The (still) President of the Republic went this Friday, March 6, to deposit the Grand Collar of the Order of Camões next to the coffin of António Lobo Antunes and confessed that he would like the writer to go to the National Pantheon.
“In the Pantheon, as I see it, I would like it, but I’m not the one who has to decide”Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa told journalists.
“I don’t know what the family thinks, and what they think he would like to happen, but he is one of those obvious names that has been in our Pantheon for a long time, one of the greats of writing in Portugal”he reinforced.
“He told us the History of Portugal at the end of the empire and the transition to democracy”continued the head of state.
For Marcelo, Lobo Antunes “He was one of the great Portuguese writers, not only in all of our literature, but particularly at the end of the last century, in the transition to this century”highlighting that the winner of the Camões Prize in 2009 was “one of the most translated in the world”.
The President of the Republic recalled that the equally poet began “writing very late” and that he touched “very different people” with his writing, “because he told everyday stories, he was also a chronicler”. “But, above all, it told the History of Portugal at the end of the empire and the transition to democracy”, he stressed.
Marcelo recalled that Lobo Antunes “was uniquely brilliant, intelligent and quick” and that he told stories based on “a lived experience”: “He was there, he lived, he exchanged letters about what he felt, what he thought, what he dreamed of.”
“He was very irreverent, he was very iconoclastic, he was very heterodox. As a person, he was fascinating, because he was a unique storyteller, because he was a great critic of social reality, of everyday life and of the community as a whole. Always irreverent, always independent, never getting old”he specified, referring to the writer as one of the “two or three great names in our literature, in the last 60, 70 years”.
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