THE LIGHTNESS OF MEANING: ON EUTRAPELIA — by Paula Morais
Upon the publication of O Moscardo e Outras histórias (The Horsefly and Other Stories, 20189), I had the opportunity to remark that João Ricardo Lopes embodies a symbiosis between poet and educator, evoking the memory of another great master of poetry who was also a teacher: António Gedeão. Both cultivated the ability to inhabit an intermediate realm, suspended between dream and reality, between the “sensible and the intelligible” — as Plato termed the world we call real and that of ideas, akin to the religious notion of heaven. They brought to poetry the small, everyday things, using them as a springboard to explore the perennial resilience of the human condition and to embrace life in its entirety — with all its dualities: joy and pain, happiness and sorrow, life and death — while capturing reality through the lens of dreams and alternative perceptions.
Another eminent poet, Eugénio de Andrade, in his poem «Matéria Solar» (Solar Matter), briefly upon his raw material — words — posing to a virtual interlocutor the poignant questions: “What have you done with the words?” and “What will you say to them, when/they ask you about the tiny seeds/they entrusted to you?” It is precisely in order to nurture these seeds — fragile, precious, and oftentimes ephemeral — that poets weave them into the blank page (whether physical or digital), in their endeavour to interpret the world, humanity, and both the observed and imagined realities, invariably through a personal prism. As Rudolf Arnheim aptly observes: “The human mind receives, shapes, and interprets its image of the outer world with all its conscious and unconscious powers.”
João Ricardo Lopes’ most recent poetry collection is a superb illustration of this process of recollecting life and the world, transmuting them into words shared with the reader, fulfilling an intrinsic need to account for a mute yet ever-present creditor: language itself. Thus, in «The Life of Words», one of the poems in Eutrapelia (2021), the poet undertakes a brief journey through a lexicon of “forgotten” words, still “so sonorous”, only to conclude that “words are born, live, and die”; and yet, the poetic voice recognises their unexpected resurgence, ending the poem with the rhetorical question: “who would have thought they resurrect?”
Across fifty poems, the reader is invited to accompany these words on a multidimensional voyage — a blend of sensations (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory) and intellectualised memories of situations, spaces, music, artistic objects, and people. This journey entails a return to the universe of childhood, to contact with the earth and forebears, evoking a childlike and incredulous rediscovery of the self, an attempt to rescue the simple and seemingly negligible from oblivion. This gaze — akin to that of a child, newly awestruck by the splendour (or harshness) of the world, reminiscent of Alberto Caeiro — is immediately underscored in the two epigraphs that open the work: one by Emily Dickinson, the other by Jacques Prévert.
In both, the common motif is the bird — that creature which inhabits both earth and sky, which withers in captivity, and which, in various cultures, is seen either as a divine emissary or as an omen of misfortune, unrequited love, or an embodiment of the yearning for freedom. In Dickinson’s epigraph, its symbolic role is accentuated: it represents imagination, freedom, boundlessness, and ultimately, poetry itself. Prévert’s lines, in turn, evoke a yearning to keep singing, so that birds might guide the poetic self to “yellower climes”, associating this ethereal being with the heart of a child. These are among the recurring topoi (already explored in previous works by the author) that underpin the poetic architecture of Eutrapelia: light and its impact, the enchantment with the world, the vividness of flowers, the persistence of life’s rougher edges symbolised by “stone”, the realm of childhood linked to home and grandparents, and the role of art in shaping the poet’s worldview.
The collection’s opening poem functions as a metatext, a programmatic declaration wherein the poet contemplates his craft: how ideals and words intertwine to construct a poetic universe, marking his return after nearly a decade. Central to this vision are recurring elements: “light”, “voice”, the “fury of the wind”, “memory”, and the small, long-ago tasks of a puerile daily life (“the old Saturdays/when we scrubbed the house floor”), alongside a sense of plenitude, harmony, and belonging: “we were humble servants/of a greater cause/and felt serene/and pristine.” The closing poem, «Prodigies», brings this sensory journey to a close, celebrating the fusion of nature and humanity, and the realm of possibilities — underscored by the thrice-repeated phrase “it is possible”. Through a succession of vivid metaphors and appeals to the senses, the reader is confronted with a “world suddenly interrupted”, a prodigy, yet profoundly cherished by the figure of the “grandfather”.
Between these two anchor poems, the remaining compositions offer the tangible material of the poet’s universe, shaped by sensory perception, intellectual reflection, and artistic transfiguration. This transformative vision aligns with that of Cesário Verde and the surrealists, merging musicality with symbolism in the vein of Camilo Pessanha, and introducing cinematic effects into poetry, particularly through the dynamic interplay of the four classical elements — water, air, fire, and earth — most strikingly depicted in «Trovoada» (Thunderstorm). Here, the poet captures a natural phenomenon as a luminous dance, orchestrated by percussion and piano, conducted by the rain, with lightning leading the charge to rescue the “us” at the crucial moment, accentuated by the triple refrain of “at least that”.
THUNDERSTORM
at least this—
the lightning wallowing
in the sky,
cheering the night,
the thunder striking
against the door hinges,
the scent of dry earth
lifted by the fingers of rain
at least this—
to feel something awakened
within and for us,
like a piano’s vibrato
played late in the night,
just in time to save us
.
Eutrapelia is more than a gentle play with words and situations, or a subtle ridicule of certain behaviours; it is a delicate, crystalline meditation on how the self is constructed and reconstructed through memory, by recovering the innocent and ingenuous gaze of the child once was. It is the quest for a unified, coherent thinking subject, forged from the diversity of sensations, memories, and acquired knowledge — hence the references to music and cinema (Concerto de Aranjuez, Coltrane, Pérotin, Eleni Karaindrou, Cinema Paradiso, Giuseppe Tornatore, Ennio Morricone), museums and works of art (Caravaggio, Bosch, Duomo, Rijksmuseum, Rothko), and to writers either named explicitly or detectable through certain verses (Anna Akhmatova, Sophia de Mello Breyner and her poem «Ressurgiremos» (We Shall Rise Again), Saramago, Shakespeare’s Falstaff, Hesiod). Through dialogues with an inner “You” or an implied “You” (the reader), the poet crafts a universe where life and death are inseparable facets of the same reality, where the fragility of simple things is magnified by their undervaluation or oblivion. As Fernando Catroga aptly asserts, “to remember is, in itself, an act of alterity. No one remembers solely oneself, and the demand for fidelity inherent to remembrance compels one to bear witness to the other.” João Ricardo Lopes emphasises, in the eponymous poem Eutrapelia, that it is through recollecting life’s small, mundane moments that humanity finds solace and overcomes sorrow.
EUTRAPELIA
when days become
too heavy, repetitive, atrocious,
perhaps you will remember
the magnificent yellow jug
that blooms anew each year
in the shadiest corner of the yard,
or the wise words of Epicurus,
or the holy words of Augustine,
and come to love beauty differently,
or know it beyond
shapes, colours, common sense,
measuring it not by intensity
and ostentation,
but by the good it does you
.
This elevation of the everyday permeates much of the collection, as exemplified in «Arte de Furtar» (The Art of Stealing), where the contemplation of theft concerns not material gain but rather the preservation of “the place that serves as our refuge”, composed of “small gifts” from ordinary life..
THE ART OF STEALING
what would we steal if we could,
if granted the gift of invisibility
and the power to pass through
the most impenetrable walls?
what kind of gold could surpass honey,
the small gifts we gather on common days,
the place that serves as our refuge
when the monstrosities of time
have claimed our ground?
what now could be
the art of stealing,
the wise mouth from which
sagacious sentences would emerge?
and the poem? in which pocket, reader,
will you carry it?
.
Thus, this poem functions not only as a reminder of the value of life’s simple blessings — the “small gifts” of everyday existence, swiftly stolen by the “monstrosities of time” — but also as a transfer of responsibility to the reader, accentuated through a series of rhetorical questions. While Eugénio de Andrade once questioned the poet about his stewardship of words, João Ricardo Lopes turns the mirror towards the reader: “and the poem? in which pocket, reader, will you carry it?” Nevertheless, the poet’s responsibility as a world-builder, a cultural agent, and a catalyst for change is never forgotten. In «Poiein», the poet recalls the Greeks and their view of poetry — an ode to life and positivity, never to conflict, fear, or anguish — juxtaposing this with the words of Juan de la Cruz, and affirming poetry’s enduring role as a luminous, incendiary force, challenging complacency and inciting transformation.
Poein
to dress a poem in sunlight
is what the Greeks have done from the start,
to celebrate life
and never the discord of psyche and phren,
never the phantom of Patroclus
confessing to Achilles
the torment of silence
for them, a poem
is a vehement, pulsating, living thing,
incapable of succumbing to time
or being vanquished
by dust
centuries later, Juan de la Cruz
would call the words of a poem
lamps of fire within the profound
caverns of meaning
we concur, in short, on this point —
nothing burns as poetry does when it burns
.
Porto, 13 November 2021,
Paula Fernanda da Silva Morais
About the author:
Paula Morais (b. 1971) teaches at primary and secondary education levels. She holds a degree in Modern Languages and Literatures (Portuguese-German specialization) from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto; a Master’s degree in Literary Theory and Portuguese Literature from the University of Minho; and a PhD in Romance Literatures and Cultures, with a specialization in Portuguese Literature, from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto.
