Vimala Devi
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Vimala Devi is the pseudonym of Teresa da Piedade de Baptista Almeida, a Goan writer, poet and translator.
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[edit] Life in Goa
| Vimala Devi | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | 1932 Penha-de-Franca, Goa |
| Occupation | Short story writer, Poet, Translator |
Vimala Devi was born in 1932 in the village of Britona in the parish of Penha-de-Franca, across the Mandovi river from Panjim, the principal town of Goa. At that time Britona was owned by Devi's family, which belonged to the uppermost brahmin caste of bhatkar landowners. The bhatkar class owned the land and the labour of the mundkar class of lower-caste inhabitants in what was essentially a feudal relationship. Although this rural aristocracy was still predominant at this time, this was the period when the decline of the land-owning class first began to set in, a theme that appears in Devi's later fiction. After Goa's incorporation into India laws were passed giving the mundkar workers rights to the lands on which they had always lived and worked and abolishing their duty to provide unpaid labour to the bhatkar landowners.
As in many high caste families at the time, Portuguese was spoken at home alongside Konkani, the vernacular language of Goa. The author pursued primary studies in Portuguese and also in English, which even under the Portuguese administration was widely used by the Christian population of the territory.
[edit] Debuts
Whilst in Goa, Vimala Devi contributed articles and poetry to two of the main Portuguese-language newspapers, the Diário da Noite and o Heraldo. Whilst the former is now defunct, the latter continues to appear in an English language edition.
[edit] Life in Lisbon
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| Vimala Devi: "Goa" |
Vimala Devi moved to Lisbon in 1957 to rejoin part of her family already established in the city and began work as a translator. The first stage of her career as a writer is marked by a concern with bringing the world of the then-Portuguese Estado da India into representation. It was also at this time that the writer chose her pseudonym, a name that brought together in one persona the divided Hindu and Catholic communities of Goa (as do the short stories of Monção in the space of the same collection). Thus, for the first time in Portugal, there appeared a writer of Hindu appellation writing in Portuguese about the country's recently lost colony. In this period she published a collection of poems entitled Súria in 1962 and a book of short stories called Monção, which was written and published in 1963.
It was in Lisbon that Vimala Devi met and married her husband Manuel de Seabra, a journalist, poet and translator and a great influence on her writing.
[edit] Súria
Súria focusses on Devi's memories of India intertwined reflections on Goa's social, economic and historical character and is, for Mauro Neves, who echoes the verdict of Portuguese critic João Gaspar de Simões, a "symbolist" work "profoundly influenced by Camilo Pessanha"[1]
[edit] Monção
Everton Machado has described Monção as the best portrait (alongside the novels of Orlando da Costa) of what resulted from the interpenetration of the Indian and Portuguese cultures in Goa"[2]". To some extent Devi's collection could be likened to a Goan version of James Joyce's Dubliners, insofar as the stories contained concern the constrictions placed on the lives of ordinary people located in inescapably provincial settings. A further link is the recurrence in the narrative of the epiphanic moment, so typical of Dubliners, in which the characters (or at least the reader) sees clearly the nature and structure of the limitations placed upon them.
[edit] London
For seven years, Devi lived in London and worked as an art critic for the BBC's Portuguese-language service. It was during this period that Hologramas and Telepoemas were written. Here, far from Goa and the far-reaching transformation of Goan society into the Indian Union, Devi turns from the Goan themes and memories that animated her earlier work to a deep engagement with Western European culture and contemporary Anglophone poetry. For Mauro Neves, the period from Hologramas onwards "reflects the marked influence of Fernando Pessoa"[3]. Certainly, Major influences in her work that can be felt in her work, and to which she refers directly include, Fernando Pessoa and his heteronyms, but also [T.S.Eliot] (above all The Waste Land and 4 Quartets), [W.H. Auden], Matthew Mead (principally Identities), Kingsley Amis (such as A case of samples), Alan Bold, Gunther Grass, Blaise Cendrars, Paul Valery, Cesare Pavese, Robert Creeley and other poets from the New Writing movement in the United States.
[edit] Hologramas
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| Vimala Devi: "Tempo Individual" |
It is in Hologramas that Devi leaves behind the nineteenth-century world of colonial Goa to engage with both twentieth-century modernity and twentieth-century Western modernism. The guiding principle of the collection is the eponymous hologram, and the idea that the human mind creates mental holograms of the reality it perceives and decodes. In a sense, the poems contained are themselves holograms constructed from the interplay of several sets of three dimensions: past, present and future; the microscopic, the human and the cosmic; the mythological, the human and the technological. In Hologramas, as in Baudelaire for example, the most ancient and the most up-to-date in culture and technology clash and enter into dialogue.
[edit] Telepoemas
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| Vimala Devi: "Este Agora" |
With its internationalist poems, drawing on the experiments of concretism and modern Briitsh verse, Telepoemas is a further instance of Devi's engagment with the intellectual laboratory of Europe that was partially smashed by the World Wars - "Surgia Europa/Mais Tarde surgia/Europa chorava" (Europe arose/Later Europe arose/Europe wept). One thing that distinguishes Telepoemas from the preceding collection is the increased focus on the bodily, on man and woman, as though the pendulum between the microscopic and the macroscopic had found itself at the level of the human for the instance of this collection. Like the telephone and the television that the title invoke, and which instruments helped bring about the world with which the verse engages, Telepoemas relates the sights and sounds, both inner and outer, of man and woman, nature and science as they are distanced and brought together in the routine of the city streets of its age. There is also a notable increase in focus on the painterly, with many references to European artists and a recurrent play with typesetting and the ordering of words on the page.
[edit] A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa
Financed by a grant from the Junta de Investigações do Ultramar and drawing on material from the Lisbon's Biblioteca Nacional and London's British Library, as well as more than a hundred letters exchanged with writers and intellectuals in India, Devi co-authored with Manuel de Seabra of A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa. The first volume was a ground-breaking historical account of the history and development of Portuguese-language Goan literature, supplementing the bibliographical information contained in the work of Father Filinto Dias[4]. The second volulme was an anthology of Portuguese-language Goan writing that contains many works that would todays have disappeared had they now been found and preserved by Devi and Seabra. In 1972, A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa was awarded the prestigious Prémio Abílio Lopes do Rego of the Academia das Ciências de Lisboa.
[edit] Barcelona
In 1971, Devi returned to Lisbon. A year later she left for Barcelona, where she and branched out into writing verse in Spanish, Catalan and Esperanto, as well as doing translations of science fiction and other literature. With Seabra, Devi also composed an up-to-date Catalan-Portuguese dictionary, which was published by the Enciclopèdia Catalana.
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] Prose
- Monção Lisbon: Dédalo, 1963 (2nd augmented edition: Lisbon: Escritor, 2003)
Translated as:
- Musono: novelaro Skövde: Al-fab-et-o, 2000. (version in Esperanto)
- Monsó. Vilanova i La Geltrú: El Cep i La Nansa, 2002) (version in Catalan)
[edit] Poetry
- Súria: poemas Lisbon: Agência-Geral do Ultramar, 1962.
- Hologramas Coimbra: Atlântida Editora, 1969
- Telepoemas Coimbra: Atlântida Editora, 1970
- Hora. El ojo de Polifemo, Barcelono, 1991. (Poetry in Spanish).
- Rosa secreta. El ojo de Polifemo, Barcelono, 1992. (Poetry in Spanish).
- El temps irresolt. L'ull de Polifem, Barcelono, 1995. (Poetry in Catalan and Portuguese).
- Pluralogo. La Kancerkliniko, Thaumiers, 1996. (Poetry in Esperanto).
- Speguliĝoj. La Kancerkliniko, Thaumiers, 1996. (Poetry in Esperanto).
- Éticas-Ètiques. Vilanova i La Geltrú: El Cep i La Nansa, 2000. (in Portuguese and Catalan).
[edit] Reference Works
- A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa (with Manuel de Seabra) Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1971
- A Literatura Indo-Portuguesa 2. Antologia Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1971
- Diccionari portuguès-català (with Manuel de Seabra) Barcelona: Enciclopèdia Catalana, 1985
[edit] References
- ^ Neves, Mauro. "A poesia de Vimala Devi," in Bulletin of the Faculty of Foreign Studies #34, 1999
- ^ Machado, Everton. "A literatura goesa de língua portuguesa" in Cronópios 16/07/2006
- ^ Neves, Mauro. "A poesia de Vimala Devi," Bulletin of the Faculty of Foreign Studies #34. Tokyo: Sophia University, 1999
- ^ Dias, Filinto Cristo. Esboço da história da literatura indo-portuguesa. Bastorá (Goa), 1963
