THE FIRST BOOK PRINTED ON TIMOR
DE CASTRO, Alberto Osório.
Flores de Coral. Ultimos Poemas.
Dili, Ilha de Timor – Insulindia, Imprensa Nacional, 1908 [(colophon:) 31 December 1909; (wrapper:) 1910].
Tall thin 8vo, pp. 272; uncut, and in very good condition, in the original red, silver-sprinkled printed paper wrappers (dated 1910) preserved in a folding red morocco-backed box with paper sides (signed ‘D. Montecot’); small portions of covers and spine wanting, short closed tear to upper cover at foot; tissue repairs and remnants of old adhesive to lower wrapper; some pressed tropical (?) flowers, a large leaf, and a moth preserved between the pages; signed and numbered by the author, with lengthy authorial presentation inscription on the half-title (see below); two gilt paper samples with red geometric woodcut designs loosely inserted.
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Flores de Coral. Ultimos Poemas.
First edition of the first book printed on the island of Timor, no. 2 of 31 copies on a combination of song-kió-zu and tço-tzu paper from Guangzhou, a presentation copy, with a long dedicatory inscription in French from de Castro to the Romanian-French poet Anna, Comtesse Mathieu de Noailles, dated 5 February 1910.
De Castro (1868–1946), who played a notable role in Portuguese poetry in the early years of the tewntieth century, was a judge by training, and was in Timor from 1908 to 1910 as president of the Tribunal de Timor; he had published earlier collections of verse in Coimbra and Goa. Flores de Coral comprises forty-eight symbolist poems with an exotic edge, collecting poems from 1905 to 1908 written in Timor, Goa, Indonesia, the Gulf of Bengal, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and along the Suez Canal, several of which drafted at sea. The poems are followed by very lengthy notes (pp. 132 ff.) covering the language, ethnography, flora, history, &c. of the Portuguese East Indies. The entry for ‘Timor’ occupies over fifty pages and includes material on the Catholic missions and quotations from songs in Bahasa.
Our copy was presented by the author to the celebrated poet Anna, Comtesse de Noailles (nèe Princess Bibesco-Bassaraba de Brancovan), the first woman elected to Belgium’s Académie Royale de Langue et Littérature, and in 1931, the first woman to be made Commander of the Legion of Honour. Her salon on Avenue Hoche was frequented by the likes of Colette, Cocteau, Valéry, and Gide, and she maintained a thirty-year correspondence with Proust. Although it is not clear where or when de Castro and the Comtesse de Noialles ever met – if they met at all – her influence on him is palpable, and he was perhaps one of her numerous admirers. The wrappers feature a quotation from her L’Ombre des jours, the second poem in the collection, ‘Outra vida’, is dedicated to her, and another poem, ‘Surpresa’, quotes her in an epigraph. In his long inscription on the half-title, De Castro dedicates ‘ce frustre livre de l’extrême Malaisien’ to her as ‘The greatest, most melodious, and most beautiful female genius of our time, the soul of Hellenised Asia Minor ... of Rome, of small Tanagrean statues … of the East and of the West, of Rusalkas and the steppes, of fairies and the moors … of cypresses and rosaries, of iconostases, soirées, dead cities, of Aladdin’s lamp …’ (trans.).
Although Flores de Coral is dated 1908 on the title-page, the colophon states that printing was finished on 31 December 1909 and the wrapper is dated 1910. 72 copies were printed on song-kió-zu paper, and 257 on tço-tzu paper; this is one of 31 copies printed on a combination of both song-kió-zu and tço-tzu, with paper samples for each loosely inserted (pictured above).
Library Hub finds three copies in the UK (BL, Bodley, Rylands).