Abstract
A Czech artist, František Listopad, born Jiří Synek, known in Portugal as Jorge Listopad, was born in 1921 in Prague and died 2017 in Lisbon. He has written poems, short stories, essays in several languages, has been a theater and television director and screenwriter, and has worked as a journalist, translator and art critic.
After the war he became involved in the creation of the newspaper Mladá fronta, in which he directed the cultural section. He was part of a group of "dynamoarchists".
He studied aesthetics and literary sciences at the Faculty of Arts of the Carolina University of Prague. In 1948 he emigrated to France, settled there for a while and began directing films.
In 1959 he moved to Portugal where he lived and worked until his death. He was co-founder of a film and theater college in Lisbon and became director of the local National Theater.
Jorge Listopad visited his homeland several times, especially to present his plays. As an artist he was divided between many languages and between many worlds.
His poems he wrote exclusively in his mother tongue, the prose we find in French, Portuguese, English and Czech. His prose poems, especially included in the books Boj o Venezuelu (1947, in Czech) and Estretamento Progressivo (1974, in Portuguese) are the bridge between the two genres, between Listopad's two stages of life, between experimental forms of writing.
Speaking of the alternation of narrative voices, the similar theme and the composition of the mosaic, the lecture will contribute to the commemoration of the centenary of the author's birth.