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.
