A prolific and multitalented author, Jorge de Sena wrote poetry, drama, short stories, critical essays, a novel, and a novella. He had an erudite interest in culture, and his fascination in several aspects of the cultural world are reflected in the richness and diversity of his writings. Scholars of Sena generally emphasize in his work the importance of biography, the concept of metamorphosis, and the experience of "double exile." Sena spent much of his life in Brazil and the United States, but, as he stated more than once: "I have always been in exile, even before I left Portugal." The statement lays bare the feelings of an intellectual, born only seven years before the longest-running dictatorship of twentieth-century Europe began in Portugal and surrounded in his childhood and youth by abuses of power and censorship.

Family circumstances did little to attenuate the feeling of displacement that haunted Sena...