A reading list for Portugal - The shape of those books explained everything about contemporary Portugal.

A reading list for Portugal.  I remind Portuguese literary patriots of my easily correctable ignorance.

The Lusiads of Luis de Camões (or Camoens) is the Portuguese national poem, the foundation stone of Portuguese literature.  A world traveler himself, Camões turns Vasco de Gama’s voyage of discovery around Africa to India into a ten canto Virgilian epic.  The poem is highly learned, allusive, and complex, a monument to early modern scholarship, imagination, and imitatio.  It is amazing; it requires real effort.  I wonder how it is taught in Portugal.

Early modern Portuguese poetry is similarly interesting but similarly demanding.  Books with titles like 113 Galician Portuguese Troubador Poems perhaps hint at the problem.  A number of early modern chronicles have also made at least a partial entry into English.  The 15^th and 16^th century playwright Gil Vicente sounds good, and a surprising number of his plays have been translated, but I know little about him.

If Camões stands at the beginning of Portuguese literature, he also marks the end for almost three centuries.  A Canonical Gap appears, which I will blithely blame on the Counter-Reformation.

Portugal served as a battlefield during the Napoleonic Peninsular War, and was left under the dominance of English commerce and French ideas – the latter are most relevant for my purposes.  One might try the single Romantic Portuguese novel that I know  has been Englished, Almeida Garrett’s 1846 Travels in My Homeland, or one of the many Romantic and otherwise Frenchified poets about whom I am fruitlessly curious.  Please see Cesario Verde’s “The Feeling of the Westerner,” the consensus Greatest 19th Century Portuguese Poem.  Please translate a volume of his poems for me.

No, the Portuguese literature of the 19th century is available in English in scraps, with one extraordinary exception, the novels of José Maria Eça de Queirós (1845-1900). The stout-hearted Margaret Jull Costa has been pulling his entire shelf of books into English – a new one is coming out in November (this time by Gregory Rabassa)!  Having read a long one and a short one, I can see why.  Eça de Queirós published five novels:

The Crime of Father Amaro (1875)
Cousin Basilio (1878)
The Mandarin (1880 – this is the short one, a sharp Voltaire-like satirical novella)
The Relic (1887, and please see Dwight)
The Maias (1888, please see Dwight again)

The confidence and imaginativeness completeness of The Maias astounded me.  The novel is often described as Flaubert-like, which is true if I think of A Sentimental Education rather than Madame Bovary.  Eça de Queirós called himself a Naturalist, like Zola, but I have yet to see how that label is anything but a nuisance.  I will write about The Maias next week, I think.  It is a poor Challenge book because it is enormous.  I am excited about reading the remaining three, more ordinarily thick novels.

The oddest thing about  Eça de Queirós is that a new shelf of books began to appear with his death.  He had stopped publishing, but not writing: The Illustrious House of Ramires, The Correspondence of Fradique Mendes (this is the one coming in November), The City and the Mountains, The Yellow Sofa, The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers.  These have all been translated – there may be more.  I know one thing* about them – they are significantly shorter than the novels published during the author’s lifetime, so easy to take a chance on.

Finally, Fernando Pessoa, the primary reason I wanted to run the Portuguese Challenge.  The quantity and variety of Pessoa’s work that has been translated into English is daunting.  The pseudo-novel The Book of Disquiet (1980, written much earlier) has had at least four translations.  Numerous collections of the poems and miscellaneous prose are extant.  I want to explore.

I actually spent four days secretly writing about Pessoa’s poems earlier this year.  The hidden challenge of that week was to avoid the P-word, to discuss Alberto Caeiro ("the most influential Portuguese poet of the 20th century," I called him) and Ricardo Reis and Pessoa’s other heteronyms as if they were real authors.  Pessoa’s solution to all sorts of technical and aesthetic problems was to simply invent new poets, sometimes with detailed biographies and personalities, to write different kinds of poems.  Pessoa himself was just one poet in the stable.  These poets would interpret and criticize each other – all except Caeiro, who unfortunately died young, soon after writing the poems in The Keeper of Sheep.

See, I have fallen right back into the game.  However this all worked on the page, it may be the most original literary performance of the 20th century.  I hope to spend a lot of time with Pessoa and his imaginary peers.

As tempting as Pessoa’s poems are, I will remind readers of poetry that I will be reading later poets as well.

Tomorrow, Brazil.

Nymeth of Things Mean a Lot is Portuguese and has written her own list.

My subtitle is from the last chapter of The Maias, except I substituted "books" for "boots."

* Update: Sort of. Mostly. In a manner of speaking. See comments.