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.

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen: Our attention to the world is the observance they claim, or Writing insists on solitudes and deserts

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen is a poet of the sea, but which sea?  She is a dedicated Hellenist, and a characteristic poetic effect is a blurring of the difference between Portugal’s ocean and Greece’s Mediterranean.  When Sophia, a dedicated Catholic, discovers the gods in the landscape, which gods does she mean?

She shares her interest in Greece and its gods with an earlier Portuguese poet, an imaginary one, the sad Epicurean Ricardo Reis.  Reis insisted that he was a true pagan, and that his encounter with the shepherd poet Alberto Caeiro showed him how to turn his beliefs into poetry.  Reis perhaps taught Sophia something similar:

Homage to Ricardo Reis III

The gods are absent yet they preside.
    We inhabit this
    Ambiguous transparency.

Their thought emerges when everything
    Suddenly becomes
    Solemnly exact.

Their gaze guides ours:
    Our attention to the world
    Is the observance they claim.

I cannot tell if Sophia is speaking to Reis or as Reis.  The poem is meaningful either way; the poets share their purpose, even if the absent gods are less metaphorical for Reis than for Sophia.

Our world is transparent yet ambiguous - an obscure enough adjective.  The transparent becomes visible, the ambiguous fixed, when we direct attention to the things of the world, to their exactness.  Or the confused invisibility then becomes “exact” as the result of our attention.  “Lord, free us from the dangerous game of transparency” she writes in “On Transparency.”  Sophia is positing a corollary to Heisenberg’s much-abused Uncertainty Principle: we can observe either the position or momentum of a particle with precision, but not both; but without “attention to the world” we know nothing at all.  The poet is the operator of the electron microscope.  Like Coral the cat, the poet asks each thing its name.

Lest Sophia de Mello Breyner seem too mystical,  the editor of the Marine Rose collection sets beside the pair (only two, unfortunately) of Homage to Ricardo Reis poems an alternative description of the poet’s vocation.  What can Sophia share with Lord Byron, a writer of satire and long narrative poems about pirates and lady-killers?  The title is the first clue:

Writing

In Palazzo Mocenigo where he had lived alone
Lord Byron used every grand room
To watch solitude mirror by mirror
And the beauty of doors no one passed through

He heard the marine murmurs of silence
The lost echoes of steps in far corridors
He loved the smooth shine on polished floors
Shadows unrolling under high ceilings
And though he sat in just one chair
Was glad to see the other chairs were empty

The empty chairs imply full ones, and in fact Byron’s life in Venice at this time was manically social:

By the end of the year 1818, in which he had begun his greatest poem, Don Juan, he was to be discovered morosely climbing the balcony of an 18-year-old Italian heiress at midnight.  He afterwards told Medwin that he was indifferent to the outcome of the affair, and did not care whether the police officer had come to have him shot or married. (Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, 420)

Sophia is interested in the first part of that passage, the writing, amidst chaos, of the great poem, as her poem concludes:

Of course no one needs so much space to live
But writing insists on solitudes and deserts
Things to look at as if seeing something else

We can imagine him seated at his table
Imagine the full long throat
The open white shirt
The white paper the spidery writing
And the light of a candle – as in certain paintings –
Focussing all attention

Byron, too, if guided by the gaze of the gods and giving them the observance they claim.  He is a poet.

Translations are again from Ruth Fairlight's Marine Rose.

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen: Fantastic sea gods stroll at the edge of the world, or She asked each thing its name

Three collections of Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen exist in English, I think, all minuscule.  Their titles help place the poet:  Log Book; Shores, Horizons, Voyages; and Marine Rose.  I have read that last one (tr. Ruth Fairlight, Black Swan Books, 1988).  Portuguese literature from its roots is a literature of the sea; Sophia* is a poet of the sea.

Beach

The pines moan when the wind passes
The sun beats on the earth and the stones burn.

Fantastic sea gods stroll at the edge of the world
Crusted with salt and brilliant as fishes.

Sudden wild birds hurled
Against the light into the sky like stones
Mount and die vertically
Their bodies taken by space.

The waves butt as if to smash the light
Their brows ornate with columns.

And an ancient nostalgia of being a mast
Sways in the pines.

Just taken as a bundle of imagery I find a lot to like here.  The first two lines may be ordinary scene-setting, but the salt-crusted sea gods are excellent.  Are they purely imaginary, or is Sophia transforming Speedo-clad bathers into deities?  The lines about the birds are all about motion, about moving faster than the eye.  The waves I do not quite see – are the columns the rays of the sun (the light that is being smashed)?  The pines return with added weight, the brilliantly paradoxical addition of the fate they might have had back in the time of the sea gods, who are as likely to be Portuguese explorers as Neptune and his court.

Marine Rose ends with an essay by Kenneth Krabbenhoft that makes as much use of Heidegger as I can take.  Such philosophical firepower is hardly necessary, but the connection is not fanciful.  Besides a common interest in ancient Greece, Sophia is, like Andrade, a poet of the moment, of something like Heidegger’s Being (Dasein).  How that helps me more than this, I do not understand:

In the Poem

To bring the picture the wall the wind
The flower the glass the shine on wood
And the cold chaste severe world of water
To the clean severe world of the poem

To save from death decay and ruin
The actual moment of vision and surprise
And keep in the real world
The real gesture of a hand touching the table.

In a short talk included in Marine Rose, Sophia says “For me, poetry has always been the pursuit of what is real.”  The creation of the poem, an act of imagination, is what “keeps” the gesture of the hand “real.”  Or so the poet argues.  Prove her wrong!

One last tiny sea poem:

Coral

He went and came
And asked each thing
Its name.

No, that’s a trick.  It’s not a sea poem at all – Coral, a note tells me, is a cat.

The Poetry International site has a number of Richard Zenith’s translations of Sophia, plus a sweet personal essay about her which inventories the art in her apartment.  And do not miss St. Orberose, where one can enjoy Sophia alongside three other tantalizing contemporary female poets.  Marvel at the way Adília Lopes can write a good poem which includes the line "I need a hug."  I would not have thought it possible.  The poem is called "I don't like books."

*  How nice to discover that the poet with the multi-part name is typically just called Sophia.