page_title: António Botto
section_title: The scandal of Canções
hierarchical_section_title: António Botto / The scandal of Canções
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover of António Botto, Canções, 2nd edition
context_page_description: António Botto was a Portuguese aesthete and lyricist poet.
context_section_description: His first book of poems Trovas was published in 1917. It was followed by Cantigas de Saudade (1918), Cantares (1919) and Canções do Sul (1920). Canções (Songs) was published in 1921 and went unnoticed. Only after Fernando Pessoa published its 2nd edition, through his publishing house "Olisipo", emerged a public scandal amongst the Lisbon society which granted Botto a lifelong notoriety: the author dared to write about same-sex love and in a very nonchalant and romantic way. Besides that, it featured a photograph of Botto in a camp, languid pose showing his bare shoulders.
  To noise Botto's book, Pessoa wrote a provocative and encomiastic article about Canções, published in the journal Comtemporânea, praising the author's courage and sincerity for shamelessly singing homosexual love as a true aesthete. Pessoa's article had a contrary reply in the same journal by the critic Alvaro Maia, followed by another article by Raul Leal (an openly homosexual writer, friend of Pessoa).
  Conservatives reacted and complained to the authorities about the work's immorality ("Sodom's literature") and the book was apprehended by the authorities in 1923. The Liga de Acção dos Estudantes de Lisboa [Lisbon Students Action League], a Catholic college students group (led by Pedro Teotónio Pereira) clamored for an auto-da-fé of Botto's book and someone even suggested the author should be hanged. Nevertheless, most artists and intellectuals, headed by Pessoa (a close friend of Botto's and also his publisher and later English translator), promptly took up his defence in several polemic articles.
  Eventually, the scandal subsided, the next year the ban was lifted and until the end of his life Botto would publish several revised versions of the book. It's true his work had been saluted by Teixeira de Pascoaes and José Régio, but praises from the likes of  Antonio Machado, Miguel de Unamuno, Virginia Woolf, Luigi Pirandello, Stefan Zweig, Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce or Federico García Lorca, as he claimed, seem to have been a figment of Botto's very wild imagination.
caption: Canções, 2nd edition, 1922
exif: {}