Sophia means “wisdom” in Greek but the poet known to her Portuguese countrymen everywhere simply and affectionately by that forename would have disavowed any claims to wisdom. She was humble, but her humility had a steely quality, as though she assessed all human endeavors against the immensity of the sea, which was her great and abiding subject. Her full name was Sophia de Mello Breyner, and she was born in Porto in 1919. When she died on July 2 of this year, at the age of 84, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and German newspapers carried lavish obituaries, but so far as I can tell no American publication noticed her passing. This is a shame, for she had one of the purest and most distinctive voices in modern European poetry.

Though she published her first book in 1944, it was almost 20 years before she achieved widespread recognition in Portugal. In the last half-century, her fame spread, largely because of her poetry but also because of her courageous opposition to the Salazar dictatorship. Her lyrics, with their abrupt lines and scorn of punctuation, display an unusual clarity, yet remain elusive, even cryptic at times, like gnomic inscriptions. A frankly classical poet, haunted by the ancient Greeks, her verses have a marmoreal finality without ever becoming cold; her words seem perpetually sun-touched. Here is “Beach” from her 1950 collection “Coral”:

The pine trees creak when the wind passes The sun strikes the ground and the stones burn.
White with salt and gleaming like fish The fantastic sea gods pass in the distance.
Swift wild birds, thrown Against the light like a spray of pebbles, Rise and die straight up into the sky, Their bodies swallowed by space.
The rushing waves break against the light Their foreheads adorned with columns.
And an ancient nostalgia of being masts Sways in the pine trees.

The translator is Richard Zenith – best known for his editions and translations of Sophia’s Protean predecessor (and unavoidable influence) Fernando Pessoa – from a selection titled “Log Book: Selected Poems,” issued a few years ago by the Manchester publisher Carnacet (111 pages, L8.95). Mr. Zenith interviewed Sophia in 1991, and in the affectionate foreword to his translation he quotes what the poet said about her earliest inspiration:

It was quite on my own that I chanced to discover Homer. … In a bookshop I found a French translation of the Odyssey, which is a story that a child can understand with no problem. I read the epic – I was 12 years old – and it was a revelation. I remember how, although I read it in winter, the days felt to me like summer, and there was nothing I liked better than summer, when I would spend three months at the beach, in a house next to the ocean.

From the beginning, the ocean and classical antiquity were fused; in this respect, Sophia stands in the tradition of such littoral poets as Montale, Seferis, and Elizabeth Bishop, for whom the sea-wrack cast up by the tides constitutes a secret and runic language, to be decoded only in poetry:

I saw iron tools arrows spears Flakes of gold in the soft waves
And the diverse shimmer of other metals
I saw pearls and shells and corals
Deserts fountains waving plains
I saw Eurydice’s face in the mists
I saw the freshness of natural things

I wouldn’t want to portray this distinctive poet as merely “sunny.” As a spiritual daughter of the ancient Greeks, her sense of tragedy is acute. In “Maenads” she writes: “The ancient furies had red pupils / Hair bristling with snakes / Heavy hands ravenous mouths / And faces tattooed with pure blood.” In another poem she notes that these “ancient furies” have nowadays been “banished from sin and the sacred / Now they inhabit the humble intimacy / Of daily life. They are / The leaky faucet the late bus / The soup that boils over…” She knows the bleakness and the petty tribulations of modern life, but refuses to surrender to them. Poetry of this sort could easily turn into barren proclamation; in Sophia’s work, thanks to the delicacy of the music of her language and her severe control of form, which no translation can convey, there is an implacable and burnished hardness that somehow is transmuted into the lightness of song (many have been set to music). Lightness – both of weight and of radiance – characterizes her best poems. Even so, a fury runs through them, too. Of a “learned poet” she says with scathing succinctness:

Learned skilled astute informed
But when he writes
The Maenads don’t dance
To see the sun in its full effulgence the dark and bloody furies must also be present;
without the shadow we would be blind:
We humans repeated the ritual gestures that re-establish
The initial whole presence of things –
This made us attentive to all forms known by the light of day
As well as to the darkness which lives within us
And in which the ineffable shimmer travels

In her great poem “The Minotaur,” she states:

In Crete
I kissed the ground like Ulysses
I walked in the naked light

I too was devastated like the ruined city
That no one rebuilt
But in the sunlight of my empty courts
Fury reigns intact And penetrates with me into the sea’s core
For I belong to the race of those who dive in with eyes open
To survey the depths one stone one anemone one flower at a time

The photographs of this remarkable woman, with her high forehead and graceful hands, give prominence, inevitably, to her dark and attentive eyes, in which a kind of shining friendliness appears to burn, like candle-flame glimpsed through a misted window. The warmth and force of her personality shine through even the grainy newsprint. I don’t know what she had chosen for her epitaph, but I can’t imagine a better memorial for her than the tiny poem “Inscription” from her “Sixth Book” of 1962: “When I die I will return to seek / The moments I did not live by the sea.”