By Michael Hall
Scholars from around the globe gathered for a colloquium at the Mosher Alumni House last week to commemorate the 100th birthday of Jorge de Sena, a renowned Portuguese poet and novelist who brought Portuguese studies to UC Santa Barbara.
De Sena escaped from Portugal during its authoritarian regime in the 1930s to Brazil. He eventually landed in the United States and became the chairman of UC Santa Barbara’s Spanish and Portuguese department and the department of Comparative Literature in 1975.
The event, titled “One Hundred Years of Jorge de Sena Itineraries: Portugal, Brazil, United States,” ran from mid-morning to early evening, featuring five keynote speakers from around the world to discuss the life and work of the late writer. One of de Sena’s nine children, Maria, also attended the event.
During his time at UCSB, de Sena was responsible for creating the Portuguese part of the Spanish and Portuguese department, as well as the Center for Portuguese Studies. After his death in 1978, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, a Lisbon-based philanthropic organization dedicated to preserving Portuguese culture, provided UCSB with an endowment to start the Center.
“We are here thanks to the prestige of Jorge de Sena,” said Élide Valarini Oliver, director of the Center and a professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Department. “And according to what we know, he was a great teacher.”
Yale professor K. David Jackson began the series of keynotes by sharing the complicated nature of de Sena’s political exile and the poetry those travels inspired.
“His travel to Brazil, and later to the United States,” said Jackson, “constituted for him a cartography of worlds of culture and knowledge that he explored on his wanderings for which poetry would serve as a route and guide — a compass for the cardinal points of human adventure in search of truth.”
Other speakers throughout the day discussed de Sena’s translations and their cultural contexts as well as personal recollections from those who knew him during his life.
Michael Hall is a fourth year Film and Media Studies major at UC Santa Barbara. He is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.