Ana Hatherly

Biography

In 1958 a collection called “Um Ritmo Perdido” came out in Lisbon, published by Ana Hatherly herself. She was twenty-nine, and no one could have expected that poems would turn out to be only one of her roads.

She was born in Porto in 1929. The date is given differently: most often 8 May, sometimes 15 June. Her parents died when she was a child, and she was brought up by her maternal grandmother, an avid filmgoer; later Hatherly recalled how deeply James Whale’s “The Invisible Man” had affected her. In her youth she wanted to be an opera singer and went to Germany to study Baroque music, but her voice could not bear the strain. She began to write during a long period of treatment in Switzerland, on the advice of a doctor who gave her a fountain pen.

Her education was in philology: Germanic philology at the University of Lisbon, then a doctorate in Hispanic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She began publishing in newspapers in the late 1950s, including in Diário de Notícias in September 1959. In the 1960s came “As Aparências”, “A Dama e o Cavaleiro”, “Sigma”, “Estruturas Poéticas – Operação 2”, “Eros Frenético” and “39 Tisanas” (1969). The “Tisanas” became her own genre: short prose poems, close in spirit to Zen koans. She went on writing new ones for decades: 63 in 1973, 351 in 1997, 463 in 2006. In the same years she came to the conclusion that writing “had never been anything but image”. She turned to calligraphy, ancient and contemporary, and to signs; in the Gulbenkian Foundation’s catalogues this is called “writing-image”. Hatherly belonged to the Grupo Experimentalista Português and took part in group exhibitions, among them “Alternativa Zero” in 1977. One late example is “Auto Retrato Obliterado” (“Obliterated Self-Portrait”, 1996): a drawing in which writing and gesture cannot be separated.

In 1971, according to some accounts, she left for Britain in protest against the dictatorship and censorship. Later she studied at the London Film School. According to other accounts, on 25 April 1974 she was flying to Egypt, stopped in Lisbon to look at her house in Estoril, and because of the Carnation Revolution decided to stay. The years after the revolution were financially hard for her: she had to sell her house and belongings until she found work. Between 1974 and 1979 she made several short films: “C.S.S.”, “Revolução”, “Rotura”, “Música Negativa” and others. Copies are held at the Centre of Modern Art of the Gulbenkian Foundation and in the archive of the Portuguese Cinematheque.

Scholarly work went on alongside. Hatherly studied Baroque literature and the visual texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: “A Experiência do Prodígio” (1983), “O Ladrão Cristalino” (1997), “Poesia Incurável” (2003). She prepared editions of Baroque authors, among them Sóror Maria do Céu, Frei Jerónimo Baía and António Barbosa Bacelar, and founded the journals “Claro-Escuro” and “Incidências”. From 1981 she taught in the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and co-founded its Institute of Portuguese Studies. She translated from English, French, Italian and Spanish.

In 1992 the Centre of Modern Art of the Gulbenkian Foundation presented a large retrospective of her paintings and graphic works from the 1960s to the 1990s, and in 2000 the catalogue “hand made” appeared. Her work is in the collections of the Gulbenkian Foundation, the Serralves Foundation, the Berardo Collection Museum, the Museu do Chiado and others. She chaired the Portuguese PEN Club. Her awards include the PEN Club poetry prize for “Rilkeana” (1999), the critics’ prize for “O Pavão Negro” (2003) and, in 2009, the Order of Prince Henry as Grand Officer.

Hatherly died on 5 August 2015 in Lisbon. The funeral was held at the Estrela Basilica, and she is buried in the Olivais cemetery.