The First Foreign Edition of the Poems of Agostinho Neto

Abstract

This article deals with the first edition of Agostinho Neto’s poems, published in Milan in 1963 and edited by Joyce Lussu, a translator and, above all, an activist, with extensive political work in the context of anti-fascist and anti-colonialist movements. Among the issues to be analysed here is the title of the volume, the corpus (the edition includes about half of the poems which would be included in the definitive version of Sagrada Esperança, 1974) and – based on a comparison with previous and later editions of some of the compositions – problems of textual and genetic criticism. From the analysis that was carried out, it is possible to conclude that the 1963 edition corresponds to a mature project, since a series of poems are presented already in their definitive version. Marginally, given that this is a subject already developed by Italian scholars, some aspects of the translation are also discussed here, namely the layout of the long verses, some mistakes (due to a wrong grammatical interpretation or a misprint in the Portuguese version) and a few cases of what we might call an interpretive translation.

Keywords

• agostinho neto
• genetic criticism
• textual criticism