Three weeks in Portugal

I was in Portugal for three weeks in June.  Five hours a day for four days I was in this inlingua classroom in Porto, or one much like it:

The results:

B1 in Portuguese after about two years of fairly relaxed study – relaxed until those four days – which seems pretty good.  Maybe B2 in reading (standards defined here).  An enjoyable part of this visit to Portugal, my fourth, is that I could aggressively buy books:

And also:

And even moreso:

The Portuguese school curriculum includes an anthology of historic shipwrecks.

Still a while before I can, or I mean dare, read Saramago or Lispector in Portuguese, but I have plenty to read until then.

I strongly encourage anyone who does not overcome with anxiety at the idea of taking a language class to take an immersive class in the relevant place.  Cavilam in Vichy is pleasant, for example.  They give you a test and drop you right into a class.

I put a photo on Twitter every day, mostly adding to my collection of Pessoaiana.  Pessoa soap, Pessoa dish towels.  The Fernando Pessoa brand expands with Portuguese tourism, my puzzle being that so few people who did not go to a Portuguese-language school have any idea who he is.  Yet his image is everywhere, on everything.

A minor pleasure was this photo of a Pessoa board game, photographed in a museum gift shop, that went mildly viral, my only such experience.  At this moment, 481 likes, 37,000 views, whatever any of that means.  I wonder how many copies I sold.  The main use of Twitter is advertising, and turning  its users into marketers.  Still, it was amusing.

It was an extremely educational vacation.  Many thanks, as usual, to St. Orberose for his time and advice.  How sad that I cannot link to his blog anymore, but he is busy with his novel.

On learning Portuguese

Last October I began taking a Portuguese class.  Since January I have been reading literature, real literature, in Portuguese.  I thought I would write a note about the How and Why of that.

The Why:  My French is decent now.  My French reading.  I always have a book in French going, and I read whatever I want.  However slow my pace, that makes me an advanced reader in French.

So it was time for an experiment.  Could I use what I have learned about learning French to learn another language faster than I learned French?  Have I learned something about learning, was the question?

The How: It had to be a Romance language, so I could apply my French and for that matter my Spanish, which at points in my life was not so bad, although never quite at the level to read seriously.  The choice between Italian and Portuguese was arbitrary, but we were taking a little vacation to Portugal in December, so why not Portuguese.  We took a class – minha esposa is learning Portuguese, too – from a local Brazilian.  We visited Lisbon and the Azores and spoke a bit of limited but actual Portuguese, and bought books in Portuguese at Europe’s oldest continually operating bookstore.  Of course, what I really want is to be able to do is read Portuguese.  When will I ever need to speak it, really?

I also want greater understanding of the lyrics of great Brazilian songwriters like Gilberto Gil and Tom Zé.  Just this year, at the age of 85, Zé released a superb album that is actually about Brazilian Portuguese, Lingua Brasilieira, or Brazilian Tongue.  My resentment of Bob Dylan’s Nobel is that it was not shared with Gilberto Gil.  I have digressed.

My first book in Portuguese was the tiny As Fadas Verdes (The Green Fairies) by Matilde Rosa Araujo, a book of children’s poems, appropriate for third graders, which I know because it says so on the cover.  I advanced quickly, to Contos e Ledas de Portugal e do Mundo (Tales and Legends of Portugal and the World), “recommended for the 5th year,” and O Pássaro da Cabeça (The Bird of the Head) by Manuel António Pina, “required for the 5th year.”  The tales were a mix of the familiar (Grimm) and the new, which did not hurt; nor did the fact that Pina’s children’s poems were quite good.  I was just starting, and I was reading literature.

You can see the stamp on the covers: “Ler+, Plano Nacional de Leitura.”  These are assigned books, part of the “national reading plan” in a country that had one of the lowest literacy rates in Europe not so long ago (fifty years ago in not so long).  I want to emphasize – this is something I learned studying French – that if the goal of language study is to read literature, it is helpful to get a sense of the reading level of various books, and the easy way to do that is to see what is assigned in school.  Push yourself, but not to the point of frustration.

It will be a long time before I can read, in Portuguese, a novel by José Saramago or a book of stories by Miguel Rosa, but in the last eight months I have read stories by Eça de Queiroz, Alexandre Herculano, and Machado de Assis, and poems – entire books of poems – by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Eugénio de Andrade, Antero de Quental, and Fernando Pessoa, in the guise of Alberto Caeiro, the shepherd poet.  The anthology Primeiro Livro de Poesia (First Book of Poetry) assembled by Andresen, a book of poems from throughout the Portuguese world and  not really for children but suitable for children, was expansively useful:

I have never read anything else by writers from Timor or São Tomé and Príncipe.  Note the “Ler+” mark on the book, and the separate stamp celebrating Andresen’s centenary.

Since I am reading literature, and poems, the vocabulary I am learning is not always so useful.  Dawn, dusk, sword, fairy, angel, dew.  Lots of horsey words; lots of parts of castles, lots of seashore vocabulary.  A great surprise, since the idea was to read Portuguese, is that because of the recent appearance of Angolan immigrants in Portland I have, in real life, been speaking Portuguese: “Thank you for waiting,” Please have a seat,” and so on.  How helpful to have even a little bit of Portuguese.  What luck.  Italian would have been useless.

My “Currently Reading” box does not have anything in Portuguese now because I am not reading but studying grammar, which will last exactly as long as I can stand it.  Then back to the pleasures of Machado de Assis, or perhaps a 19th century poet.  A great disadvantage of studying Portuguese, compared to French, is that the availability of texts, whether electronic or physical, is much spottier in the United States.  And Portuguese has nothing like Georges Simenon, who wrote a huge number of engaging books with an easy reading level.  How many American readers kept up their college French with the help of Simenon?

What I am trying to say is that the experiment has been a success, and I recommend it to anyone who has the time and concentration.  Take a class, then start reading.

Not to write a book, but to create a cloud and have it bound - Raul Brandão’s The Poor - "in 2016 there are still great Modernist writers left to discover"

Raul Brandão’s The Poor (1906) is hard to describe, I find, but luckily Miguel Rosa, once of the invaluable St. Orberose book blog, has written a substantial review of the book at The Millions, coming at it from every direction.

The novel in one way is a description of the rough lives of the inhabitants of a Lisbon tenement, including a group of women who work at a brothel.  But it is as much a work of symbolism, the working through of an elaborate water metaphor that begins in the title of the first chapter (“The Deluge”) and courses through the rest of the book.  I do not mean that it is like Zola, who digs into the real world and describes it using metaphor, but rather that the metaphor is much of the substance of the book.  It is right on top of everything else, the characters and hints of a plot.

The book is as much a prose poem as a novel.  Or something like August Stringberg’s Dream Play.  I had to check the date a couple of times – knowing nothing else, I would have thought this was a French novel of the 1920s.

“Life,” concluded the Astronomer, “is only worthwhile spent dreaming, taking pleasure in a great work.”

“No, not dreaming!”

“I wanted to be a poet…” adds one.

“If I were a poet, this is what I’d want: not to write a book, but to create a cloud…  And have it bound.  Ah, the reader, the reader would be amazed.  Imagine the colors and the dream…!  A cloud, just think of it…” said Pita  (p. 98, all ellipses in original)

Time is fluid.  Narrators shift across and within chapters.  A prostitute’s miserable childhood at a Catholic orphanage is set beside a philosopher’s aphorisms about a metaphysical system based on the single tree he can see form this attic window.  Then the whole thing is constantly soaked in water.

The same rain falls tenaciously from the cloudy, nerve-racking sky.  Beneath the downpour, the dead city is getting soaked in the mud.  Underneath one of these rooftops, the same miseries and dreams are hidden.  This stone shelters hatred, crimes, scorn…  It’s dawn, and with the first light, the city looks unearthed, the houses resurge, emerged from darkness, leprous, askew, spent with hatred, with ambition, with rancor.  (85-6, ellipses mine)

The key character is this fellow, Brandão, fighting against whatever the novel usually does to say whatever it is he is trying to say.  “Brandão’s Modernism, however, was more instinctive than planned, an inner necessity rather than a deliberate intention to shack up with the zeitgeist,” Rosa writes.  He points to Brandão’s affinity with certain works of Dostoevsky, even if the Portuguese writer “gradually divested himself of what he saw as artificial in literature in order to allow himself to communicate without rhetorical distortions.”  Or as the philosopher in the novel thinks, “Old books reveal everything except life” (38).

Rosa gives the translator, Karen C. Sherwood Sotelino, the highest marks for her difficult task.  I remember a St. Orberose blog post about Brandão’s longer and more difficult masterpiece Húmus (1917).  I will bet that Sotelino is aiming at Húmus; I hope to read it someday.

The glassy glitter of the cheap metaphors I loved - how The Land at the End of the World is written and why

When I described Lobo Antunes’s The Land at the End of the World as a war novel yesterday, I was employing shorthand, just as when I called Cardoso Pires’s Ballad of Dogs’ Beach anti-mystery a mystery.  Both novels are about the thing they appear to be about, but also distance themselves from their subject by means of literary style.

The method of Lobo Antunes is particularly wild.  Not only does he create distance by putting the narrator in Lisbon in 1979 while describing Angola in 1971, an old tactic, but he smothers his stories, both the one about wartime boredom and horror and the other about the meaninglessness of the narrator’s post-war life, in what he calls “the glassy glitter of the cheap metaphors I loved” (68).

The fourth page of the novel, for example, about how the young chap used to live near the Lisbon zoo:

Ticket-takers have “blinking myopic owl eyes.”

When tigers roar wax hands “shudder in arthritic terror” and clay statuettes of priests rattle “as if they were struggling to digest one too many cookies.”

Camels’ “expression of profound boredom lacked only a managerial cigar to complete the look.”

“Seated on the toilet, where the final remnant of a river in its death agony uttered intestinal gurglings, you could hear the laments of the seals, whose excessive girth prevented them from swimming down the pipes and out through the taps, grunting like impatient math examiners.”

That last one shows the commitment Lobo Antunes has to his metaphors.  To the imaginative reader, the world of the novel now includes cigar-smoking camels and seals popping out of water faucets – seals who sound like math teachers!  Whatever grim grittiness I might expect from a war novel is hidden under all of this other stuff, of which there is a massively disorienting quantity – four out of five sentences.  Or nine out of ten.

… the bathroom is an aquarium of tiles… my arms wave spasmodically like the boneless farewells of octopuses…  my eyes resemble the sad, bulging eyes of the sea bream on the kitchen table…  I am dissolving [in the tub] as I imagine fish do when they die in rivers… (162)

The character is at this point sitting on his toilet looking at himself in the mirror.  The layered metaphor – the transformation of tentacles into “boneless farewells” – is again evidence that the narrator is really imagining the octopus, that the metaphor is not just thrown away.  He needs the second metaphor to properly describe the first metaphor, which he needs to tell us how his arms look in the mirror.

Why he needs any of it is another question.  The novel is the story of a terrible wartime experience, but it is also simultaneously the story of the invention and deployment of two hundred pages of original, often absurd, metaphors (“I feel like a horse with my snout in the nosebag of my vodka, munching the sour hay of my lemon slice,” 55), a dozen or two on every page.

It is unbelievable.  I can barely follow it.  Lobo Antunes slips from the “real” to the imagined and back so frequently and with such enthusiasm that I sometimes lost track of which plane I was on.  In fact I was on both, simultaneously, just as I was in Lisbon and Angola, and in the narrator’s thoughts and on his date.  The broken detective novel of Cardoso Pires circled around its central ideas without looking at them directly, creating a source of negative space for them, while the author of The Land at the End of the World seemingly spoke freely, while seeming to want to escape from his own story by creating an independent imaginary world.

Fascinating books, both of them.  A round of reading of post-Salazar Portuguese novels would be hugely rewarding, that is clear enough, although I suppose I will now retreat again to the jolly, comfortable 19th century.

You'll be amazed how fat I've gotten - The Land at the End of the World by António Lobo Antunes, a Portuguese war novel

Bad critical practice here.  I am going to write about a book I have not finished.  I want to follow a thematic connection with Ballad of Dogs’ Beach.

The narrator of The Land at the End of the World by António Lobo Antunes (1979) spent two years in Angola as an army doctor at the tail end of the Angolan War of Independence (1961-1975).  The novel, the narrator’s monologue, is a blend of his war experiences, which range from stultifying to nightmarish, and his life in Lisbon, also dull and horrific, although horrible in a different, self-inflicted way:

Life lived against the current does, however, have its disadvantages: my friends gradually distanced themselves from me, annoyed by what they considered to be an emotional frivolity bordering on dissolute vagrancy.  My family recoiled from my kisses as if from a bad case of contagious acne.  My professional colleagues gleefully put out the word that I was a dangerous incompetent…   (143)

I need those ellipses as Lobo Antunes is one of many Modernist long sentence fiends.  His primary method is the abuse of commas.  See pp.117-23 for a particularly effective and dramatic example, where multiple planes of action (surgery on the victim of a mine; a cheery letter to his wife) are hammered into what pretends to be a single sentence (the reader is free to pencil in ordinary punctuation) in the most expertly Faulknerian manner, best to just plunge in:

… one day I’ll take a photograph of myself and you’ll be amazed how fat I’ve gotten, two Coramine tablets and three Sympatol in the hope that I won’t lose the pulse as rapid and tenuous beneath my fingers as a bird’s heart, Slow march and at ease panted the second lieutenant on the Ericeira Road, a line of exhausted cadets on either side of the tarmac beneath the icy March rain… (123)

And all of this is supposedly being directly spoken to a woman in a bar the narrator is trying to pick up!  And he succeeds, and takes her home, and sleeps with her, and sees her out, and never stops talking.  The unremitting and allusive flow of talk, combined with the narrator’s loathing for Portugal, or perhaps for everything, often reminded me of Thomas Bernhard, but I have a hard time imagining one of Bernhard’s characters using his ranting as a tool of seduction.

I find it ridiculous here, too, but I actually interpret the river of memory and images and bile as something going on in the narrator’s head.  Fragments of the bar and bedroom leak into his thoughts; fragments of his thought leak back into his drunken conversation with the woman.  No need to be too literal.

Perhaps in the part of the novel that remains for me, all of this will be undone, or the narrator will tell us about the super-horrible atrocity he witnessed, which would destroy part of the effectiveness of the novel, so I doubt it.  The narrator’s personality is shattered by a series of ordinary atrocities and military absurdities.  He now numbs himself with booze and anonymous women.  The author, who the narrator closely resembles in biographical detail, also began writing novels.  The Land at the End of the World, his second, made his reputation.

Portugal, Europe's Best Kept Secret - a first try at Ballad of Dogs' Beach by José Cardoso Pires

The books at hand is Ballad of Dogs’ Beach: Dossier of a Crime by José Cardoso Pires, published in Portugal in 1982 to acclaim and prizes, translated by Mary Fitton and published in English in 1986 to somewhat more muted acclaim.  I vaguely remember this book getting some attention long ago.  It is a good one, but a tough nut.

The novel begins with a body – it is, in some sense, a murder mystery.  We are reading a police document, apparently, “BODY OF UNKNOWN MAN \ found, Praia do Mastro, 3^rd April, 1960,” followed by fifteen numbered descriptive details (“10 perforation of oesophagus”) and then a note on the surroundings: “Shreds of clothing at no great distance, torn by dogs.”

But then the document ends, followed by white space.  A distant third person narrator takes up the description, looking at the stray dogs and rubbish and an out-of-place travel poster “in English: PORTUGAL, EUROPE’S BEST-KEPT SECRET.”  Now there is an example of what we call foreshadowing.  The Portugal of Salazar’s rigid dictatorship is full of secrets, although many of them turn out to be badly-kept.

A detective novel needs a detective.  There he is, on page 5, Inspector Elias Santana, nicknamed Graveyard.  Pale, near-sighted, digestive troubles, and one weirdly long and polished pinky fingernail, which creeps out the main female suspect for the entire book.  He is who we spend the book with, when we are not leafing through the dossier:

‘Today’s the day we receive a kick in the pants from the corpse, my friend.  How’s that for a novelty?’

In the cage, listening, was a lizard.  Either listening or feigning sleep, you couldn’t tell.  He was a big lizard, the colour of sand, and Elias called him Reptile.  He lay as if permanently poised for flight, head motionless, neck extended, long black claws spread and gripping strongly.

‘And you, with your reptile thoughts,’ Elias told this one and only confidante, ‘you could not care less.’ (7)

The kick in the pants is that the corpse turns out to be an army officer who had been arrested for his part in an attempted military coup but had recently escaped.  The case is political, the secret police will take it over, and it is unclear why Graveyard should bother making an effort to solve the case.

He does solve it, though, almost immediately, because of the lucky capture of one of the conspirators, the victim’s stunning mistress.  Not that the reader learns the answer.  Every piece of information is delivered obliquely, in the wrong place, wrong in an ordinary detective novel, which, to my joy, Dogs’ Beach is not.   The mystery of this mystery is the motive of the detective.  His questions are his own.  He does not blow the lid off of a conspiracy or take down a corrupt general.  He explores his folder of documents, and the crime scene, and Lisbon (Dogs’ Beach is an outstanding Lisbon novel) looking for something only incidentally related to the case.

As a detective novel, the whole thing is likely a failure.  As a political novel, a novel about life under a stagnant and oppressive regime, it is a great success; I have never read a book quite like it.

One who doesn’t understand what’s said \ And likes to pretend he does - Alberto Caeiro never kept sheep

I have been thinking about doing some Portuguese reading.  A project, a Challenge, maybe.  I don’t know.   Regardless, I decided to start at the top of the heap, so to speak, with the most influential Portuguese poet of the 20th century, Alberto Caeiro (1889-1915), the paradoxical pastoral poet, the shepherd without sheep.  Or so he says in the poem that leads The Keeper of Sheep, the collection he wrote in 1914.*

I never kept sheep,
But it’s as if I’d done so.
My soul is like a shepherd.
It knows wind and sun
Walking hand in hand with the Seasons
Observing, and following along.
All of Nature’s unpeopled peacefulness
Comes to sit alongside me.

And I’ll stop, because the next set of images is in bad taste and might spoil the effect.  Caeiro was what we would now call a naïve artist, untrained and unconnected to Portugal’s literary culture, born in Lisbon but spending most of his life living with an aunt in the countryside.  Thus the free verse, the informal language, the plain vocabulary.  As if he were a character in a Theocritus pastoral poem.  As if.

Thinking is discomforting like walking in the rain
When the wind increases, making it look as if it’s raining harder.
I’ve no ambitions or desires.
My being a poet isn’t an ambition.
It’s my way of being alone.

Caeiro conflates writing and walking.  Like William Wordsworth, he composes while walking.

I write lines on the paper of my thoughts,
I feel the staff in my hands
And glimpse an outline of myself
On top of some low-lying hill,
Watching over my flock and seeing my ideas,
Or watching over my ideas and seeing my flock,
And smiling vaguely like one who doesn’t understand what’s said
And likes to pretend he does.

The simple poet seems not-so-simple now.  The simile suggests that he actually does understand what’s said but likes to pretend he doesn’t.   Is the whole thing a pose?  I do not remember Wordsworth advising his reader like Caeiro does, as the poem ends ("they" are the imagined readers):

And when reading my poems thinking
Of me as something quite natural –
An ancient tree, for instance,
In whose shade they thumped down
When they were children, tired after play,
Wiping the sweat off their hot foreheads
With the sleeve of their striped smocks.

An unusual depiction of reading, isn't it?  It's something I do after exhausting play.  The twenty-five year poet is an ancient tree; his poems are the shade.  A couple of lines before, the reader is in "Somebody's favorite chair."  Poetry puts us in two places at once.

Well, let’s spend some more time with Alberto Caeiro and see if we can get to the bottom of this.  He is a long ways from a perfect poet, sometimes a long ways from a good one, clumsy, facile, sneering.  Then there are those other times.

“I never kept sheep” now exists in several English translations.  I’m using the version by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown in The Keeper of Sheep, Sheep Meadow Press, 1986.

*  The publication history of The Keeper of Sheep is a little complicated.