Adília Lopes

Maria José da Silva Viana Fidalgo de Oliveira (20 April 1960 − 30 December 2024), better known by the pen name Adília Lopes, was a Portuguese poet, chronicler and translator.

Life and career Adília Lopes was born in Lisbon, the daughter of an assistant biologist in Botany at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon and a secondary school teacher. She studied physics at the University of Lisbon, a course she abandoned, almost at the end, due to a schizoaffective disorder, a condition about which she has always spoken openly, whether in her poems, chronicles, conferences or interviews with the media. She stopped studying on medical advice and began writing with the intention of publishing.

In 1983, she competed for a Prose Award from the Portuguese Writers Association, for which a friend suggested the pseudonym by which she would become known, and sent poems to the publisher Assírio & Alvim, which sent two of them to its 1984 Yearbook of Unpublished Poets. She began a new degree, in Portuguese and French literature and linguistics (1983–1988), at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, and published his first book of poems in an author's edition, Um jogo bastante perigoso (1985).

Throughout the course, Adília Lopes published four other books of poetry, including O Poeta de Pondichéry (1986) – her most translated work, based on an enigmatic character from Jacques le fataliste, a novel by Diderot – and O decote da dama de espadas (1988), a collection of poems written between 1983 and 1987, praised by several critics. After graduating, she received a scholarship from the National Institute of Scientific Research (1989–1992), having worked at the Linguistics Center of the University of Lisbon, on the anthroponymy project of countries with Romance languages PatRom.

Style Some of Adília Lopes main literary influences are Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen and Ruy Belo, but also the Countess of Ségur, Emily Brontë, Enid Blyton, Roland Barthes and Nuno Bragança.

The poet's style, apparently colloquial and naive, is full of phonetic games, free associations, nursery rhymes and foreign languages. Everyday themes, mainly feminine and domestic, are treated with humor and self-irony, candor and rawness, intelligence and intentionality: “there is always a great deal of violence, pain, seriousness and holiness in what I write”. It is Adília, a practicing Catholic who sometimes brings a deep religiosity to what she writes, who defines herself as a “shy troublemaker” or a “baroque poet nun”.

Death Lopes died at the Hospital de São José in Lisbon, on 30 December 2024, at the age of 64.