Juan Pinto Delgado

João or Juan, then Moshe, Pinto Delgado (Portimão, Algarve, 1580 - Amsterdam, December 23, 1653), perhaps the most important Portuguese poet, Biography

He was the eldest of three children of Gonzalo Delgado and grandson of a minor poet of the same name, João Pinto Delgado, with whom he has often been confused. At the age of twenty he moved with his family to Lisbon to study and pursue his liteary ambitions. In the capital he read the works of Jorge Manrique, Garcilaso, Herrera, Góngora and Luis de León, which at the time circulated handwritten. Although he wrote some poems in Portuguese, the bulk of his work was originally written in Spanish. In 1624 (according to others, in 1612) Juan Pinto went to Ruan to join his parents, who had escaped the Portuguese Inquisition. There, the father was one of the two leaders of the Iberian "marrano" community, and he published Poema de la Reyna Ester. Lamentations of the Prophet Ieremias. History of Ruth. As the Spanish Inquisition sent an emissary to Ruan to investigate that community, the whole family left for Antwerp and then for Amsterdam, where he could openly cultivate Judaism and renamed Moshe (Moses) Pinto Delgado. Between 1636 and 1640 he became one of the seven parnasim (governors) of the Yeshiva (religious seminary) of the Talmud and Torah in Amsterdam, where he studied little Spinoza. Works

In France he was protected by Cardinal Richelieu, validated by Louis XIII, to whom he openly dedicated his Poem by Queen Esther: Lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah; History of Rut and several poems (Rouen: David du Petit Val, 1627). The first is novel when using for the narration the stanza of the sextine instead of the usual octave real; the second is a paraphrase of the biblical book of the same title composed by the prophet Jeremiah; the third is a versified version of the History of Ruth, a novel also introduced in the Bible. Pinto Delgado belongs to the epic cult of hispanojudía. Adolfo de Castro praises the style of his works. There is a modern edition of these works (Institute Français au Portugal, 1954). One of his rare autobiographical poems is "La Salida de Lisboa", preserved in a manuscript of the Etz Haim Collection in Amsterdam and published for the first time by the historian IS Révah in his article "Autobiographie d'un Marrane" (Revue des Études Juives , 1961). Sources

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