Jorge de Lima

Jorge de Lima (born April 23, 1895, União dos Palmares, Braz.—died Nov. 15, 1953, Rio de Janeiro) was a Brazilian poet and novelist who became one of the foremost representatives of regionalist poetry in Brazil in the 1920s.

Raised on a sugar plantation in northeastern Brazil, Lima practiced as a medical doctor. His earliest verses show the marked influence of the French Parnassian poets, but the volume O Mundo do Menino Impossível (1925; “The World of the Impossible Child”) signals his break with European tradition and his adherence to the Modernist movement in Latin-American literature. He became an active collaborator with Gilberto Freyre and others in the northeastern regionalist movement and produced a great deal of “Afro-Brazilian” poetry in that vein throughout the 1930s.

Following his religious conversion in 1935, Lima sought to “restore poetry in Christ” and added metaphysical and expressionist poetry and fiction to his literary production. His best known collections of poems include A Túnica Inconsútil (1938; “The Seamless Tunic”), Poemas Negros (1947; “Black Poems”), and Invenção de Orfeu (1952; “The Invention of Orpheus”). In fiction, he is best known for Calunga (1935) and A Mulher Obscura (1939; “The Obscure Woman”).

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