O amor em Vaga-lumes ao meio-dia, de Saturnino Valladares

Abstract

The present investigation, Love in Vaga-lumes ao meio-dia by Saturnino Valladares, aims to identify and analyze the constitutive elements of love present in the work Vaga-lumes ao meio-dia (2023), articulating them with the main historical conceptions of love, such as Platonism, troubadour lyric, and Romanticism, which have traversed the Western literary tradition from biblical and Greco-Latin texts to contemporary literature. The research devotes special attention to the reception and poetic reworking of these conceptions in Spanish authors of recent decades (José Ángel Valente, Antonio Gamoneda, Claudio Rodríguez Fer, Jaime Gil de Biedma, and Francisco Brines), who have often been studied and translated by Saturnino Valladares, whose influence is evident in various thematic and stylistic traits of his poetry. Along this path, from a theoretical perspective, the analysis is grounded in Octavio Paz’s conception of love as a dynamic structure, presented in Um sistema solar and developed in The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism. To this end, the methodology combines biographical research with qualitative-oriented literary analysis, promoting the reconstruction of the poet’s personal and intellectual trajectory while also undertaking a hermeneutic reading of the poems, with the aim of highlighting the links between lived experience and aesthetic elaboration. In addition to the work of Octavio Paz, the theoretical framework is enriched by critical essays by scholars who have examined Valladares’s poetics, such as the Brazilian Tenório Telles, the Venezuelan Celso Medina, the Spanish scholar María Eugenia Alava, and the Galician Claudio Rodríguez Fer, as well as by academic research conducted at Spanish universities, with particular emphasis on the extensive study by Lucía Gato, which analyzes the Galician author’s first four books. Thus, Vaga-lumes ao meio-dia represents a singular poetic synthesis of the different amorous traditions of Western literature and a critical reworking of these matrices from a contemporary sensibility. Valladares’s work, in this sense, stands out as a space of confluence between cultural heritage, existential introspection, and lyrical expression, in which love is approached through concrete, lived experience, anchored in three central pillars: the bond with the other (person), affective intensity (attraction), and exclusive dedication (exclusivity). These elements allow the poetry to be understood as a modern testimony of love in its various human and symbolic unfoldings.