Literature | Macau and the subversive poet Bocage

A painting depicting Bocage

Pedro Barreiros (left), Daniel Pires (center) and Maria Antónia Espadinha (right) pictured during yesterday’s session

Bocage, one of the most celebrated Portuguese poets of all time, arrived in Macau at the end of 1789 and lived here for approximately six months. His presence in Macau was marked yesterday during a session held at the Old Court Building and included in the Macau Literary Festival.
With an unusual talent for improvisation and irony, Bocage was a “first class poet” and “a transgressor in social, political, religious and sexual terms,” explained Daniel Pires, a researcher of his work.
Arriving in Macau from Guangzhou (or Canton, as the Chinese city was known at the time) after having deserted the army in India, Bocage described the city in a poem: “plenty of poverty, many vile women, one hundred Portuguese, all [living] in a pigsty.”
Daniel Pires noted that, as was common in the XVIII century, he also had to write elegies for his Macau hosts. “That was normal at the time, a poor poet needed to express his gratitude.”
Back in the motherland, the short-lived poet, who died when he was forty, faced the hardships of someone “who decided to live on the margins of society and paid dearly for his choice, going through phases of extreme poverty and ‘uncertain dinners’,” Pires said.
Persecuted by censorship and the Inquisition, the poet was arrested several times. His bohemian lifestyle meant that he became famous for his romantic adventures and thus provoked many anecdotes both in Portugal and Brazil, where he also lived.
Bocage was born in September 1765. Celebrations are still being held this year to mark the 250th year of the poet’s birth.