“Of all the spells he cast, one is left:/ the invocation of voices, not of tempests, but of new materials”; these words are from Próspero Morreu, a verse play or “performed poem” published in 2011. Now that Ana Luísa Amaral (1956-2022) has left us, the time has come for us to return to her words. We will hear them on the Teatro São João’s stage, when the Ensemble company premieres her Portuguese translation of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer, which we will publish in book form. A few days later, we will read her poems, as well as poems she has lovingly translated, by such authors as Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Louise Glück, Elizabeth Bishop or John Updike. The poems are selected by essayist Rosa Maria Martelo and read, among others, by actors from the cast of Suddenly Last Summer. Ana Luísa Amaral was a researcher, a teacher, an essayist, a fiction writer, a translator and, alongside all this, a poet, “because I had no choice but to be one”. Próspero Morreu ends with these lines from Ariel, a character who is “neither a person nor a child,/ but everything and all the rest”, just as she was: “This was the story of the labyrinth,/ and I, its teller, or I, that choir of ourselves,/ shall remain in history”. And so shall Ana Luísa.

*Verse by Emily Dickinson.