DOCSLIB.ORG

Portuguese Poetry Russian Fiction Technology Mountaineering

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Portuguese Poetry Russian Fiction Technology Mountaineering 34 IN BRIEF unflinchingly individualistic conception of art. Yet it is probably what results from the third of these reasons – the author’s unique style, which defies classification – that gives Sokolov his enduring appeal, as the arrival of this new translation by Alexander Boguslaw- ski attests. Written in a haunting, lyric, stream- of-consciousness mode, A School for Fools delves into the memories of its two narrators (a student at the titular “special school”, and his double, the incarnation of his split personal- ity), in a quest to probe the nature of personal and artistic freedom, and the transcendent Mountaineering power of language. By turns philosophical, prophetic, tragic Felice Benuzzi and allegorical, Sokolov’s polyphonic novel NO PICNIC ON MOUNT KENYA was so antithetical to the Soviet doctrine of 320pp. MacLehose Press. £14.99. Socialist Realism that it was initially imposs- 978 0 85705 376 3 ible to publish. First circulated in samizdat in the USSR, Sokolov took the novel with him he story of an ascent in 1943 of Mount when he emigrated in 1975, and published it TKenya by three escaped Italian prisoners with Ardis in an English translation by Carl was first published in Italian in 1948 and in Proffer a year later. As Boguslawski points out English four years later. A minor classic of in his introduction to this new edition, the twentieth-century mountaineering literature, it quick turn-around meant that Proffer’s has been reissued by the MacLehose Press in “worthy and readable” translation “was pro- this handsomely illustrated edition, with Felice duced rapidly and contained some serious mis- Benuzzi’s own beautifully executed sketches interpretations and mistakes”. To say that supplemented by photos of Mount Kenya and Sokolov’s new translator has merely corrected diagrams of the party’s route to the summit. these, however, would be a vast understate- Benuzzi, captured in 1941 while working ment. Boguslawski’s assiduous devotion to for the Italian diplomatic service in Abyssinia, the text has meant that not only are Sokolov’s opens with an impressionistic account of the many rhythmic and rhymed passages beauti- lassitude and depression of life in his Kenyan fully restored, but also many of the subtler prison camp. Glimpsing Africa’s second- intertexual allusions missed by Proffer are highest mountain (5,199 metres) through a revealed to the English reader for the first time. break in the clouds, he and his two companions This handsome new edition is marred only came up with the outrageous notion of escap- by the occasional heavy-handed editorial note ing to climb the “massive blue-black tooth of tory” to Benuzzi and his companions. “For to confirm the epithet. Both Andresen, with and a few minor Russianisms that have crept sheer rock, inlaid with azure glaciers”. After us”, he writes, “it had just been created.” her light and luminous touch, where each word into the text – “comrades” instead of “class- forging makeshift ice axes from stolen ham- A LAN M CN EE is carefully placed in a poem, and Helder, with mates” (tovarishchi), “how many years we’ve mers, crampons from the running boards and his torrential alchemic verses teeming with been sitting in the special school” instead of mudguards of a scrapped car, and horribly Portuguese Poetry images, seem to be Pessoa’s heirs. “how many years we’ve spent” (prosideli). inadequate sisal ropes from the material used Anthologies have their limitations, a point Such minor points, however, cannot detract to fasten nets to bunk beds, they managed to Richard Zenith, editor Zenith knows well. His exclusions are readily from the overall power of the translation. slip out of the camp, only to endure consider- 28 PORTUGUESE POETS justified either by the fact that a given figure One can only hope to see more of Sokolov in able hardship and danger even before their real A bilingual edition hasn’t been translated satisfyingly enough (the Boguslawski’s stylish translation. mountaineering challenge began. On the face Translated by Richard Zenith and case for Vitorino Nemésio), or by his own per- B RYAN K ARETNYK of it, their mission to climb a technically Alexis Levitin sonal taste. We can naturally grant him that, demanding summit at an altitude higher than 320pp. Dedalus. Paperback, £12.50 (€14.99). especially as 28 Portuguese Poets isn’t just Technology Mont Blanc appears impossible, if not down- 978 1 9102510 0 3 well conceived, but also at times surprising in right suicidal, being made on inadequate the best of ways – for example, by the inclusion Paul Levinson rations by escapees whose bodies were already ichard Zenith, the editor and co-translator of Florbela Espanca, Ardília Lopes and Daniel MCLUHAN IN AN AGE OF suffering from the privations of POW life. Yet Rwith Alexis Levitin of 28 Portuguese Faria. Inevitably, some will disagree about SOCIAL MEDIA after eight months of secret preparation and Poets, is well equipped for his task, having a number of choices in particular. The trans- 16pp. Connected Editions (Kindle Edition). two weeks of trekking and climbing, they suc- already translated most of the figures repre- lations, on the other hand, largely work well £1.99. ceeded in reaching the 4,985 metres peak of sented in this anthology. He is especially in English, even though they are sometimes Lenana – not the mountain’s highest point, but knowledgeable about Fernando Pessoa. Not- uneven. What we can all agree on and salute is ocial media – one of the defining phenom- an extraordinary achievement under the cir- ing the variety of Pessoa’s many faces, Zenith the attentive work of Zenith, introducing to a Sena of our digital age – transmogrifies cumstances. Exhausted and desperately short has boldly and rightly chosen to separate the wider English-reading audience a golden continually, challenging anyone seeking to of food after returning from the summit, they three main heteronyms – Alberto Caeiro, century of poetry in Portuguese. understand how our use of it shapes our world. trekked back to the camp and actually man- Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos – adopted R ICARDO M ARQUES As the media academic Paul Levinson puts it, aged to slip inside before being detected. by Pessoa himself, making these the first Facebook and the ever-growing list of rivals, Benuzzi, who died in 1988 after a long names in the volume. Russian Fiction along with the smart devices that constantly career in the diplomatic service, has a light, Pessoa, “a hard act to follow”, in Zenith’s connect us to them, are “evolving so rapidly as engaging prose style that blends a compelling words, seems to shadow most of the featured Sasha Sokolov to make any printed essay . about them likely narrative and moments of comedy with a keen poets, even though the selection reflects the A SCHOOL FOR FOOLS obsolete the day it was published”. In this eye for Kenya’s flora, fauna and landscape, a many directions in which Portuguese poetry Translated by Alexander Boguslawski arresting, if occasionally truncated, essay prisoner’s sensuous appreciation of food and has evolved since Pessoa’s death in 1935. A 288pp. NYRB. Paperback, £8.99 (US $14.95). Levinson sidesteps the problem by applying drink, and a sense of awe and wonder that prime illustration of this flowering is Sophia 978 1 59017 846 1 “poetic, controversial” concepts forged by the evidently stayed with him years after the de Mello Breyner Andresen, as well as many cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan in the ascent. The escapade, he writes, was “a reac- poets of her generation present here, including n enchanting, tragic, and touching last century to our online lives. Although tion against the sluggish life in a POW camp, Eugénio de Andrade, Jorge de Sena and Mário Abook” – such was Vladimir Nabokov’s McLuhan died in 1980 just before the personal an act of will amidst all that inertia”. His Cesariny. A different kind of idiom was devel- opinion of Sasha Sokolov’s debut novel A computer revolution, his ideas “have even concluding chapter outlines the story of previ- oped by Herberto Helder, the “most influential School for Fools. It isn’t difficult to see why greater applicability to the media of today, ous ascents of Mount Kenya – a history almost Portuguese poet after Pessoa”, according to Nabokov’s appraisal was so uncharacteristi- which turns all of us into producers . ”. unknown to the party when they hatched their Zenith. The attention paid to Helder’s work in cally favourable: the entomological details, Exemplifying this point, Levinson has pub- plans. The mountain was thus “virgin terri- the poetry world after his death last year seems the fascination with time’s fabric, the lished this essay himself via Amazon, as a new TLS MARCH 4 2016 IN BRIEF 35 chapter in his 1999 book Digital McLuhan, Ethel Carnie (1886–1962). (Wilson has pro- school, the example of which is still cited Emer O’Toole interviews the activist and which used McLuhan’s theories such as the duced an edition of Carnie’s 1925 novel, This today. Pyke also dispatched correspondents theatre director Grace Dyas about her trilogy global village to illuminate the emerging inter- Slavery; I provided the introduction to the into Nazi Germany – and, though a British Jew of productions on the history of heroin in Ire- net. Here he focuses on recent developments; centenary edition of Carnie’s first novel, the – entered the belly of the beast himself dis- land. So too Michele Horrigan, an artist and for example, the selfie. By using McLuhan’s aptly titled Miss Nobody, also edited by Wil- guised as the leader of an English golf team to curator from rural Limerick, discusses intui- tetrad – four questions that form “a way of son.) Writing for the Woman Worker in 1909, conduct Gallup-style polls designed to deter- tive crafting with a local walking-stick maker.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • 3 World Literature in a Poem the Case of Herberto Helder1
    3 World Literature in a Poem The Case of Herberto Helder1 Helena C. Buescu It is arguable that, if world literature is also a mode of reading, as David Damrosch states, there may be special cases in which the choice of works to be read and/or to be translated has to be accounted for as a poetic gesture towards a planetary literary awareness. In such instances, the sense of literary estrangement is part of the reading process, and the project of its non- domestication (perhaps a stronger way to draw on Lawrence Venuti’s notion of foreignization) is very much at the centre of the hermeneutical process. In what follows I will be dealing with an interesting case of translation (or some- thing akin to it), from the point of view of a poet. It is not only that it is a poet who translates poems by others. It is also, as we shall see, that he translates them as a poet, that is, as part of his own poetic stance. What is (and what isn’t) a literary translation? That is the question that lies at the heart of this endeavour. As we shall see, it is also a case in which, through translation, cultural diversity and provenance are transformed into a clearly distinguished work: translating is a mode of reading, but it is also a mode of shifting socio- logical and aesthetic functions and procedures. This is why we may be able to say that world literature is not solely a mode of reading, but a mode that deals with the constant invention of reading—by reshaping the centre and the peripheries of literary systems, and by thus proposing ever-changing forms of actually reading texts that seemed to have been already read.
    [Show full text]
  • Jennings on the Trail of Pessoa Or Dimensions of Poetical Music
    Jennings on the Trail of Pessoa or dimensions of poetical music Pedro Marques* Keywords Fernando Pessoa, Hubert Jennings, Roy Campbell, Peter Rickart, translation, versification, musicality, The thing that hurts and wrings, What grieves me is not, What saddens me is not. Abstract Here we present two unpublished essays by Hubert Jennings about the challenges of translating the poetry of Fernando Pessoa: the first one of them, brief and fragmentary, is analyzed in the introduction; the second, longer and also covering issues besides translation, is presented in the postscript. Having as a starting point the Pessoan poem “O que me doe” and three translations compared by Hubert Jennings, this presentation examines some aspects of poetic musicality in the Portuguese language: verse measurement, stress dynamics, rhymes, anaphors, and parallelisms. The introduction also discusses how much the English versions of the poem, which are presented by Jennings, recreate (or not) the musical-poetic dimensions of the original text. Palavras-chave Fernando Pessoa, Hubert Jennings, Roy Campbell, Peter Rickart, tradução, versificação, musicalidade, O que me doe, O que me dói. Resumo Reproduzem-se aqui dois ensaios inéditos de Hubert Jennings sobre os desafios de se traduzir a poesia de Fernando Pessoa: o primeiro deles, breve e fragmentário, é analisado numa introdução; o segundo, mais longo e versando também sobre questões alheias à tradução, é apresentado em postscriptum. A partir do poema pessoano “O que me dói” e de três traduções comparadas por Hubert Jennings, esta apresentação enfoca alguns aspectos da música poética em língua portuguesa: medida do verso, dinâmica dos acentos, rimas, anáforas e paralelismos.
    [Show full text]
  • Browl\ CO-DIRECTORESIEDITORS Onesimo Teot6nio Almeida, Brown University George Monteiro, Brown University
    ,. GAVEA­ -BROWl\ CO-DIRECTORESIEDITORS Onesimo Teot6nio Almeida, Brown University George Monteiro, Brown University EDITOR EXECUTIVOIMANAGING EDITOR Alice R. Clemente, Brown University CONSELHO CONSULTIVOIADVISORY BOARD Francisco Cota Fagundes, Univ. Mass., Amherst Manuel da Costa Fontes, Kent State University Jose Martins Garcia, Universidade dos Afores Gerald Moser, Penn. State University Mario J. B. Raposo, Universidade de Lisboa Leonor Simas-Almeida, Brown University Nelson H. Vieira, Brown University Frederick Williams, Univ. Callf., Santa Barbara Gdvea-Brown is published annually by Gavea-Brown Publications, sponsored by the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Brown University. Manuscripts on Portuguese-American letters and/or studies are welcome, as well as original creative writing. All submissions should be accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope to: Editor, Gdvea-Brown Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Box 0, Brown University Providence, RI. 02912 Cover by Rogerio Silva ~ GAVEA-BROWl' Revista Bilingue de Letras e Estudos Luso-Americanos A Bilingual Journal ofPortuguese-American Letters and Studies VoIs. XVII-XVIII Jan.1996-Dec.1997 SUMARIo/CONTENTS ArtigoslEssays THE MAINSTREAMING OF PORTUGUESE CULTURE: A SYMPOSIUM Persons, Poems, and Other Things Portuguese in American Literature ........................................................ 03 George Monteiro Cinematic Portrayals of Portuguese- Americans ....................................................................... 25 Geoffrey L. Gomes
    [Show full text]
  • Cláudio Manuel Da Costa's Urban Pastorals, Family Life, and The
    An Arcadian Poet in a Baroque City: Cláudio Manuel da Costa’s Urban Pastorals, Family Life, and the Appearance of Race Bruno Carvalho Princeton University Abstract: With focus on Cláudio Manuel da Costa and his life in eighteenth-century Minas Gerais, this article places into dialogue seemingly contradictory notions of baroque urbanism, art, and poetics. It explores how Cláudio’s work engages baroque and Arcadian tropes, re-writing pastoral conventions with awareness of the production of nature through artifice. Some of his poems emerge as narratives of wilderness subsumed by colonial forces, others offer clues about his relationship with Francisca Arcângela de Souza, a woman of African descent (archival findings about her are presented here for the first time). Cláudio Manuel da Costa, a writer and public figure of many masks, helps us to make sense of tensions, changes, and apparent paradoxes of the period. Keywords: Cláudio Manuel da Costa, Ouro Preto, Arcadismo, baroque, race. A term that often evokes exuberance, fluidity, and excess, the baroque has itself been a dynamic, malleable, unstable concept. Its different meanings multi- ply across different contexts. Eighteenth-century Ouro Preto, the city of this essay’s title, emerged during the twentieth century as a type of “cidade-síntese,” “cidade-documento” of the Brazilian baroque (Ávila, Iniciação 27). To the poet, lawyer and businessman of this essay’s title, the term would likely not have meant much. Widely regarded as one of the finest sonneteers of the Portuguese 12 (2014):
    [Show full text]
  • Fernando Pessoa, Poet, Publisher, and Translator
    FERNANDO PESSOA, POET, PUBLISHER, AND TRANSLATOR R. W. HOWES FERNANDO PESSOA is widely considered to be the greatest Portuguese poet of the twentieth century and a major writer of European stature. His enigmatic personality and the potent combination of poetic genius and metaphysics in his verse have fascinated a wide variety of readers both in Portugal and abroad. His invention of heteronyms, or alter egos, poets of his own creation who conducted a poetic 'drama in people', has found a response in the anxieties of the twentieth century, while the innovations in his poetic style, partly influenced by his fluency in English, have revolutionized modern Portuguese poetry. Pessoa published a relatively small proportion of his work during his lifetime, much of it in ephemeral periodical publications. He left behind a trunk full of manuscript poems and fragments of verse into which successive researchers have delved to produce a seemingly inexhaustible supply of'unpublished' writings. This has tended to divert attention from a detailed study of the works which he did publish while alive. ^ The British Library is fortunate to possess copies of all five of the volumes of Fernando Pessoa's verse which were published in his lifetime as well as some of the periodicals in which he published contributions, together with various other publications associated with him. These help to illuminate not only the bibliographical history of Pessoa as a poet but also his activities as a publisher and translator. They provide too an interesting illustration of the complex way in which a large research library's collections are built up, even where the works of a relatively modern author are concerned.
    [Show full text]
  • Twenty-‐‑Five Unpublished English Poems by Fernando Pessoa
    Bridging Archives: Twenty-Five Unpublished English Poems by Fernando Pessoa Patricio Ferrari* Keywords Fernando Pessoa, unpublished English poems, Hubert Jennings, archives. Abstract Critical transcription preceded by a brief presentation of twenty-five unpublished English poems by Fernando Pessoa. The introductory text offers a historical background in regard to Hubert Jennings’s pioneer work with Pessoa’s English poems. Palavras-chave Fernando Pessoa, poemas ingleses inéditos, Hubert Jennings, arquivos. Resumo Transcrição crítica, precedida de uma breve apresentação, de vinte e cinco poemas ingleses inéditos de Fernando Pessoa. O texto introdutório oferece uma contextualização histórica do trabalho pioneiro de Hubert Jennings junto aos poemas ingleses de Pessoa. * University of Lisbon, Center for Comparative Studies. Post-doctoral Research Fellowship funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (the Portuguese national funding agency for science, research and technology). I would like to express my appreciation to Professors George Monteiro, Helena Buescu, and Jerónimo Pizarro for their guidance and constant support. I am particularly grateful to Martin J. Duffell for insightful suggestions regarding metrics and for the valuable assistance given by Carlos Pittella-Leite, Jerónimo Pizarro, Susan Margaret Brown, José Barreto, and Pauly Ellen Bothe in the latter stage of the transcription process of some of the poems presented in this dossier, and to Cary Stough for his precious collaboration in the final transcription stage of
    [Show full text]
  • Classical Mythology and Portuguese Renaissance Poetry
    Classical Mythology and Portuguese Renaissance Poetry Professor Thomas F. Earle Oxford – St. Peter’s College An enthusiasm for classical mythology is one of the most obvious markers of Renaissance poetry. However, in an intensely Catholic country like Portugal, the myths could seem extremely problematic, especially after the Council of Trent. In this brief paper I will discuss, not the myths themselves, but the various strategies by which they could be introduced into a poem. Different degrees of engagement with myth thus become visible. One possible strategy, much employed in the Middle Ages, was allegory, whereby a classical story could illustrate some Christian moral or religious truth. But, during the Renaissance, other possibilities became available. A story could be presented as a beautiful image, to be contemplated from afar or, at the other extreme, as a series of events in which the poet himself had a role to play. When that happens, in the first-person mythological narratives to be discussed shortly, the imaginative range of poetry seems to be greatly expanded. Yet that in itself does not constitute an ideological challenge to the dominant Catholicism of the age. The pioneer of the Portuguese literary Renaissance, Sá de Miranda, was, amongst many other things also the author of the first long mythological narratives of Portuguese literature, the interpolated tales included in the eclogues, Fábula do Mondego and Encantamento. The Fábula do Mondego was probably written first, around 1538.1 The centrepiece of the eclogue is the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, told in a way which recalls the versions of Virgil, Ovid, and Poliziano.
    [Show full text]
  • The New Portuguese Poetry Sociologically Considered Excerpt
    Pt. Ed. - Martins The New Portuguese Poetry Sociologically Considered En. Ed. - Balden Fernando Pessoa I [7] To the literary movement representative and peculiar of the nascent portuguese generation, there has been made, by public opinion, the favor of not being comprehended. And this movement, that, above all in poetry, with growing neatness, accuses its representative individuality, has not been comprehended, because, a part of the public, which is older than thirty years of age, is inadaptilizable, by being already old, to this movement, and rumor, before it, of innate uncomprehending ones; because another part, either for circumstances of a baccalaureate educative species, or for carelessness in the spiritual maintenance of the sentiment of race, or yet for sentiments of devious and sterile enthusiasm generated by absorption in the intense and petty life of our politics, is placed in a state of pseudo-soul, describable as being of uncomprehending ones of occasion; and because the other, remainder, belonging to which are the new poets and literary ones and the ones that accompany them in the obscure racial sentiment that guides them, they do not yet take conscientiousness of itself as what it really is, whereas the actual poetic movement is yet an embryo as to its tendencies, nebulous as to its ideas that it may have of itself or of other things. It urges that — setting it apart from mysticisms of thought and of expression, useful only for awakening by the ridiculous, that its obscurity for the profane {ones/things} causes, the happy interest of the social enemy — with reasonings and hawkish analyses one penetrates into the comprehension of the actual portuguese poetic movement, one asks to the national soul, in its {reflected/ mirrored/polished/shining,} what it intends and to what it tends, and whether it may put in terms of logical comprehensibility the value and the signification, in presence of sociology, of this literary and artistic movement.
    [Show full text]
  • Portuguese Literature and the Baroque: the Complex Labyrinth of Creation and Aesthetic Metamorphosis
    28th BARCELONA International Conference on Society, Humanities & Social Sciences (BSHSS-20) Feb. 11-13 2020 Barcelona (Spain) Portuguese Literature and the Baroque: the Complex Labyrinth of Creation and Aesthetic Metamorphosis L. Cardoso five volumes of Fénix renascida (1716–28; Abstract—The Baroque European Mouvement influenced “Phoenix Reborn”), which anthologizes the Europe from the end of the Neo.Classicism. This period represents poetry of the preceding century and shows the a major change in Portuguese literature, as well as in Europe, due pervasiveness of Gongorism (gongorismo; see to the new approach to life, religion and philosophy that operated also culteranismo) in Portuguese poetry. This a profound metamorphosis in aesthetics and created a complex taste for the construction of literary enigmas, labyrinth of influences, paradox and innovation that brought to literature a set of domains that were forgotten during puzzles, labyrinths, and visual designs, all Neo-Classicism. presented in an esoteric, Latinate style, led to cabalistic and occult exercises. Satire was used Keywords— Portuguese Literature, Baroque, Baroque by those who wished to attack the dominant characteristics. formalist style; the anonymous Arte de furtar (1652; “Art of Stealing”) unmasks social I. INTRODUCTION deviance in the time of John (João) IV, who was restored as king of a newly independent Portugal After a period of equilibrium, aesthetic rules, Latin and greek in 1640. Yet Spanish influence continued after models, background for a common theoretical framework, a Portugal regained its independence: use of common ideology of creation, a new meaning for the role of the Spanish was common, and the Portuguese court artist and a new horizon of faith in mankind’s ability for preferred Italian opera, French plays, and building a new society with strong values, all this comes to an Spanish operettas, to the detriment of local drama end when social and politic clashes start all over Europe, mixed and acting.
    [Show full text]
  • Galician Portuguese Medieval Poetry and the Iberian Interliterary System
    CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 13 (2011) Issue 5 Article 9 Galician Portuguese Medieval Poetry and the Iberian Interliterary System Santiago Gutiérrez García University of Santiago de Compostela Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <[email protected]> Recommended Citation Gutiérrez García, Santiago. "Galician Portuguese Medieval Poetry and the Iberian Interliterary System." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.5 (2011): <https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1907> This text has been double-blind peer reviewed by 2+1 experts in the field.
    [Show full text]
  • Milton in Portuguese a Story in Blank Verse
    OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 25/05/17, SPi View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Repositório Científico da Universidade de Évora 14 Milton in Portuguese A Story in Blank Verse Hélio J. S. Alves MILTON AND PORTUGUESE John Milton’s connections with Portuguese began during the poet’s lifetime. As Secretary for Foreign Tongues (1649–60) in Cromwell’s republic, the poet must have dealt with the envoy from the Portuguese Crown, João de Guimarães, several times during the first half of 1651, where ‘his services as an interpreter were doubt- less needed’.1 The political relationship between the Protestant republic and the Catholic monarchy could hardly have been tenser in those days. The Portuguese continued to play an important role in English politics throughout the decade, under Milton’s attentive purview, until the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and the subsequent marriage of Charles II to the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza (1638–1705) in 1662. If the poet had political and religious grudges against the Portuguese before, his dismay at their Catholic influence on English government would have attained its peak at this stage. The religious, moral, and social threat posed by Catherine’s presence as Queen of England was felt the most in the years in which Milton was completing Paradise Lost. Milton’s command of Romance languages such as Latin and Italian seems to have been quite thorough, but not much can be ascertained with respect to the Iberian languages, particularly Portuguese. Contemporary accounts suggest that Milton knew Spanish and that Spanish was one of the several tongues his daugh- ters read aloud for him.2 Given his experience with other Romance languages, it is probable that Milton could have had some reading knowledge of Portuguese.
    [Show full text]
  • Fernando Pessoa — Selected English Poems the Pessoa Edition from Shearsman Books
    Fernando Pessoa — Selected English Poems The Pessoa Edition from Shearsman Books: Selected English Poems Message / Mensagem (bilingual edition; translated by Jonathan Griffin) (co-publication with Menard Press) The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro (translated by Chris Daniels) The Collected Poems of Álvaro de Campos Vol. 1 The Collected Poems of Álvaro de Campos Vol. 2 (translated by Chris Daniels) Lisbon – What the Tourist Should See Zbigniew Kotowicz: Fernando Pessoa – Voices of a Nomadic Soul Fernando Pessoa Selected English Poems edited by Tony Frazer Shearsman Books Exeter First published in in the United Kingdom in 2007 by Shearsman Books Ltd 58 Velwell Road Exeter EX4 4LD www.shearsman.com ISBN-13 978-1-905700-26-4 ISBN-10 1-905700-26-1 Editorial matter copyright © Shearsman Books Ltd, 2007. The publisher gratefully acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England. Contents Introduction 7 from English Poems I-III from 35 Sonnets (published 1918) IV 14 VII 15 X 16 XI 17 XIII 18 XIV 19 XV 20 XVII 21 XXIV 22 XXVI 23 Epithalamium (1913; published 1921) 24 Antinoüs (1915, published 1918) 38 Inscriptions (published 1921) 51 from The Mad Fiddler (1911-1917) Spell 56 The Shining Pool 57 Looking at the Tagus 59 ‘If I could carve my poems in wood’ 60 Prayer 62 Rivers 64 The Broken Window 65 Fiat Lux 66 Uncollected Poems (1901-1917) ‘Separated from thee, treasure of my heart’ 70 ‘Now are no Janus’ temple-doors thrown wide’ 71 Second Sight 79 5 Desolation 81 Salute to the Sun’s Entry into Aries 84 Selected Later Poems ‘I have outwatched the Lesser Wain .
    [Show full text]