The exemplary life of a poor poet. Pedroni by Portogalo, 1953

Abstract

This article is based on an epistolary exchange between José Pedroni and José Portogalo at the beginning of 1953 to focus attention on the “biographical note” on Pedroni that, after said exchange, Portogalo published in NoticiasGráficas. It’s proposed to analyze, on the one hand, the mechanisms of self-figuration that are put into play in Pedroni's autobiographical story in the letters and, on the other, the ways in which Portogalo selects these “data” based on the construction of an exemplary figure of the “poor poet” who manages to overcome “adversities”. The hypothesis is sustained that in both cases a system of evaluation of the writer and literature appears as a substrate that recovers an image of the proletarian writer or worker of Boedista affiliation based on a morality of the example of life. That same affiliation is evident in the miserabilist rhetoric that Portogalo resorts to to narrate the life of Pedroni. But, at the same time, this image of the exemplary poet is stressed by another figuration through which being a poet seems to be the fulfillment of a predetermined destiny, an essential condition that can hardly be recovered for the morality of the example.