Mário de Sá-Carneiro
1890–1916
Biography
Mário de Sá-Carneiro was a Portuguese poet and prose writer who lived only twenty-five years. He was born in 1890 into a wealthy family with a military background. His mother died when he was two, and his grandparents brought him up. He began writing verse in his early teens and was translating Victor Hugo, Goethe and Schiller while still a youth. In 1911 he went to Coimbra to study law, but he never got past his first year there. It was around this time that he met Fernando Pessoa, who became his closest friend. He went on to live much of his last years in Paris, where he kept a bohemian life among artists and writers. In April 1916 he took his own life in Paris, at the age of twenty-five.
Sá-Carneiro is one of the best-known members of the Geração de Orpheu, the group of Portuguese modernists who wrote for the review Orpheu, published in Lisbon in 1915. Alongside Pessoa and Almada Negreiros he helped bring modernism to Portugal, and the review caused a scandal. His poetry collection Dispersão (1914) and his prose show a writer drawn to the fantastic. Many readers rank him just behind Pessoa among the poets of the group.
The site holds A Confissão de Lúcio, a short novel and one of his best-known works. It is a fantastic tale that mirrors the avant-garde spirit of its age, and it gives readers a way to meet the prose writer who is usually remembered for his poems.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
A Confissão de Lúcio
by Mário de Sá-Carneiro
Having served ten years in prison for a crime he says he did not commit, Lúcio writes down what happened. The story goes back to Paris in 1895, his friendship with the failed artist Gervásio Vila-Nova and the poet Ricardo de Loureiro, and a puzzle that the narrator is never…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.