Ruy Cinatti

Ruy Cinnatti Vaz Monteiro Gomes graduated from the Higher Institute of Agronomy of Lisbon in 1941 and studied Ethnology and Anthropology at Oxford. He served as the aeronautical meteorologist for Pan-American Airways, and was chief of staff for the governor of Timor, where he developed intense activity as a phytogeographer making several discoveries, which led to the classification of two plants under his name in the Netherlands. Later he was appointed head of the Agriculture Services of the Government of Timor. It was in 1956 that he began his research work at the Overseas Research Board. He returns to Timor (1961 to 1963), taking an oath of blood with two Timorese families. From 1966 he was forbidden to return to Timor, definitively settled in Lisbon the following year, in a house near Praça do Príncipe Real. His first verses are published in the College Nun'Alvares (1932), and he is an attentive spirit, particularly interested in nature, the first source of an imaginary life and all his spiritual adventure. With Ossobo (1936), Cinatti achieves a skilfully accomplished naturalness, capturing the ephemeral, fugitive and transient in a rigorous poetry, full of sonorities and rhythms of great beauty. With José Blanc de Portugal and Tomás Kim he coordinated (1940 to 1953) the magazine Cadernos de Poesia, a project to which Jorge de Sena joins. In 1942, in parallel, he created the magazine Aventura, editing five issues until 1944. He also collaborated in other newspapers and magazines, among them the newspaper Acção. A poet always in search of himself, he systematically questions his convictions, distressing himself in doubts and uncertainties, revealing many of his poems, renewed fidelity to the hope of redemption of man through religious faith and love, a readiness to read the world and others, always in the certainty of the existence of an essential mystery of being, the genesis of his creativity. The poet Ruy Cinatti is today considered unique in the Portuguese literature of twentieth’s century, by the commitment only assumed with him, by the type of imagination entangled in the real, by the adventurous genius of a Portuguese wanderer, a man of action and mystic, inventor of a new tone and a seemingly simple rhythm, generators of an admirable work.
Ruy Cinatti was awarded the Antero de Quental Prize, for his work O Livro do Meu Amigo N+omada (1958), and the National Prize for Poetry, by Sete Septetos (1967).