António Botto (August 17, 1897 – March 16, 1959) was a Portuguese aesthete and lyricist poet.

Early life

António Thomaz Botto was born on August 17, 1897 to Maria Pires Agudo and Francisco Thomaz Botto, in Concavada, Portugal, the couple's second son. His father earned his living as a boatman in the Tagus. In 1902 the family moved to Rua da Adiça, 22, 3rd floor, in the Alfama quarter in Lisbon (where a third and last son would be born). Botto grew up in the typical and popular atmosphere of that neighbourhood. Very old shabby houses, stretched up in steepy narrow streets, the ambiance was one of poverty and somewhat promiscuous. Small shops, small taverns where fado was sung late in the night. The dirty streets crowded with workers, housewives shopping, vendors, beggars, tramps, kids playing, pimps, prostitutes and sailors, which would deeply influence his work. Botto was poorly educated and since youth he took to a series of menial jobs, among them that of a book-shop clerk. Probably his education came from reading the books he lay hands on during his daily work. He also got acquainted with many of Lisbon's men of letters due to his job. In his mid-twenties he got into civil service as a modest administrative clerk in several State offices. In 1924–25 he worked in Santo António do Zaire and Luanda, Angola, returning to Lisbon in 1925, where he stayed the remaining years as a civil servant up to 1942.

The scandal of Canções

His first book of poems Trovas was published in 1917. It was followed by Cantigas de Saudade (1918), Cantares (1919) and Canções do Sul (1920). Canções (Songs) was published in 1921 and went unnoticed. Only after Fernando Pessoa published its 2nd edition, through his publishing house "Olisipo", emerged a public scandal amongst the Lisbon society which granted Botto a lifelong notoriety: the author dared to write about same-sex love and in a very nonchalant and romantic way. Besides that, it featured a photograph of Botto in a camp, languid pose showing his bare shoulders. To noise Botto's book, Pessoa wrote a provocative and encomiastic article about Canções, published in the journal Comtemporânea, praising the author's courage and sincerity for shamelessly singing homosexual love as a true aesthete. Pessoa's article had a contrary reply in the same journal by the critic Alvaro Maia, followed by another article by Raul Leal (an openly homosexual writer, friend of Pessoa). Conservatives reacted and complained to the authorities about the work's immorality ("Sodom's literature") and the book was apprehended by the authorities in 1923. The Liga de Acção dos Estudantes de Lisboa [Lisbon Students Action League], a Catholic college students group (led by Pedro Teotónio Pereira) clamored for an auto-da-fé of Botto's book and someone even suggested the author should be hanged. Nevertheless, most artists and intellectuals, headed by Pessoa (a close friend of Botto's and also his publisher and later English translator), promptly took up his defence in several polemic articles. Eventually, the scandal subsided, the next year the ban was lifted and until the end of his life Botto would publish several revised versions of the book. It's true his work had been saluted by Teixeira de Pascoaes and José Régio, but praises from the likes of Antonio Machado, Miguel de Unamuno, Virginia Woolf, Luigi Pirandello, Stefan Zweig, Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce or Federico García Lorca, as he claimed, seem to have been a figment of Botto's very wild imagination.

Personal life

Botto was described as a slender, medium-height dandy, fastidiously dressed, oval-faced, a tiny mouth with thin pursed lips, strange, scrutinizing, ironic eyes (sometimes clouded by a disturbing malicious expression) hidden by an everpresent fedora. He had a sardonic sense of humour, a sharp, perverse and irreverent mind and tongue, and he was a brilliant and witty conversationalist. He also reveled in indiscreet gossiping. Some of his contemporaries said he was frivolous, mercurial, mundane, uneducated, vindictive, a mythomaniac and, above all, vain and narcissistic to the point of megalomania. Botto's mythomania seems to have been a lifelong trait of his. He talked about unlikely friendships with people like Vaslav Nijinsky, Federico García Lorca or André Gide. On the other hand, he never alluded to his modest background or ever talked about his parents or brothers. He was a regular visitor of Lisbon's popular bohemian quarters and the docks, enjoying the company of sailors, a frequent image in his poems. In spite of a homosexual fame, he had a lifelong and fully devoted common-law wife, Carminda da Conceição Silva Rodrigues, a widow, nine years his elder. "Marriage suits every handsome and decadent man", he once wrote.

Expelled from job

On November 9, 1942 Botto was expelled from the civil service for When he read the humiliating public announcement in the official gazette he was totally disheartened, but commented ironically: "Now I'm Portugal's only acknowledged homosexual." But this proved insufficient. His health was deteriorating from tertiary syphilis (of which he refused treatment) and the brilliance of his poetry was fading away. He was jeered at any time he entered cafés, bookshops or theatres by homophobes. He was fed up with living in Portugal and in 1947 he decided to move to Brazil, hoping for a new beginning. To raise funds for his trip in May he gave two large poetry recitals in Lisbon and Porto. They were a big success, and he was largely praised by several artists and intellectuals, among them Amália Rodrigues, João Villaret and the writer Aquilino Ribeiro. On 5 August 1947, Botto and his wife sailed to Brazil aboard the Juan de Garay liner.

Years in Brazil and death

On the evening of March 4, 1959, on the way to meet a lawyer friend while crossing the Nossa Senhora de Copacabana Avenue, in Rio de Janeiro, he was run over by a State's motor vehicle and he got a broken skull, going into a coma. He died on March 16, 1959, around 5:00 pm, in the Hospital Sousa Dias. In 1965 his remains were transferred to Lisbon and since 11 November 1966 they are buried in the Alto de São João Cemetery. By that time, his widow also sent Botto's archives to a Portuguese relative of hers who later donated them to Lisbon's Biblioteca Nacional in 1989.

Further reading (chronological order)