Et in Arcadia ego: Elegias da pátria e da infância na poesia de Alberto de Lacerda e Rui Knopfli
Et in Arcadia ego: Homeland and Childhood Elegies in the Poetry of Alberto de Lacerda and Rui Knopfli

Summary/Abstract: Shaped by shared biographical circumstances and thematic affinities, the poetic works of Rui Knopfli (1932-1997) and Alberto de Lacerda (1928-2007) also explore a common elegiac ethos which is often combined with the nostalgic evocation of the places of memory. The elegiac genre is correlated to the key theme of exile, which in the case of both poets often adopts distinctive geographical, political, temporal and ontological overtones, and is further associated with a nostalgic evocation of the childhood they both spent in Mozambique. Whereas, in Knopfli, the elegy addresses the lacerating experience of an expatriate poet, excluded from a defunct empire and engaged in a postcolonial labour of loss, in Lacerda the libertarian exhilaration felt in the foreign adoptive homeland which sets him free from dictatorship is nonetheless clouded by the innate loneliness of a subject who is most of all exiled from himself. Rather than the conventional meditatio mortis that echoes in classical elegy, both Knopfli and Lacerda’s poetry, therefore, reverberate a dramatic awareness of the instability affecting all arcadias warning us that, sooner or later, they are doomed to disappear.

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