Eça de Queiroz explained

Eça de Queirós
Birth Name:José Maria de Eça de Queirós
Birth Date:1845 11, df=yes
Birth Place:Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal
Death Place:Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
Occupation:Novelist, consul
Nationality:Portuguese
Movement:Realism, Romanticism
Signature:Assinatura Eça de Queirós.png

José Maria de Eça de Queiroz[1] or Queirós (pronounced as /pt-PT/; 25 November 1845 – 16 August 1900) is generally considered to have been the greatest Portuguese writer in the realist style.[2] Zola considered him to be far greater than Flaubert.[3] In the London Observer, Jonathan Keates ranked him alongside Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoy.[4]

Biography

Eça de Queiroz was born in Póvoa de Varzim, Portugal, in 1845. An illegitimate child, he was officially recorded as the son of José Maria de Almeida Teixeira de Queiroz and Carolina Augusta Pereira d'Eça. His unmarried mother left home so that her son could be born away from social scandal. Although his parents married when he was four years old, he lived with his paternal grandparents until he was ten.[5]

At age 16, he went to Coimbra to study law at the University of Coimbra; there he met the poet Antero de Quental. Eça's first work was a series of prose poems, published in the Gazeta de Portugal magazine, which eventually appeared in book form in a posthumous collection edited by Batalha Reis entitled Prosas Bárbaras ("Barbarous texts"). He worked as a journalist at Évora, then returned to Lisbon and, with his former school friend Ramalho Ortigão and others, created the Correspondence of the fictional adventurer Fradique Mendes. This amusing work was first published in 1900.

In 1869 and 1870, Eça de Queiroz travelled to Egypt and watched the opening of the Suez Canal, which inspired several of his works, most notably O Mistério da Estrada de Sintra ("The Mystery of the Sintra Road", 1870), written in collaboration with Ramalho Ortigão, in which Fradique Mendes appears. A Relíquia ("The Relic") was also written at this period but was published only in 1887. The work was strongly influenced by Memorie di Giuda ("Memoirs of Judas") by Ferdinando Petruccelli della Gattina, such as to lead some scholars to accuse the Portuguese writer of plagiarism.[6]

When he was later dispatched to Leiria to work as a municipal administrator, Eça de Queiroz wrote his first realist novel, O Crime do Padre Amaro ("The Crime of Father Amaro"), which is set in the city and first appeared in 1875.Eça then worked in the Portuguese consular service and after two years' service at Havana was stationed, from late 1874 until April 1879, at 53 Grey Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, where there is a memorial plaque in his honour.[7] His diplomatic duties included the dispatch of detailed reports to the Portuguese foreign office concerning the unrest in the Northumberland and Durham coalfields – in which, as he points out, the miners earned twice as much as those in South Wales, along with free housing and a weekly supply of coal. The Newcastle years were among the most productive of his literary career. He published the second version of O Crime de Padre Amaro in 1876 and another celebrated novel, O Primo Basílio ("Cousin Bazilio") in 1878, as well as working on a number of other projects. These included the first of his "Cartas de Londres" ("Letters from London") which were printed in the Lisbon daily newspaper Diário de Notícias and afterwards appeared in book form as Cartas de Inglaterra. As early as 1878 he had at least given a name to his masterpiece Os Maias ("The Maias"), though this was largely written during his later residence in Bristol and was published only in 1888.[5]

In February 1886, he married Maria Emília de Castro in Lisbon and she joined him in Bristol, with the couple staying in Stoke Bishop. However, Maria Emília was not happy there. As a result they decided to rent a house in Notting Hill, London, and Eça would commute to his work in Bristol. It is unlikely that he would have been unhappy with this arrangement as his earlier letters indicate that he had already made frequent visits to London.[5]

Eça, a cosmopolite widely read in English literature, was not enamoured of English society, but he was fascinated by its oddity. In Bristol he wrote: "Everything about this society is disagreeable to me – from its limited way of thinking to its indecent manner of cooking vegetables." As often happens when a writer is unhappy, the weather is endlessly bad. Nevertheless, he was rarely bored and was content to stay in England for some fifteen years. "I detest England, but this does not stop me from declaring that as a thinking nation, she is probably the foremost." It may be said that England acted as a constant stimulus and a corrective to Eça's traditionally Portuguese Francophilia.

Eça's politics were of the Liberal stamp, although he was also influenced by the ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.[8] In 1898, upon growing more pessimistic about the future of Portugal and Europe, he described himself as a "vague, saddened anarchist".[9]

In 1888 he became Portuguese consul-general in Paris, a position he actively sought. He lived at Neuilly-sur-Seine and continued to write journalism (Ecos de Paris, "Echoes from Paris") as well as literary criticism. He died in 1900 of either tuberculosis or, according to numerous contemporary physicians, Crohn's disease.[10] His son António Eça de Queiroz would hold government office under António de Oliveira Salazar. He was first buried in a family vault in Alto de São João Cemetery and later exhumed and moved to a grave in Santa Cruz do Douro Cemetery, in Baião Municipality, Portugal

Works by Eça de Queiroz

Posthumous works

Periodicals to which Eça de Queiroz contributed

Translations

The works of Eça have been translated into about 20 languages, including English.

Since 2002 English versions of eight of his novels and two volumes of novellas and short stories, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, have been published in the UK by Dedalus Books.

Adaptions

There have been two film versions of O Crime do Padre Amaro, a Mexican one in 2002 and a Portuguese version in 2005 which was edited out of a SIC television series,[11] [12] [13] released shortly after the film (the film was by then the most seen Portuguese movie ever, though very badly received by critics, but the TV series, maybe due to being a slightly longer version of the same thing seen by a big share of Portuguese population, flopped and was rather ignored by audiences and critics).

Eça's works have been also adapted on Brazilian television. In 1988 Rede Globo produced O Primo Basílio in 35 episodes.[14] Later, in 2007, a movie adaptation of the same novel was made by director Daniel Filho.[15] In 2001 Rede Globo produced an acclaimed adaptation of Os Maias as a television serial in 40 episodes.

A movie adaptation of O Mistério da Estrada de Sintra was produced in 2007.[16] The director had shortly before directed a series inspired in a whodunit involving the descendants of the original novel's characters (Nome de Código Sintra, Code Name Sintra), and some of the historical flashback scenes (reporting to the book's events) of the series were used in the new movie. The movie was more centered on Eça's and Ramalho Ortigão's writing and publishing of the original serial and the controversy it created and less around the book's plot itself.

In September 2014, film director João Botelho released the film Os Maias based on the novel with the same name Os Maias.[17] The film cost a million and a half euros,[18] having €600,000 from the Instituto do Cinema e Audiovisual (ICA), €170,000 from Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, €120,000 from Agência Nacional do Cinema (Ancine, the Brazilian akin from ICA), and a good part from Montepio Geral, as well as the purchase by RTP of the rights for the mini-series.[19] The filming happened between October 14 and December 22 in 2013, and was shot in Ponte de Lima, Celorico de Basto, Guimarães and Lisbon.[20]

Galleon Theatre Company, the resident producing company at the Greenwich Playhouse, London, has staged theatre adaptations by Alice de Sousa of Eça de Queiroz' novels. In 2001 the company presented Cousin Basílio, and in 2002 The Maias.[21]

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Salgado. Ana. 2015-11-04. Pareceres Académicos. 2021-09-10. Pórtico da Língua Portuguesa. pt-pt.
  2. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/dec/23/biography1 Pick of the week – Consul yourself
  3. Book: The Crime of Father Amaro: Scenes from the Religious Life. Eça de Queirós. Margaret Jull. Costa. 1 January 2003. New Directions Publishing. 9780811215329. Google Books.
  4. Book: Eça de Queirós . Vetch . John . 1995 . To the Capital . Manchester . Carcanet . [ii] . 1-85754-687-3 . 6 January 2020 .
  5. Web site: Shepherd . Andrew . Eça de Queiroz and the English . British Historical Society of Portugal . 24 January 2021.
  6. Cláudio Basto, Foi Eça de Queirós um plagiador?, Maranus, 1924, p.70
  7. Web site: Wall plaque at 53 Grey street image . JPG . Farm9.staticflickr.com . 2016-11-24.
  8. Book: Filomena Mónica . Maria . Eça de Queiroz . 2005 . Tamesis Books . 123.
  9. Filomena Mónica . Maria . Eça de Queiroz . Portuguese Studies . 2002 . 18 . 50–63. 10.1353/port.2002.0009 .
  10. Ribeiro . Iolanda Cristina Teixeira . May 2009 . Doença de Crohn: Etiologia, patogénese e suas implicações na terapêutica . Master's dissertation . Universidade da Beira Interior . 1 April 2023 . 10400.6/1028.
  11. News: Mexico: the controversy of Father Amaro. 2002-08-16. BBC. 2018-11-26. en-GB.
  12. News: THE CRIME OF FATHER AMARO Scen .... 2003-06-01. Washington Post. 2018-11-26. en-US. 0190-8286.
  13. News: O Crime do Padre Amaro - Cinecartaz. Público. Cinecartaz. 2018-11-26. pt.
  14. Web site: Eça de Queirós. IMDb. 2018-11-26.
  15. Web site: Primo Basílio (2007). IMDb. 2018-11-26.
  16. Web site: O Mistério da Estrada de Sintra. https://web.archive.org/web/20070504015808/http://www.filmesfundo.com/omisteriodaestradadesintra/. dead. 4 May 2007. 4 May 2007. 13 January 2018.
  17. News: Há cem anos ou agora, em livro ou em filme, "Os Maias " são Portugal. Cardoso. Joana Amaral. PÚBLICO. 2018-11-26. pt.
  18. News: Que Força é Eça?. Jornal visao. 2018-11-26. pt-PT.
  19. News: Há cem anos ou agora, em livro ou em filme, "Os Maias " são Portugal. Cardoso. Joana Amaral. PÚBLICO. 2018-11-26. pt.
  20. Web site: Botelho arranca com adaptação de Os Maias ao cinema . Tiago da Bernarda . . 10 October 2013 . 6 September 2014.
  21. Web site: Alice de Sousa . . Doollee . 11 June 2022 .

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