Gavea-Brown Publications, Sponsored by the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Brown University

CO-DlRECTORESI EDITORS Onesimo Teot6nio Almeida, Brown University George Monteiro, Brown University EDITOR EXECUTIVOI MANAGING EDITOR Alice R. Clemente, Brown University with the collaboration of Stephen C. Lubkemann, Brown University CONSELHO CONSULTIVOIADVISORY BOARD Francisco Cota Fagundes, Univ. Mass., Amherst Manuel da Costa Fontes, Kent State University Jose Martins Garcia, Universidade dos A,ores 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. Caiij., 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 andlor studies are wel come, 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-BROWN Revista Bilingue de Letras e Estudos Luso-Americanos A Bilingual Journal ofPortuguese-American Letters and Studies Vols. IX-XI Numbers 1-3 Jan. 1988-Dec. 1990 SUMA.RIOI CONTENTS This triple volume, covering the years 1988-1990, includes as the first essay a work which will also be published as a separate volume, under the title Reading the Harper: On a Portuguese Immigrant Poem from California, 1901. ArtigoslEssays On Reading the Harper: A Study and a Text Maria A. Duarte and Ronald W. Sousa Foreward..........................................................................................................1 On Reading the Harper. 1. "An Anonymous Poem" by a Portuguese Laborer ................................. .4 2. The Text: An Initial Overview................................................................. 7 3. Oral Composition and the "Anonymous Poem" ....................................11 4. The Readings and Their Implications .....................................................18 5. Association, Oral Erasure, Folk Etymology and Networking as they Appear in the Anonymous Poem ............................................................29 6. What Is in the "Dialogue"?: The Social Dimension.............................. 36 7. One Result of the Analysis: The Texture of the "Anonymous Poem"......................................................................................................43 8. Questions of Genre and of Collection and Research Practices..................................................................................................46 9. A Final Question: "What Has Been Lost?" ...........................................51 Notes.......................................................................................................53 The Text. ........................................................................................................61 The Edited Text. ......................................................................................63 Facsimile.................................................................................................83 Notes.....................................................................................................103 Sources and Select Bibliography................................................................. 117 Aforisrnos e Desaforisrnos de Aparicio - Fragmentos de urn Diario de Jose Rodrigues Migueis?.............................................. 125 Onesimo T. Almeida Recensoes CriticasIBook Reviews Sadlier, Darlene J. The Question of How - Women Writers and New Portuguese Literature. Alice R. Clemente ..................................................................................133 When priests dine together, let the words of God be read. It is fitting on such occasions to listen to a reader, not a harper, to the discourses ofthe Fathers, not the poems of the heathen. Aleuin ARTIGOSIESSAYS ON READING THE HARPER: A Study and a text Edition and Introductory Study by Maria A. Duarte and Ronald W. Sousa 1 FOREWORD As is suggested in the foregoing epigraph and in the title of this study, the purpose of the ensuing pages is to deal with problems of the relationship between what have been called "orality" and "literacy" as modes of both language use and cultural organization. Precisely what aspects we shall focus on and the nature of their invocation by the text that we shall be examining are the topics of these prefatory remarks. It is, of course, a problem area much discussed today, with literally thousands of books and articles dedicated to it in fields as widely divergent as philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, so called "Third World literature," medieval studies, classics, and history. What we propose to take up is an area of inquiry within that problematic that, after having been the focus of much early work, has for many years now received comparatively little critical attention. As our title suggests, we have an interest in what we can learn from and about the working of texts that partake of both cultures-as any "text" responsibly said to have something to do with "orality" obviously must (the extent to which we see the metaphoricity in our use of such terminology will become increasingly explicit as we proceed). Our interests are, moreover, quite specific. They are not the primarily literary-and therefore in the last analysis thoroughly literate-concerns of such earlier students of the question as Milman Parry and Albert Lord and of their current followers. Our interests are, rather, cultural ones, though it is our sense-which we expect to substantiate in the following pages-that we can approach them only through close "textual" work and analysis of its implications. By contrast, the language theorists of today, from whom we have taken considerable guidance-just as we have from the Parry-Lord oralists and their followers-, have chosen to work in a much wider frame, that of a broad cultural criticism, and that endeavor has regularly eschewed close textual work. Through examination of one problematic text we wish to see what such texts can be made to say about the circumstances from which they arose, circumstances clearly very different from our own precisely as regards oral and literate language use. Conversely, we wish to see what they can be made to say about our own circumstances as readers of such texts. Moreover, the latter goal has the obvious but seldom-mentioned corollary of trying to see what we, as textual critics from the side of literate language use, cannot make 2 such texts say to us. (As will become obvious, we have strong doubts about some of the premises that underlie the oralists' work; we note issues in several places in the ensuing pages but do not develop them here.) And, finally, as our ultimate goal, we wish to see if such analysis, oscillating between critical awareness of our own boundedness in literacy and an attempt to see what that critical awareness enables us to say about such marginal texts, will help us to understand, however distantly and indirectly, important aspects of the behavior and functioning of language in circumstances other than our own. By use of the term "language functioning," we mean to raise the multifaceted question of how language that partakes of "oral culture" works as a vehicle of social cohesion-a function often asserted for it but, to our knowledge, in some important ways not demonstrated-without being able to rely on the verbatim II storage " function of written language use. The key issue for us in that question is the matter of such language's adaptation to changes in social circumstance-changes that our Portuguese-American poem, through its obvious bicultural status, problematizes in equally obvious ways. We wish, then, in immediate, working terms, to try to see what sort of "reading" (the metaphoricity continues) such texts expected of their projected audience, by contrast, what sorts of challenges they pose for our literate readerly expectations, and ultimately how those two "readings" can be worked with methodologically to ask some specific questions about the very notions of "orality" and "literacy." It is our intent too, in looking at the one specific example that will provide the material for our study, to try to derive conclusions, where such are possible, about the Portuguese-language cultural traditions in which it is grounded. In sum, we wish to invert Bishop A1cuin's terms. We are not interested in listening, as the literate establishment of our own time, correlative to A1cuin's "priests, II now to the (read) words of God (a written language use despite the power of the concept of the verbum Dei) and now to the words of the harper entoning the IIpoems of the heathen. II We are instead interested in the problems, inherent in literacy's look toward orality, that come with the reading now of the (literate) "words of Godll-Le., literacy and now the "poems of the heathenll--or, at least, one such "poem." 1 The vehicle of this exploration of such questions is an extraordinary poetic text, which will subsequently appear reproduced both in edited form and in facsimile. We shall analyze and treat it as regards its many far-reaching implications for understanding the relationships of which we speak, as well as the specific cultural matrixes involved-Portuguese, Island Portuguese, and Luso-American. It may be well to mention parenthetically at the outset that the Portuguese-and most specifically, Island

Load more