Portuguese Literature – Portuguese Writer

August 23, 2026

A pilgrim

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The man came to the holy place dry as a well.

For many days he wandered the same paths where innumerable pilgrims passed, praying, singing, or weeping. He did so without company, without words, without any final thought about anything whatsoever.

In those days the crooked stones of the pavements troubled him deeply, as did the shrines, the small oratories, and the overheated walls of all the labyrinths of that place. The great statues imploring the heavens disturbed him, the dusty ground, and the waterless fountains along the interminable sacred way.

He did not grasp the wearying office of remorse, nor the compulsion toward tears of which they sometimes spoke in strange tongues, languages whose idiom he knew, though not the meaning of their phrases.

His name was Stanislaus Jakubiak. He was a scientist. He called himself an agnostic.

On the seventh day, in one of the alleys that lead from the great square toward the outskirts of the sanctuary, still dazed by the reverberation of the heavy bells of the carillon, he beheld an olive tree.

It was a very ancient tree. Of the original trunk only a twisted, bowed remnant endured, as though lightning had once cleft it in two and only one half had survived the sacrifice of existing. Around it stood a low parapet of loosely set shale slats, and between them, the trunk, and the small green‑grey leaves, a thick layer of dust had gathered.

Stanislaus would have signed his name beneath a declaration calling it the finest metaphor of Christian faith.

Pausing a few instants, he saw a small bird with yellow feathers hop there and lift its beak. And he noticed that from the faded leaves of the branches an immaculately white flower sprang forth — alive, resilient. And he felt that from the harmonious breathing of the stones, the bird, and the tree, a silence was rising, the very silence we feel in lands lost from maps.

The Pole perceived that this fossil was a dwelling. Forms of love depended upon that ruin and proved that nothing in this world is so definitive and so fragile that it cannot take us unawares.

He recalled a poem by Zbigniew Herbert that says: “In dust they buried our soul, / in the wind they will uncover our bones still joined.”

He was not certain the poem belonged to Herbert. Nor that the verses said exactly that.

He felt only weary. He wiped his eyes. He saw things.

July 22, 2026

The Gypsies’s Fire

THE GYPSIES’S FIRE

to Catarina

in the south of Lanzarote, near Playa Blanca,
in a place they call Los Charcones,
I saw the closest thing on earth
to the moon

the landscape is covered in pyroclasts, in hardened ash,
in dust.
nothing survives here, save the creeping euphorbia
and one or another species of lizard

but at night this desert fills with bonfires,
with small scattered flames
between walls and tents

they say it’s the gypsies’ fire,
no one knows where they come from or where they go.
and I say blessed be they, for they exist

Poem by João Ricardo Lopes from the book Em Nome da Luz (2022 | Translated by Marcus Margrave (2026)

May 23, 2026May 23, 2026

Communicating

Sometimes, still with my eyes hardened by sleep, I come out into the courtyard and stand there for a few minutes, simply contemplating. I see the triple high‑voltage lines, the fuselage of an aeroplane moving between them, the sometimes frayed, translucent lacework of spiderwebs on the roof cornices, the roads rising and falling, curving through the places that were and are my whole life.

I ask myself whether these lines might not also be a form of language, of writing, just like the sun, the grasses, or the wind itself. Might they be a kind of script whose deciphering depends largely on the sharpness of our eyes and on the sense of occasion with which they plunge into reality and see it differently?

The Polish poet Wisława Szymborska tells us that “Nothing can ever happen twice. / In consequence, the sorry fact is / that we arrive here improvised / and leave without the chance to practise.” It is a variant of the popular saying “nobody is born knowing”. The world’s forms of communication are a little like the false silence of the cosmos: everything depends on the kind of telescope with which we scrutinise it. Our innocence ends the moment we discover a way of reading what lies beyond us.

The quoted lines are from Wisława Szymborska’s poem “Nothing Twice”, in the translation by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, published in Poems New and Collected, 1957–1997 (Harcourt).
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January 25, 2026March 27, 2026

Ritual

Cleaning the hands — Photo by Melissa Jeanty

He had acquired the habit of meticulously washing his hands and trimming his nails before delivering a speech. He ran his palms and the backs of his fingers under the water, lathered them with Clarim, then held them again beneath the stream flowing from the tap, almost scalding hot. It was a ritual.

Then, before leaving his office, he read the text one last time and corrected it with a cheap pencil, crossing out more words than he put back onto the page. He disliked coming up against formulas, clichés, sentences that sounded like a great deal and yet said nothing.

Finally, he looked at himself in the mirror.

He did so in silence, trying to glimpse in the face before him the slightest traces of childhood. He searched there for the boy in clogs, with a torn sweater and an ugly little moustache, whose courage in the hard work of those earlier days he seemed to value more than the prestige he had gained over the years. That boy was his inspiration.

He remained in near-total silence for a long time, an immeasurable stretch, an hour, a minute, an eternity, until an aide knocked at the door.

They were waiting for him.

This was the moment. Millions of viewers had their televisions tuned to the channel through which his words would echo, measured, carefully chosen, perhaps a little rough, competent, in a steep dive toward the very core of the problems.

Text by João Ricardo Lopes

Official website: https://joaoricardolopes.com

João Ricardo Lopes is a contemporary Portuguese poet and writer.

More about:
https://joaoricardolopes.com/about/

January 10, 2026March 27, 2026

Vermeer

VERMEER

in these days of vertigo, when the world seems to go mad with every gunshot, and even open books are grasping mouths waiting for impure truths to be spoken through them, I return to Vermeer’s silent paintings: to the milkmaid pouring the white unhurriedly, imbued with grace; to the geographer who, through the panes of glass, discerns the inexact place of thought; to the girl reading the mysterious letter, in which she may be shown a certain love, not delicate like a poem, but in the hardness of verbs that do not hide in grammar and instead strip themselves bare in living gestures, difficult and unfeigned

Poem by João Ricardo Lopes

Official Website: https://joaoricardolopes.com

December 31, 2025March 27, 2026

Limpidity

There is only one dependable way to love life: to draw near to the limpidity that asks for patience, courage, sacrifice, and so often silence and self‑denial. And also for defeats, for the encounter with what contradicts us, for the labour of continual learning. Zbigniew Herbert, in a remarkable poem, writes, “I would like to describe the simplest emotion,” trading “all metaphors / for a term / torn from the chest like a rib / for a word / that fits / within the limits of my skin.”

With age we learn that nothing is quite as difficult as the limpidity of childhood—an equivocal yet precious gift. We learn that truth (like the sun) still casts its light and warmth, though it has shifted its place upon the horizon. The irony could hardly be sharper: as we grow older and confront physical short‑sightedness, we look more deeply into things, into the character of others (and of ourselves), into the perplexity of life, into the feeling stirred by little beings, into the pain dealt to us by ignorance and human savagery; we look more intently into the depths of the cosmos, of death, of the genuine happiness born in a poem; we look towards the comfort of friendly voices, towards the solemn wisdom of Vilhelm Hammershøi’s paintings, or the enchantment of the guitar chords of Isaac Albéniz or Joaquín Rodrigo. Life does not require wealth or genius to be worthy. It asks only for kindness and stillness. And with age we learn that nothing matters more than drawing close to our destiny, even if that destiny is a mirage. We recognise it by the confidence and quiet joy with which we open the door each morning. In the end, compassion is the reward of our discovery.

I write these words on a bright December morning, a cup of coffee warming my hands. I feel, far beyond myself, the harmony of space and the mind’s impetuous surge of effort. I might have taken up pencil and paper to write something entirely different. But I needed to set down this thought. Life chose us, as love chooses us, or as the gaze of someone seeking ours. I suppose that responding to such devotion is worth not only the effort, but above all the heart.

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Text by João Ricardo Lopes

Official Website: https://joaoricardolopes.com

December 25, 2025March 27, 2026

The Leper

A cliff rose steeply, and on its summit ancient hermits had built, stone by stone, a small church. Seen from afar, it could scarcely be told apart from the granite mass itself. Up close, it looked more like an animal shelter, with a cross perched upon its roof.

Soeiro Ramires, falconer, or perhaps goldsmith, or tailor, or even royal furrier, depending on the version that has reached us, was afflicted with the dreadful disease of leprosy, and found in that rough and holy heap of stones his hiding place. Not only to die there, but because he was fleeing justice. His crime was to have maintained relations deemed against nature with another man. Leprosy and guilt pursued him without mercy.

It was in the time of the first kings of Portugal. Afonso, son of Sanches and grandson of Afonso, was himself dying as a leper. Other monarchs of Christendom had suffered, and would yet suffer, from the same affliction. He, Soeiro Ramires, was seized by a single thought: to climb, to climb as high as he could, before it was too late, to a solitary place where the mercy of Our Saviour might find him sooner than wretched human judgement, and there to await, if not the healing of the flesh, then the absolution of the soul.
At the top of the cliff, where the pinewoods hide themselves in the mist, he dismounted and settled as best he could. He lit a fire, wrapped himself in a thick blanket, ate bread and prayed.

“Love chooses us,” he thought. “With this great sin of loving I have offended the Creator, who has thus defiled my face, my hands, my arms and all my body.”

The cold spread its white cloak all around. Great falls of snow plunged from the sky and made the Beira mountains gleam, from their foothills to the sharp bones of their peaks. Shivering, the wretch gathered what firewood he could and set it alight.

One night, a great star streaked across the horizon from end to end, falling in luminous ash upon his head. Soeiro Ramires marvelled greatly. Not only did the trembling and itching of the flesh cease to torment him, but a profound peace, a sense of rebirth and inexplicable lightness, lifted him from the vileness of the world.

It is said that the disease left him as mysteriously as it had come. Ramires devoted himself to the religious life, becoming one of the first Franciscans to profess in the kingdom. A temple of considerable size was later built on the site of the primitive one: the Church of Saint Francis, Saint Sebastian and the Nativity.

Today, little frequented and almost abandoned, it remains a place to which desperate believers still make their way, in search of a miracle and of redemption.

Text by João Ricardo Lopes

Official Website: https://joaoricardolopes.com

Category: Portuguese Literature

A pilgrim

The Gypsies’s Fire

Communicating

Ritual

Vermeer

Limpidity

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To translate

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