Issue 2 of the magazine Meridional will be presented on Saturday, January 14th, at 17 pm, at Casa do Meio-Dia, in Loulé, announced the Institute of Ibero-American Culture (ICIA), responsible for the publication.
The presentation of this Mediterranean studies magazine will be made by the writer Lídia Jorge, who, along with other important names, signs one of the articles.
Presentations in Lisbon and Coimbra follow. Meanwhile, Meridional is already on sale at Elifalma (Portimão), A Internacional (Lagos) and, soon, at Fortaleza de Sagres and Ler Devagar (Lisbon).
The publication features works by 20 writers and historians, from Lídia Jorge, Nuno Júdice and Luís Castro Mendes, to João Romero Chagas Aleixo or Andreia Fidalgo, among others.
«A southern world that, in the thematic dossier of this issue, we cross to the Black Sea, with its history “in motion” (Rui Bebiano), its literature (“Odessa, open city”, João Ventura’s geographical and literary incursion through of a city threatened by war) and the traumas of a Soviet past that still mark Georgians (according to the testimony of writer and activist Tamta Melashvili). “The war in a low voice”, in the words of the poet Nuno Júdice», describes the ICIA.
The magazine also features texts by António Cabrita (from Mozambique), a distant south where the echo of sirens from Kherson arrives that «anticipate bombings». It is still today's massacred Ukraine that Maria Cantinho suggests in contrast to the «Mediterranean that was Greek light and Ulysses' dream».
The Algarve and Andalusia are also present, both in the study by João Romero Chagas Aleixo and in the review by Jorge Semedo Matos of the book “Por este mar adentro”.
Fishing, an ancestral activity practiced in the Mediterranean with different arts and varied descriptions, is addressed by Carlos Osório, who evokes the “copejada do tuna”, and by Andreia Fidalgo's review of the study on “Fishing in the Medieval Algarve”.
The South is also the Alentejo and the wandering of the shepherds who follow their sheep through the green plains that Joana Portela talks about.
This issue also talks about Morocco. «The other side bordering the Algarve, the former Algarve d'Além, recovers the marks of the Portuguese presence in the Modern Period (study by Frederico Mendes Paula) and of the collective imagination represented by the legend of Aisha Qandisha, told by Mohamed Saadan».
The Moroccan writer and artist Mahi Binebine shares, in the magazine, his conversation with the architect José Alberto Alegria, Honorary Consul of the Kingdom of Morocco in the Algarve, since 2001.
The Algerian piracy that ravaged the Algarve coast takes us a little further east, when António Jorge Afonso recounts the adventures of Abraão Cardozo from Lacobrigen.
«The South always depends on the point of view of the observer and, therefore, Manuel Jorge Marmelo always feels southern, whether he is in Castelo de Vide or at the South Pole, and reminds us that for Moroccans, the Algarve is to the north. Just as Maria Adelina Amorim places death, the current slaughter, in the north (for Turks, Ukraine is to the north, as well as for inhabitants of the southern hemisphere). Dora Gago went from Macau, to the south, to Florence, where childhood memories erupted to recall the fragrances of medicinal herbs collected in the fields of São Brás de Alportel with her great-grandmother», says the ICIA.
«Nuno Júdice celebrates 50 years of a brilliant literary career, internationally recognized and awarded in both hemispheres. As Luís Castro Mendes, another poet from the Algarve, who presents here a review of the book 50 years of poetry, personal anthology, writes, Júdice plays with words and, without committing to any current of writing, is one of the authors who stay and found», he concludes. .
The cover features a photograph of a holm oak tree, by Elsa Martins.
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