Team Iberia's Portugal: History, Links, and Hovercrafts

The History of Poetry in Portugal:

As far back as the ninth century, Portugal has had a rich history of poetry written about a retreat from and eventual return to native land, including a special preoccupation with the natural elements of Portugal as well as mercantilism (see “Elisabeth Doesn’t Work Here Anymore”) which was often what drove natives from Portugal in the first place. This history culminated most completely in the 16th C. Portugese epic poem, “Os Lusíadas” by poet Luis de Camões. For a link to the poem in English translation, click here.

OR For a link to the poem scrolled like movie credits in Portugese while Evanescence plays in the background, click here.

While this music may seem an absurd background, from the 12th C. on, Portugal was heavily influenced by the troubadour culture, causing three main poetic modes to emerge: “cantigas de amigo or love songs addressed by a female to a male lover; cantigas de amor or love songs sung by a man; and cantigas de escárnio or songs of mockery, criticizing or making fun of somebody or something—a kind of cosmopolitan ambiance can be detected” (Marques 101). Lyric, as opposed to narrative, then, has always been the dominating poetic mode of Portugal.

However, by the 16th C., Portugese, as a language, began to be considered “rustic and vulgar,” fit more for the marketplace than the poetic stage, and until the 1700s when new Portugese universities began to revive poetry as a point of study, much in terms of Portugese “cultural individuality” was lost (Marques 323).

Skip ahead to the 20th century, and you find, in terms of a cultural individual VIP, or as Joel indicated, Portugal’s Elvis-Shakespeare, Fernando Pessoa. Bob Holman wraps up Portugal’s poet worship of Pessoa when he writes, “When you discover Fernando Pessoa, you don’t walk into a new room of poetry, but into another wing. Hop over to another planet. In solar system Po, he’s Planet X, orbiting just outside, shadowing everything going on in our busyness. More than any other human, he lived life solely in his poems, his life a shell for the literary movement that was himself” (“Fernando Pessoa, Poet as Poetry”). Indeed, Pessoa’s work appears not only under his own revered name, but under many heteronyms (pseudonyms with their own distinct biographies and writing styles). More complete information on Pessoa can be obtained in Richard Zenith’s article on the link Joel posted to Poetry International Web (direct address for Portugal: The links on the right will take you to three of the four poets anthologized in New European Poets, but Rosa Alice Branco gets the shaft.)

Portugal has struggled to maintain its poetry in the Portugese language. Young or old, at the time of the 1974 Carnation Revolution, in which the left-leaning Armed Forces Movement [AFM (or, in Portuguese, Movimento das Forças Armadas, or MFA!!!)] overthrew Estado Novo, which had been in power since the early 20th century, all the poets anthologized in the Prufer and Miller text certainly benefited from the freedom of speech afforded to them in Portugal after the coup. But the poets don’t use it in the heightened sense with which we equate many English-language poets.

Richard Zenith, one of the translators in the book, wrote a brief piece for Poetry International in which he contends there was a “national inferiority complex” in Portugal when he first moved there in the 1980s. There appears to be no such complex evidenced in the poems, but it seems as though they refuse to heel to the aesthetic Zenith discussed: “timelessness, a cultivated melancholy, an elevated diction, an aura.” Most specifically, the heightened, charged language largely doesn’t materialize in these poems. “These days poems written in Portugal – even when rhetorical, sentimental and lyrically rapturous – generally consist of a rather limited number of short verses written in straightforward language,” Zenith exhorts. Later, regarding Rui Coias, he writes, “[His poems] avoid the merely pretty and scorn the notion of poetry as a set of well-rounded verses, as proven by verses ending in words such as ‘the’ or ‘that’.”

Some useful phrases in Portuguese:

How are you? Como está? Como vai?

I love you. amo-te, eu te amo, eu gosto de você, eu amo você

My hovercraft is full of eels. Meu hovercraft está cheio de enguias.

For a breakdown of the Portuguese language, as well as to hear Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Portuguese, click here.