Five Portuguese authors and their words
As an only child growing up there were times I had to entertain myself, I had no siblings to play with nor was I a child who had many friends due to my shyness.
However, I eventually found that books not only could be my friends, but they were also a source of creativeness for my young self. I was lucky that my mom was such an avid reader and there were always books in my house for me to go on an adventure, from fiction, crime and classics my youth was filled with literary exploration.
It wasn’t until I started middle school and high school that I actually started reading portuguese authors more in depth as it was obligatory reading material for Portuguese classes, maybe it was a bit late but once I started studying Portuguese literature there was no going back. While some of my classmates would bemoan about reading the classics of Portuguese authors I fell in love with how our language and history were so intertwined and beautifully written.
There are many authors I could discuss here but I will write a few that have left a mark on me, Portuguese literature and that can capture the essence of the Portuguese in their words.
As an only child growing up there were times I had to entertain myself, I had no siblings to play with nor was I a child who had many friends due to my shyness.
However, I eventually found that books not only could be my friends, but they were also a source of creativeness for my young self. I was lucky that my mom was such an avid reader and there were always books in my house for me to go on an adventure, from fiction, crime and classics my youth was filled with literary exploration.
It wasn’t until I started middle school and high school that I actually started reading portuguese authors more in depth as it was obligatory reading material for Portuguese classes, maybe it was a bit late but once I started studying Portuguese literature there was no going back. While some of my classmates would bemoan about reading the classics of Portuguese authors I fell in love with how our language and history were so intertwined and beautifully written.
There are many authors I could discuss here but I will write a few that have left a mark on me, Portuguese literature and that can capture the essence of the Portuguese in their words.
Luis Vaz De Camões
If British have Shakespeare and Italians have Dante, us, Portuguese have Camões, one of our national greatest poets.
As one of the most sublime figures in the history of Portuguese literature, Camões owes his lasting fame to his epic poem "Os Lusiadas," (The Lusiads); he is remarkable also for the degree of art attained in his lyrics, less noteworthy for his dramas. Exiled during a large part of his lifetime, he has, like Dante, enjoyed an abundance of fame since his death; his followers have been in legion, and his memory has begot many fabulous legends however actual facts regarding his career are not easily obtained. What we do know is that Camões was an adventurer and this can be noted on his works.
Many people may know about The Lusiads which recounts the heroic age of Portuguese navigation and the journey of Vasco da Gama in 1497-98, when he became the first European to reach India by rounding the Cape of Good Hope, it is a great read for those who enjoy the classics (such as The Iliad) as Camões achieves a harmony between classical learning and practical experience, perception, suburb artistic skills, and he expresses through them the gravity of thought and human emotions.
However, it is also important to note that this author has more to his name than just The Lusiads, he is also known for his poems, sonnets, odes, elegies, eclogues, canções, redondilhas, and the like, which reflect the moods and passions of the poet's mind and heart throughout the periods of his varied and ill-starred life. He also wrote three comedies in verse, one of them, the "Filodemo", gives scenic setting to the plot of a medieval story of love and adventurous travel; another, "Rei Seleuco", takes up a love episode in the life of the Syrian King Seleucus and his son Antiochus, which had been narrated by Plutarch and treated by Petrarch and many other poets; the third and best of all, the "Anfitriões” is a free and attractive rendering of the "Amphitruo" of Plautus.
I leave you here a translated version of one of his most popular love poems to entice you to read a bit more of this exalted poet.
Love is a fire that burns unseen,
a wound that aches yet isn’t felt,
an always discontent contentment,
a pain that rages without hurting,
a longing for nothing but to long,
a loneliness in the midst of people,
a never feeling pleased when pleased,
a passion that gains when lost in thought.
It’s being enslaved of your own free will;
it’s counting your defeat a victory;
it’s staying loyal to your killer.
But if it’s so self-contradictory,
how can Love, when Love chooses,
bring human hearts into sympathy?
Luís Vaz de Camões
From: Rimas (1598)
As one of the most sublime figures in the history of Portuguese literature, Camões owes his lasting fame to his epic poem "Os Lusiadas," (The Lusiads); he is remarkable also for the degree of art attained in his lyrics, less noteworthy for his dramas. Exiled during a large part of his lifetime, he has, like Dante, enjoyed an abundance of fame since his death; his followers have been in legion, and his memory has begot many fabulous legends however actual facts regarding his career are not easily obtained. What we do know is that Camões was an adventurer and this can be noted on his works.
Many people may know about The Lusiads which recounts the heroic age of Portuguese navigation and the journey of Vasco da Gama in 1497-98, when he became the first European to reach India by rounding the Cape of Good Hope, it is a great read for those who enjoy the classics (such as The Iliad) as Camões achieves a harmony between classical learning and practical experience, perception, suburb artistic skills, and he expresses through them the gravity of thought and human emotions.
However, it is also important to note that this author has more to his name than just The Lusiads, he is also known for his poems, sonnets, odes, elegies, eclogues, canções, redondilhas, and the like, which reflect the moods and passions of the poet's mind and heart throughout the periods of his varied and ill-starred life. He also wrote three comedies in verse, one of them, the "Filodemo", gives scenic setting to the plot of a medieval story of love and adventurous travel; another, "Rei Seleuco", takes up a love episode in the life of the Syrian King Seleucus and his son Antiochus, which had been narrated by Plutarch and treated by Petrarch and many other poets; the third and best of all, the "Anfitriões” is a free and attractive rendering of the "Amphitruo" of Plautus.
I leave you here a translated version of one of his most popular love poems to entice you to read a bit more of this exalted poet.
Love is a fire that burns unseen,
a wound that aches yet isn’t felt,
an always discontent contentment,
a pain that rages without hurting,
a longing for nothing but to long,
a loneliness in the midst of people,
a never feeling pleased when pleased,
a passion that gains when lost in thought.
It’s being enslaved of your own free will;
it’s counting your defeat a victory;
it’s staying loyal to your killer.
But if it’s so self-contradictory,
how can Love, when Love chooses,
bring human hearts into sympathy?
Luís Vaz de Camões
From: Rimas (1598)
Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage
The son of a lawyer, Bocage left school at the age of 14 to join the army, then transferred to the navy at 16. At the Royal Navy Academy in Lisbon, he dedicated his time to love affairs and poetry. In 1786 he was sent, like his hero Camões, to India and also like him was disillusioned by the Orient. Upon returning to Lisbon in 1790 he joined the New Arcadia, which was a literary society with elusively egalitarian and libertarian sympathies, but his satires on his fellow members resulted in his expulsion, and a long verse war ensued, engaging most of the poets of Lisbon.
Bocage, in addition to poetry, composed satirical poems covering regime’s people and the clergy, which did not please those in power. Censorship pursued Bocage throughout his life. Many lines of his poems were cut, others ostensibly changed, and some poems only appeared posthumously. For this reason it is plenty understandable his desperate yearning for freedom.
For many he is a poet of lyrical and comical vein, a Poet of Freedom.
This is one of his more subdued poems as Bocage was known for writing with profanity which landed his poems a more comical or erotic tone. However, it is plain to see the aforementioned characteristics in this poem.
Do not, my charming Armia, do not cast
Your tender lamentations to the deaf wind;
If amorous impatience is a torment,
The expectation of joys can relieve it.
That strict mother of yours who watches over you
Tries in vain to forbid us that bright moment
When our feelings of love, free and aloft,
Rise to the peak of glorious happiness.
Love’s cares don’t really matter as much
As the sweet and secret recompense
That it grants, though late, to sighs and moans.
What cleverness thinks it can foil lovers’ plans?
Desire has wings, and the night has a mantle:
There is no obstacle that Love can’t hurdle
Fernando Pessoa
I love eccentric writers whose neuroses make me seem well-adjusted in comparison, and no writer — not one — was more neurotic than Fernando Pessoa.
Throughout his life Pessoa created several alter egos. Arguably, the four greatest poets of his period in the Portuguese language were all Pessoa using different names. One invented writer was a doctor and classicist; a second was an unlettered genius; a third was a naval engineer and bisexual dandy who traveled the world. The fourth was "Fernando Pessoa," another invention, according to the author. By some accounts there were more than 72 creations and he didn't stop there as he did not only invent poets, there were short-story writers, translators, philosophers, an astrologer, a baron who committed suicide, and a hunchbacked, lovelorn woman by the name of Maria Jose. It is rather fascinating to note that every one of his characters is fully fledged, gifted with their own biographies, philosophies and their own literary styles.
Although Pessoa’s poetic work is studied still today in Portuguese schools his greatest literary achievement is without doubt O livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet) a "factless" autobiography, filled with observations, aphorisms, ruminations, dreams, moods and the deepest revelation of an artist's soul.
What brands this book — this fictional diary — transcendent is that it deals with the eternal pursuits: the meaning of life, of death; the existence of God, good and evil; the questions of love, reality, consciousness; and the disquiet of the soul. It quenches the thirsty mind and floods the arid heart.
I leave you with some quotes of this literary masterpiece in hopes it will prickle your curiosity.
“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”
“I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.”
“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Throughout his life Pessoa created several alter egos. Arguably, the four greatest poets of his period in the Portuguese language were all Pessoa using different names. One invented writer was a doctor and classicist; a second was an unlettered genius; a third was a naval engineer and bisexual dandy who traveled the world. The fourth was "Fernando Pessoa," another invention, according to the author. By some accounts there were more than 72 creations and he didn't stop there as he did not only invent poets, there were short-story writers, translators, philosophers, an astrologer, a baron who committed suicide, and a hunchbacked, lovelorn woman by the name of Maria Jose. It is rather fascinating to note that every one of his characters is fully fledged, gifted with their own biographies, philosophies and their own literary styles.
Although Pessoa’s poetic work is studied still today in Portuguese schools his greatest literary achievement is without doubt O livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet) a "factless" autobiography, filled with observations, aphorisms, ruminations, dreams, moods and the deepest revelation of an artist's soul.
What brands this book — this fictional diary — transcendent is that it deals with the eternal pursuits: the meaning of life, of death; the existence of God, good and evil; the questions of love, reality, consciousness; and the disquiet of the soul. It quenches the thirsty mind and floods the arid heart.
I leave you with some quotes of this literary masterpiece in hopes it will prickle your curiosity.
“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”
“I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.”
“My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Florbela Espanca
As the first woman on my list there is much to be said about Florbela Espanca, both on her life and on her literary work.
Her life was filled with torment caused by her gender, her deviation from provincial mores, and her lifelong sense of loss and abandonment. She was the illegitimate child of a housemaid and a nondescript father who didn’t acknowledge her as a daughter until nearly twenty years after her death. In a Catholic country at the turn of the Twentieth century, she married three times and divorced twice.
This poet has always had her fans. But for many years her poetry – deemed too emotive, with too many exclamation marks, too feminine! – was not given due recognition by the literature departments of Portuguese universities. Nowadays, however, her work is the object of critical study in Portugal and in other countries. The contemporary of Fernando Pessoa, she is somewhat his opposite. Instead of dividing herself into multiple poetic personalities that cast doubt on the validity of a coherent, unified self, she wrote an exalted poetry that relentlessly proclaimed "I am!"
To love
I want to love, love madly
To love just for love: here... beyond...
This one and that one, the other and everybody...
Love! Love! And love no one!
Recall? Forget? indifferent!...
Attach or detach ? Is it bad? Is it good?
Who says that you can love someone
During the entire life, is lying!
There is a spring in every life:
You need to sing it as it is blossoming
For if God gave us voice, it was for singing!
And if one day I am dust, ash and nothing
Let my night be a dawn,
So I can lose myself... and find myself...
Florbela Espanca, in 'Heath in Bloom'
José Saramago
Saramago was the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in 1998. He was mainly known for his novels and a man of the letters.
The son of rural laborers, Saramago grew up in great poverty in Lisbon. After holding a series of jobs as mechanic and metalworker, Saramago began working in a Lisbon publishing firm and eventually became a journalist and translator. It wasn’t until his 50’s that he began his literary career that would eventually establish his international reputation.
One of Saramago’s most important novels is Memorial do convents (“Memoirs of the Convent”). With 18th-century Portugal (during the Inquisition) as a backdrop, it chronicles the efforts of a handicapped war veteran and his lover to flee their situation by using a flying machine powered by human will. Saramago alternates this allegorical fantasy with grimly realistic descriptions of the construction of the Mafra Convent by thousands of laborers pressed into service by King John V.
Another book from this author that I find fascinating is Ensaio sobre a Cegueira ( Essay on Blindness) in this novel, Saramago, depicts and demonstrates how in an instant your right to see can be taken. However, in this novel, blindness is metaphorically related to seeing the truth beyond our own bias opinions. Saramago’s novel clearly illustrates themes that describe the importance of the awareness of others, in terms of feeling oppressed by fear, lack of trust, dehumanization, and segregation.
To finish I will leave some quotes from different books of this amazing writer:
“If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?”
― José Saramago, Blindness
“...in matters of feeling and of the heart, too much is always better than too little.”
― Jose Saramago, The Cave
“Old photographs are very deceiving, they give us the illusion that we are alive in them, and it's not true, the person we are looking at no longer exists, and if that person could see us, he or she would not recognise him or herself in us, 'Who's that looking at me so sadly,' he or she would say.”
― José Saramago, All the Names
The son of rural laborers, Saramago grew up in great poverty in Lisbon. After holding a series of jobs as mechanic and metalworker, Saramago began working in a Lisbon publishing firm and eventually became a journalist and translator. It wasn’t until his 50’s that he began his literary career that would eventually establish his international reputation.
One of Saramago’s most important novels is Memorial do convents (“Memoirs of the Convent”). With 18th-century Portugal (during the Inquisition) as a backdrop, it chronicles the efforts of a handicapped war veteran and his lover to flee their situation by using a flying machine powered by human will. Saramago alternates this allegorical fantasy with grimly realistic descriptions of the construction of the Mafra Convent by thousands of laborers pressed into service by King John V.
Another book from this author that I find fascinating is Ensaio sobre a Cegueira ( Essay on Blindness) in this novel, Saramago, depicts and demonstrates how in an instant your right to see can be taken. However, in this novel, blindness is metaphorically related to seeing the truth beyond our own bias opinions. Saramago’s novel clearly illustrates themes that describe the importance of the awareness of others, in terms of feeling oppressed by fear, lack of trust, dehumanization, and segregation.
To finish I will leave some quotes from different books of this amazing writer:
“If I'm sincere today, what does it matter if I regret it tomorrow?”
― José Saramago, Blindness
“...in matters of feeling and of the heart, too much is always better than too little.”
― Jose Saramago, The Cave
“Old photographs are very deceiving, they give us the illusion that we are alive in them, and it's not true, the person we are looking at no longer exists, and if that person could see us, he or she would not recognise him or herself in us, 'Who's that looking at me so sadly,' he or she would say.”
― José Saramago, All the Names