Leaving his post as Portuguese Ambassador to Paris in June 1979, diplomat Antonio Coimbra Martins offered his own variation on the cry uttered by the poet Mayakovsky half a century earlier: “I would like to live and die in Paris if there was no Lisbon in the world. “
Co-founder of the Portuguese Socialist Party in the last days of the dictatorship, friend and minister of Mario Soares (1924-2017), committed custodian of a fiercely European humanist tradition, this intellectual who taught in the highest French institutions of knowledge was granted since it was in Paris that he died on May 19 at the age of 94.
Born in Lisbon on January 30, 1927, this son of a banker first began an academic career. Graduated in Roman philology at the Faculty of Letters of Lisbon (1950), he taught for a time in secondary school (1952) then left Lisbon for France, where, perfectly bilingual, he became a Portuguese reader at the Faculties of Letters of Montpellier and Paris. ‘Aix (1953-1956), before moving to Paris where he held the same position at the Catholic University and at the Sorbonne (1957-1960).
If he returned to Portugal, attending the Faculty of Letters in Lisbon where he taught Portuguese linguistics and French literature (1961-1964), his hostility towards the Estado novo, the authoritarian regime set up by General Salazar in 1932, pushes him to join the Democratic and Social Action in 1964, which will soon become the Portuguese Socialist Action (ASP). So back to Paris, where he set up in January 1965 the library of the Portuguese Cultural Center of the Calouste-Gulbenkian Foundation, avenue d’Iéna, inaugurated four months later. Antonio Coimbra Martins, the institution’s capital linchpin, becomes its librarian and deputy director.
Take part in the “carnation revolution”
Militant for the return to democracy in his country, he created with Ramos da Costa the Parisian nucleus of the ASP and joined the Committee for the Defense of Freedoms in Portugal, based in Paris.
At the same time, he continued his academic commitment, working both on lexicography and on the history of ideas in Portugal in the 18th century.e and XIXe centuries or the theater of which he has long been a passer, translating for his compatriots Marcel Achard, Jean-Paul Sartre, even before the Nobels distinguished him – from Nausea (1958) to Abducted from Altona (1961) -, later Dom juan by Molière which he translated in 1985 for the stage (version only published in 2006).
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