Devising another eternity: readings of Penthesilea in Vasco Graça Moura and Hélia Correia

• Autor(a) principal: Sousa, Sandra
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34624/fb.v0i16.25177

Western literary and artistic tradition was particularly disdainful towards the representation of the epic battle between Achilles and Penthesilea, whose representation found no place in the Homeric poems. This amazon’s myth wasn’t depicted in any dramatic or epic text like some other classical tradition heroines such as Medea, Antigone and Helen were. Because the literary records of the myth are rare (in archaic Greece, in the Epic Cycle, The Aethiopis; in the 1st century B.C. by Diodorus Siculus and Apollodorus; by the epic poet Quintus of Smyrna, who lived between the III and IV centuries B.C.), interest in its revitalization has been scarce over the centuries. In this sense, it is relevant to observe the interest that this battle between these two Greek heroes, Penthesilea and Achilles, which traditionally highlights the king of the Myrmidons’ fragilities in what concerns love and the military qualities of the amazon warrior, aroused in the two Portuguese authors, Vasco Graça Moura and Hélia Correia. Using as objects of study Vasco Graça Moura’s sombras com aquiles e pentesileia (1999) and Hélia Correia’s brief prose work Penthesiléa, taken from a small set of texts titled Apodera-te de Mim (2002), we aim at approaching these rereadings of the myth in light of the classical tradition in order to further understand its contribution to the strengthening of the presence of classical myths in contemporary Portuguese literature.