Pirâmide

Unlike the French case, surrealism in Portugal had few magazines. This was due to the country's political circumstances, with very tight and vigilant official censorship. Although the surrealist agitation appeared among us in the 1940s, and had a certain broad impact in Lisbon, no Portuguese surrealist magazines emerged at the time. Contraponto (cadernos de crítica e arte), which had two issues (1950; 1952) and was edited by Luiz Pacheco, who would become the surrealists' first editor (Mário Cesariny, A. Maria Lisboa, Manuel de Lima - and the manifesto of the dissident group and visual art by Cruzeiro Seixas), cannot be considered surrealist, although the attention given in the second issue to Cesariny's poetry provided a platform for the best surrealism of those years. One must wait until the end of the 1950s to find a Portuguese-language magazine that can properly, if not without some hesitation, be associated with surrealism in Portugal, Pirâmide (1959-1960).

Three issues were published (February 1959; June 1959; December 1960), under the guidance of Carlos Loures and Máximo Lisboa - Sena Camacho joined the duo for the second issue. A fourth issue was planned and announced - even a group of contributors was listed - but never appeared. Mário Cesariny writes the opening text of the first issue (“Mensagem e Ilusão do Acontecimento Surrealista”, pp. 1-2). While not purposely written for the occasion, but rather retrieved from fragments prepared years earlier, the text's publication still makes the magazine stand out in an otherwise barren backdrop of surrealist periodicals. The title Pirâmide was suggested - as told by Carlos Loures in a much later statement (see Daniel Pires, Dicionário da Imprensa Periódica Literária Portuguesa, 1999, pp. 361-362) - by Mário Cesariny, who had already written about the “pyramid” in his verses (see “Poema podendo servir de Posfácio”, final poem of Discurso sobre a Reabilitação do Real Quotidiano, 1952).

Presented as “non-periodical booklets”, the publication's issues, perhaps except for the first, which was entirely organized by Cesariny and featured a clear thematic cohesiveness, were less a well-defined homogeneous collection of texts and more an anthological unconnected set of unpublished texts. Not by chance, the booklets' subtitle was always “anthology”. To find articles with some programmatic consistency, defining an orientation for the publication and a strategy for the group of authors, one must wait for the third issue, where Máximo Lisboa's opening text, “Iconoclasia”, and Carlos Loures' closer, “Aos Ladrões de Fogo - Poesia, Surrealismo, Controle”, perhaps start to play this role. In his text, Loures states: “We believe that the Surrealist Revolution is a singular alert cry, calling us to fight for the salvation of what little there is still to be saved (...).”

Looking at the magazine's contributors, it is clear that Pirâmide is made by young people, the patrons of the Café Gelo (and Café Restauração, with the third issue), while welcoming older authors who in the previous decade had been responsible for the surrealist agitation - Cesariny, Lisboa, Pacheco, Pedro Oom. An important part of the young generation that made up the Café Gelo participates in the magazine, and that suffices, in our opinion, to value this second wave of surrealism in Portugal. In fact, only that generation seems to have been able to create a collective publication, which, although brief, was indisputably important. There we find alchemists of form and colour like D'Assumpção, poets like Herberto Helder, António José Forte, Ernesto Sampaio, Manuel de Castro, José Sebag, and Fernando Saldanha da Gama, critics like Luiz Pacheco and Alfredo Margarido. This group alone would be enough to make the publication one of the most significant of its time. While underappreciated, Pirâmide is a magazine that, in addition to the relevance to surrealism-related matters, has significant generational importance, as pointed out by Gaspar Simões, who compared it to Presença - making it for the generation of Cesariny, Seixas, and Lisboa what the magazine from Coimbra had been for that of Sá-Carneiro, Pessoa, and Almada.

The magazine's coordinators, who were very young at the time - Carlos Loures was 21 years old in 1959 -, in the second half of the 1960s swapped the oneiric assumptions of surrealism for other paths that were closer, if not coincident, with the literary and artistic version of dialectical materialism - the so-called socialist realism. Loures even argued about this with Cesariny in the Jornal de Letras e Artes, directed by Azevedo Martins, in 1966. See his article “Notas sobre Demónios do Absurdo” (n.º 228, February 9, 1966, pp. 1-2), Cesariny's reply “Nota sobre a Nota de Carlos Loures” (n.º 231, March 2, 1966, pp. 1-2), and Loures' response, “A Propósito da Nota de Mário Cesariny” (n.º 232, March 9, 1966, pp. 1 and 4).

The route followed by the two coordinators is not, however, representative of the other Pirâmide collaborators. Even those who came nearer to the practical and political reasoning of dialectical materialism, such as Ernesto Sampaio, Virgílio Martinho, and José Carlos Gonzalez, never lost connection with André Breton's heritage nor wanted to be leave - or at least gain distance from - the surrealism line. Others, such as Forte, Saldanha da Gama, and Manuel de Castro, who appear to have turned their backs on Marxism, and others yet like Herberto Helder, D'Assumpção, and António Pinheiro Guimarães, who seem to have never been adepts, are still further away from the coordinators' turn.

From the three issues that were published, from the importance of collaborations in areas as diverse as criticism, ideas, poetic creation, and pictorial expression, it becomes clear that the magazine could have played a much more important role in the cultural life of its time if it had continued for a few more years. In any case, with three discreet issues and less than two years of activity, it still seems to be one of the rare collective publications of Portuguese surrealism and one of the most important cultural manifestations of its historical time.

António Cândido Franco