Global Impact of the Portuguese Language

Asela de Laguna

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351325905
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Within the cultural and literary context of contemporary Portugal and Western literature, 1998 was unquestionably the year that Portuguese writing gained international recognition as JosU Saramago became the first Portuguese writer ever to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. Readers who had never thought about Portuguese letters began to consume his books and, most importantly, opted for expanding their reading lists to include other important writers not only from Portugal, but from Portuguese-speaking well beyond the borders of Portugal. Global Impact of the Portuguese Language is a collection of Portuguese writing that is as rich in content and broad in scope as the diversity of its topics and writing modes of its contributors. The book is divided into three major parts. Part 1, "Different Cultural Perspectives of Portuguese Writing, " contains thirteen chapters in which the first and opening one, "Portugal: The New Frontier" ably sets the stage for the book by examining from a cultural perspective how Portugal, a peripheral country in the new world system, serves as a microcosm of the problems of cultural intercommunication in today's world. Subsequent chapters are grouped in three categories: "The Voices of the Writers, " "Critical Approaches to Cames, " and "Fictionalizing the Nation." Part 2, "Portuguese Language and Literature Outside Portugal, " comprises one section devoted to the Portuguese language in Africa, followed by studies about Portuguese discoveries as part of the historical process of remembering and forging one's identity, and finally a comprehensive historical development of Portuguese writing, both in Portuguese and English, in the United States. Part 3, "Portuguese Literature and Criticism Available in English: Suggested Readings" details the recent literary happenings which point to a possible renaissance in Portuguese literary production. The concluding part of this volume offers a short, comprehensive listing of anthologies, general studies, and the most popular translations of the best of Portuguese writing from Portugal and Africa. This lively volume constitutes a first pioneering effort to contribute to a deepening appreciation and understanding of Portuguese writing. Anyone interested in ethnic writing will find this book an invaluable education resource with which to begin an exploration of Portuguese writing in the United States. Asela Rodriguez de Laguna is associate professor of Spanish and director of the Hispanic Civilization & Language Studies Program. She is the author of Notes on Puerto Rican Literature: Images and Identities: An Introduction, and editor of Images and Identities: The Puerto Rican in Two World Contexts.

Part 1

Different Cultural Perspectives of Portuguese Writing

1

Portugal: The New Frontier

Helder M. Macedo

Once upon a time the world was divided into two great spheres of political and economic influence by two super powers. One of them favored direct control through conquest and territorial occupation; the other, while not hesitating to resort to arms when necessary, preferred a policy based on trade and strategic alliances. One created a vast centralizing bureaucracy whose cumbersome machinery eventually contributed to the disintegration of its huge empire; the other, with a more fragmented and apparently more precarious empire, managed to adapt itself to changing circumstances, and a large part of it survived the end of empires.

The super powers I am talking about are not the former Soviet Union and the United States: they are two small European nations with an imperial past. One is slightly bigger than the state of California, the other slightly smaller than the state of Indiana. I am talking about Spain and Portugal which, at the turn of the fifteenth century, with supreme arrogance, set about dividing between themselves all of the world that still remained unknown.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the consequent ending of the tense armed peace with which the contemporary world had learned to live has been called “the end of history.” This is one of those metaphors that trendy historians like to use when they want to give an appearance of purpose to the unpredictable transformation of past into present. But I believe that, by its very nature, history is constantly coming to an end and constantly begins anew, identical and different, changing the maps of a world which is neither larger nor smaller as a result.

But my perspective is cultural, not historical. And if I speak of the past it is only so that I may speak of the present, not about beginnings and endings but about continuities and frontiers. Frontiers divide but can also unite: borders are there to be crossed in both directions. And sometimes people meet across the frontier, and understand one another even in the different languages spoken on either side.

Portugal is a country where many cultures converge, an exemplary microcosm of the problems of cultural intercommunication in today’s world. For the first time in five hundred years, Portugal has the same geographical borders that it had when its imperial adventure began. But it is now part of the European Union, that expanding community of more or less regenerate former imperial nations. Indeed, eight of the Union’s members are former colonial powers. Portugal’s entry into the community made so much sense that it now seems to have been inevitable. It made sense for economic reasons, for political reasons, and even for psychological reasons, given the traumas caused by Portugal’s isolation during almost fifty years of dictatorship, by the colonial wars, and by their troubled aftermath. The benefits of joining are already there to be seen. But membership of a community without political and economic frontiers could lead to loss of cultural identity.

The main problem facing the Portuguese is one of perception. Over the centuries many Portuguese came to see themselves with the eyes of strangers, of voyagers who have returned home or are about to leave. Portugal was like an ancestral home, a place where they could take a vacation from a life lived elsewhere, and where they hoped to spend their last years. Elsewhere, they built and lost three empires—in the East, in the Americas, and in Africa—but the ancestral home was largely neglected. Repairs have now begun but, despite having finally liberated themselves from the dubious benefits of empire, one-third of the Portuguese (five million of the total fifteen million registered nationals ) continue to live outside their own country. Many return, but many leave in their place. They are all citizens of a country that has confronted the end of history many times and even ceased to be an independent nation when it thought it was still at the height of its power. But it survived as a nation, just as it continues to survive in the alien nations of its present diaspora. The Portuguese are a people who have seen everything: greatness, misery, and now even a respectable mediocrity. They have been the oppressor and the oppressed, inquisitor and freethinker, Christian, Jew, Muslim, African, and Amerindian. They have absorbed all the world’s races and cultures and have been absorbed into all of them. The collective wisdom of the Portuguese is immense. They must now assume their own culture as the only wealth they truly have and finally understand that this may always have been so.

In the sixteenth century, João de Barros, chronicler of the then very recent “deeds of the Portuguese in the discovery and conquest of the lands of the East” decided that he must also compile a Portuguese grammar, justifying his purpose by declaring that “the arms and pillars of stone which Portugal carried to every continent of the globe are material things that time may destroy, but the Portuguese language will not so easily succumb to time.” Nor did it. The Portuguese language is spoken today by some 200 million people; it is the official language of seven independent nations; and it is the third most widely spoken European language, after English and Spanish, having recently overtaken French. The other Portuguese-speaking nations are Portugal’s natural cultural partners: its cultural boundaries do not coincide with its European political frontiers; they extend well beyond Europe.

And yet Portugal has been characterized as a peripheral nation, a characterization which assumes that there is an acknowledged center elsewhere. The problem is not simply a cultural one, it is primarily political and economic. The “center” is where power resides, and the periphery is anywhere that depends on that center without being in a position to influence it.

A nation’s political and economic power considerably influences, or even determines, the overall perception of the quality of its culture. This accounts for the poor self-image of the so-called peripheral cultures: the periphery, looking at itself with the borrowed eyes of the center, sees itself as definitely peripheral. This perception of itself becomes the image it projects, which the center feels justified in accepting. The result is a vicious circle, a tautology accepted as a factual truth. From this perspective Portugal has suffered, paradoxically, from its own internationalism, from always being able to see itself with alien eyes, looking from the outside in. For the center, however, there are dangers in seeing only itself, even when it appears to be looking outward. For, without the periphery, the so-called great cultures at the center of power are also impoverished.

Let me pose a question: how many books by Portuguese authors—or Brazilian, or Angolan, or Mozambican, or Cape Verdean—would a cultured American reader have read in the last twelve months? Or twelve years ? Or in a lifetime? Such readers are the poorer because of their ignorance. What makes it worse is that they do not even know what they are missing, as Luis de Camões tells his reluctant Catarina, who promises but fails to deliver.

Camões wrote in the aftermath of the voyages of discovery initiated by Portugal, which brought into the forefront of Western culture the problem of the new and the different. These are Camonian themes par excellence. He was a citizen of the first imperial diaspora, with a “life scattered in fragments” in worlds about which his own culture had known nothing. His lyric poetry speaks to us of the results of a new knowledge, gained through the experience of living, and understood as “pure truths and not imagined fables.” He speaks of a world in which “there are things that happen and are not believed and things that are believed and do not happen,” in which “experience offers greater proof than the reasons of the learned.” He asserts that perception is based on experience, and is therefore relative, telling his readers that they will understand his verses according to their own experience of love. He inverts the neoplatonic ideal of the angelic woman, the donna angelicata—blonde, blue-eyed, asexual, distant and superior—to exalt the “blackness of love” of the dark captive who was his carnal mistress. And when he writes “I erred all the discourse of my years,” he is attributing to his passage through the world the value of meaningful speech, even if his wanderings have ended in the despair of having found fragmentation where he sought harmony. In speaking of his time and for his time, Camões is also speaking of and for our own.

This is evident in his masterly epic poem Os Lusíadas, in which he breaks all the rules of the classic epic to speak of himself and his experiences, and through himself of Portugal, and through Portugal of all humankind. The poem’s subject is the pioneering voyage of the Portuguese mariners who opened the sea route to India; its broader theme is the history of Portugal in which that voyage was the culminating moment; but its central concern is the human quest for knowledge through love—a new image for a new world.

More than four hundred years have passed since the publication of the first edition of Os Lusíadas, and the poem’s reception has undergone many metamorphoses, having served as a banner for the most absurd causes, from the most rabid nationalism to the most anachronistic anti-imperialism. All too often it has been read not for what is actually in it but for what is presumed to be in it, and so has inevitably been understood in terms of banal similarity rather than of the difference that characterizes its renewal of the cultural tradition to which it belongs. Camões’s provocative originality is not fully recognized because he wrote in a language made peripheral by a historical shift in political and economic power. A peripheral poet cannot be comfortably acknowledged as a great innovator in a central cultural tradition. It is almost as if Chicanos, or Native Americans, or African Americans, or women, wanted to be heroes of a Western movie and dared to change all the rules of the genre.

But this is precisely what has been happening to the Western, that admirable cinematic and modern development of the old epic tradition that includes romances of chivalry, the epics of Homer, and Virgil, and Tasso, and Camões, among its most notable literary predecessors. And yet nothing would have seemed less probable than that these essentially localized—indeed, essentially peripheral—tales about cows and cowboys and crooks and saloons in the wide open spaces of the young American nation should have acquired the universal relevance that has enabled them to develop into the modern equivalent of the classic epic, with golden-hearted tarts instead of nymphs, buxom whorehouse madams instead of Camões’s Venus, and trail blazers instead of mariners seeking new worlds beyond the frontiers. These days the Japanese make Westerns, and so do the Italians; the president of a South American republic used to wile away nights of insomnia watching old cowboy movies; it seems that even Stalin—or was it Brezhnev?—also liked watching them when the proletariat was not looking. The old basic form was enriched by new contents—as the traditional epic was in Os Lusiadas—but it always maintained the same basic conflicts and the same unchanging values: good versus evil, generosity versus greed, the lone hero exhorting the compliant community, the confrontation between love and hate, the triumph of love, the heroes riding into the sunset like the Portuguese mariners sailing over the horizon. Oddly enough, it seems perfectly natural that a shoot-out in a ghost town in the American West should have universal relevance, as if it had always been part of the world’s cultural experience, even if such unlikely confrontations never happened with real cowboys in a real America. But it is easier to understand this if we recall that the “West” happens to be situated in the country that is the world’s center of political and economic power. The unfamiliar expression of an old archetype has become familiar for reasons that go beyond its aesthetic representation. So far, so good. But there is more to it than that: my contention is that the aesthetic value of this specific expression of an old archetype would be lessened if those elements in it that differ from other expressions of the same archetype were to be lost in a grey sea of sameness. In other words, each culture is made up of similarities to others as much as of differences. If it were not, similarity would eventually become sameness, leading to a culture without interlocutors.

Every culture needs dialogue: its own identity depends on its difference from other cultures. And only through an exchange of cultural differences—the crossing of frontiers in both directions—can the experience of other cultures become part of one another. French culture, or German, or Italian, or Japanese, or Portuguese would be poorer without American Westerns or Shakespeare’s plays. And non-Portuguese cultures are also poorer without the poetry of Camões or Cesário Verde or Fernando Pessoa, or the novels of Eça de Queiróz, the Brazilian Machado de Assis or the Angolan Pepetela. A few days ago, a psychotherapist, speaking of the difficulty of treating less literate patients, said something that made me think. It can be summed up as follows: “If you don’t have the word for it you cannot understand the experience that the word describes.” If I am not mistaken, this insight is not all that different from Camões’s comment to his coy mistress that she would not know what she was missing. For true culture also implies the capacity to transform the experience of others into our own experience. And what can happen as an extreme logical consequence of the cultural standardization of the modern world is that whatever is different in the so-called peripheral cultures can be lost without that loss being noticed. This has already happened: history offers umpteen examples of extinct languages and cultures. And we have no way of knowing what was lost as a result.

Latin was once the cultural language of western Europe. Since the Roman empire had long ceased to exist, Latin was not specifically identified with an imperial power and could be used as the international medium of communication, the language in which to express what was specific to each culture as well as what was common to them all. English is now taking over the role once played by Latin as an international language. But English is not only the magnificent language which, in its simultaneously specific and universal expression, can be used in a dialogue with other cultures, it is also the language of political and economic power which could obliterate all the others, becoming the grey language of similarity and indifferentiation in the same amorphous sea that threatens other languages. This danger is beautifully and movingly expressed in a poem by Jorge de Sena, that other poet of the Portuguese diaspora, who was a professor of Portuguese in this country, where he died twenty years ago. The poem—which I shall, of course, read in translation-is called “Notions of Linguistics.” The translation is by Suzette Macedo.

Among themselves I hear my children

talking English. Not the younger children only

but the older ones as well, talking

to the others. None was born here.

Growing, all had in their ears

the sound of Portuguese. Yet their talk is English;

they will be American. More: they’ve been dissolved,

they are dissolving in a sea that is not theirs.

And then you tell me of the mysteries of poetry,

of the traditions of a language, of a race,

of what cannot be said with less

than the experience of a people and a tongue. Fools.

Languages, which last for centuries, and even survive

forgotten in some other tongue, die each day

in the stammering of their rightful heirs:

are so immortal that half a dozen years

suppress them from mouths dissolved

beneath the weight of other races, other cultures.

So metaphysical, so untranslatable,

that they can melt like this, not into thin air,

but in the daily cack of other tongues.

The chronicler João de Barros was right when he decided to write his grammar because he could foresee, even at the beginning of Portugal’s imperial adventure, that a time would come for the end of empires. But for his reasons to remain valid, Portugal has to fight the threatening sameness of the modern post-imperial world, in which multinational blocs are diluting national identities. On the one hand, it has to assert its cultural uniqueness within a unified Europe, thus contributing towards making the European Union a union of cultural diversity rather than sameness. On the other hand, the Portuguese must assert their awareness that they not only represent a minority culture in Europe, geographically surrounded by other national languages and cultures, but that they are also part of a worldwide multinational community of independent nation states that share the Portuguese language.

Other nations must also play a part in fighting cultural loss through homogenization. Countries in which Portugal has played a role, whether in terms of their history or in terms of the presence of sizeable communities of Portuguese nationals within their territories, should ensure that there is due access to the study of the Portuguese language—and Portuguese language cultures—in their schools and universities. This obviously applies to the countries of the European Union but is no less relevant to the United States of America. The United States is still a political and economic superpower, not at ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Different Cultural Perspectives of Portuguese Writing
• The Voices of the Writers
• Critical Approaches to Camões
• Fictionalizing the Nation
• Part 2: Portuguese Language and Writing Outside Portugal
• Lusophone Languages and Literary Expressions
• Portuguese-American Literature
• Part 3: Bibliography
• Contributor
• Index