Published in May 1968, “Presentation of the Face” (Ulisseia), by Herberto Helder, was banned by censorship two months later. The report boiled down to a single paragraph that, unsurprisingly, said more about the censor than about the censored work: “Author’s autobiography, which is of a leftist nature, written in surreal and hermetic language that as a literary work does not sell [sic] any repair if it did not present passages of great obscenity as for example, those verified in the pages. 71, 111, 120, 162, 163, 186, etc. ” Most of the 1500 specimens were seized and destroyed by PIDE. The few who survived later reached extremely high values in the circuit of used booksellers, not only because they are rare survivors of a first obliterated edition, but because Herberto Helder decided never to reissue the work.
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