Jorge Vera-Cruz Barbosa
- Literatura
Jorge Vera-Cruz Barbosa was born on the island of Santiago de Cabo Verde on May 22, 1902. He did his primary studies in the city of Praia and then came to Lisbon, where he studied until the 3rd year. He then returned to Cape Verde, where he continued his studies until the 5th year.
At the age of eighteen, he began to work at the São Vicente Customs House. He travels almost all the islands in service, where he is transferred several times. He retired from the island of Sal in 1967, at the age of sixty-five, with the rank of director of customs.
In September 1970, already very sick of the heart, he went to Portugal to be treated and died three months later, on January 6, 1971.
A life without great jolts and limited to the maritime border that inspired so many of his poems. However, deep and immense in dreams and imagined journeys that he never made.
Jorge Barbosa published three books: Arquipélago (1st edition in December 1935, under the aegis of Claridade Editorial), Ambiente (1st edition in 1941, Praia, Minerva de Cabo Verde) and Caderno de um Ilhéu (1st edition in 1956, Lisbon, Agência Geral do Ultramar).
Posthumously, in 2002, his Poetic Work was gathered by the Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, where three unpublished books were added, ordered by the poet:
I – Expectativa;
II – Romanceiro dos Pescadores;
III – Outros Poemas.
In these three books we find some poems that were presented in the unpublished and disperse poetry of Jorge Barbosa, published in 1993 by Edições ALAC. The remaining ones, which were excluded from the three unpublished books, were also included in part IV with the title Poemas dispersos. Part V also includes five poems in Creole.
He gave his literary collaboration to magazines and newspapers of the time, such as Presença, Claridade (both in the first three issues and in the remaining six of the 2nd phase), Cadernos de Poesia, Diabo, Atlântico, Mundo Português, Aventura, Movimento, Mensagem (CEI), Notícias de Cabo Verde.
More regularly, his collaboration went to the Boletim de Cabo Verde, for several years, not only with poems, but also with the chronicles of São Vicente and various articles.
Jorge Barbosa - Cape Verde (1902/1971). One of the most significant poets in the evolution of the history of Cape Verdean literature was born in Praia, Santiago Island - Cape Verde, and died in Cova da Piedade, in Portugal. His work "Arquipélago" (1935) is a landmark of modernity, Cape Verdean, breaking with the dependence on metropolitan models and anticipating in months the appearance of the magazine Claridade of which he was one of the founders. Barbosa's poetry, telluric and social, brings to light the problems of the archipelago and the anonymous Cape Verdean/brother: drought, hunger, death by starvation, emigration, isolation, insalubrity, are themes evoked by the poet in his "radiography of the social drama of Cape Verdean man".
