New year's Eve in Portuguese

Since Portugal used to be everywhere in the world, they will be shouting Feliz Ano Novo! in many countries tonight (and they have already begun)

One day, I plan to create a cookbook that will include Portuguese meals from Goa (India), the islands of the Azores, Madeira and Cape Verde. Brazil! And of course, East Cambridge, Massachusetts, San Jose, California and Toronto, Canada.

And I want to include the 5 other African countries (in addition to Cape Verde) that speak Portuguese: Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Sao Tome and Principe and (since 2011) Equatorial Guinea.

I don't know if I would be lucky enough to make it for New Year's, but one can certainly hope! ;)

Portuguese Thanksgiving in America

Portuguese Thanksgiving include salted cod fish and massa suvada/sweet bread.

This year, there was also laughter about how my aunt made tuna sandwiches.  Spreading the mayo on the bread-like butter-and then putting the tuna on top-dry, instead of mixing it up.  I still can't tell whether it is funny or more time consuming. 

There is still a big divide between things that are American, and things that are Portuguese. And the bits that are Portuguese are fading with each year.

This year, there was no sweet bread. Only sweets.

DISQUIET WRITING PROGRAM

“Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us.”
–Fernando Pessoa

I've just come across a marvelous writing program for those who would be interested in a session in Lisbon, and then maybe Ponta Delgada, Azores.

http://disquietinternational.org

It is named after a certain Book of Disquiet by Pessoa, who explains that it is "the autobiography of someone who never existed" The program is based on:
"inspiration from The Book of Disquiet, the great Lisbon poet Fernando Pessoa’s masterpiece; from the city of Lisbon itself; and from the late Portuguese poet Alberto de Lacerda, who believed above all in the importance of literary community."

There are different levels of participation and fellowships which encourage Luso and Luso-American writers. It all looks like fun!! Anything that encourages Portuguese writers sounds like it could bring together a larger community in ways that can't happen under everyday circumstance.

A Walk in the Country with Saramago

Jose Saramago wrote a Walk in the Country in 1981.

The NYTimes reviewed it 20 years later, not understanding it and missing more than what is lost in translation. "The poet of Portugal is José Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize, a fabulist with the power of some mesmeric storyteller at the fireside. So you might expect that a book by Saramago called ''Journey to Portugal,'' tricked out with pretty photographs, would light up a country that was once Europe's anchor and now is shamefully unfamiliar. Sadly, you'd be wrong."

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/01/reviews/010401.01pyelt.html

Not an auspicious start.

Is it a travel book? No. It offers no trips, just a record of where the author went, what he experienced and what he thought.
Is it a book written for Westerners? No. It was published in Portuguese.

At least the writers of the review have a better assessment of how it SHOULD be assessed. "All this is puzzling, unless you realize that ''Journey to Portugal'' isn't a travel book at all. It's a historical document in its own right -- a product of the year 1979, when Saramago's journey started. A seemingly interminable dictatorship had ended just a few years earlier, and the idea of Portugal, as Saramago writes, had been ''poisoned by a paternalist, conservative rural idyll.'....This book is best read as a snapshot of Saramago's mind just before the first of his great novels, ''Levantado do Chão'' (''Raised From the Ground''),"

Has he ever traveled through his own native-born country, ignored the monuments as being monumental and just let the place be? The reviewer is annoyed at Saramago for not living up to unexplained expectations: "What he leaves out is sometimes puzzling, sometimes infuriating. How could he have gone to the mountain town of Belmonte and missed the great drama of the Jewish community coming back into the light after 500 years of concealment? Why does he leave out the modern importance of that so-called Temple of Diana in Évora: as a meeting place for the military conspirators who brought democracy back to Portugal in 1974? Is it just that he's the kind of man who, faced with a dolmen that might be 5,000 years old, ''drops his head to listen to his own heartbeat''?"

For a writer of English, however, I AM glad he calls out the difficulties of translations from Portuguese.  I myself feel that the vague qualities of English can render the original incomprehensible: "The imprecision can't have helped the translators, Amanda Hopkinson and Nick Caistor, but their attention does seem to wander. You fall over phrases like ''the voluntary disposition or the incompletion of its lateral buildings'' or the sudden, entirely unexplained question: ''Are there any reserve demarcations in these parts?'' And it is worrying to think of a great stone castle sitting in a town center ''like a jelly on a plate.' "

John Dos Passos: A Portugal Story

The other day, I came across a fun fact.  The "Lost Generation" author and artist, John Dos Passos had a father whose parentage was from Madeira.

Dos Passos wrote 42 novels, and the screenplay for "The Devil is a Woman" starring Marlena Dietrich (1937).  Also, he produced over 400 pieces of art.

But the topic here is The Portugal Story (1969), a history.  He had also previously written about Brazil on the Move (1963).

I ordered the first book immediately and when it arrived, I was eager to see what an (almost) native son had written about it.  But....

Kirkus reviews it quite clearly:

It is difficult to think of John Dos Passos as a dull writer, or of the history of Portugal as a lusterless sequence of events. Yet, The Portugal Story manages somehow to make a reality out of both improbabilities. The narrative covers in some detail the ""three centuries of exploration and discovery"" that made Portugal, for a time, the world's leading commercial nation -- roughly from the middle of the thirteenth century until the extinction of the Aviz dynasty in 1580 and the subsequent seizure of the Portuguese crown by Philip II of Spain. It is a period remarkable for the complexity and color of its characters: Alfonso III--and Diniz; Nun'Alvares Pereira; Henry the Navigator, who laid the foundation of the Portuguese empire; Da Gama, Cabral, Almeida and Albuquerque, who raised their country to the pinnacle of eminence; Manuel I and John III, who ruled Portugal at its zenith. But out of this wealth of raw material, Mr. Dos Passos has been able to make only a textbookish tale astonishingly devoid of that love for life which animated Portugal during the centuries of her glory. Significantly, the pace quickens only when the author quotes, as he does too infrequently, contemporary narratives and chronicles. On the whole, the book has little to recommend it other than the author's name.

My Mother is in the Azores

And I am not.

It breaks my heart, but I am working, and saving up for the next time.

Hopefully, with my job, I'll be able to send her every summer. And me every OTHER summer!

Visiting Sao Miguel

My Mother will head to the Azores soon, a reunion with some of the family and friends. I'm still amazed at how much time she spends on the phone with everyone.  She still keeps in touch.

I'll miss her, but I know she'll be in good hands.  The one place in the world where I can trust that she'll be safe and treated with respect, other than home.

But then again, which side of the Atlantic is home?  Both, I think.

Pancada, Fralda and Contabilidade

Some random words.

Pancada=A kid who is a little zangada all the time, looking for attention

who needs a

Fralda="blankie", comfort object, to keep the kid from crying

and the opposite, philosophically.

Contabilidade=Accounting.  A grownup method for keeping track of finances, by reporting everything dispassionately and making sure that everything is in balance.

A short story if I ever heard one....

Visiting Portugal Again, CLARO!!

My mother, my poor dear mother. But when I think of how old my grandmother was when she was my mother's age, I think my mother is doing very well.

But every time we have made the trip, she thinks it is the last time she will muster up the energy.

Until I asked her recently. And she lit up.

"Do I want to go? Of COURSE! CLARO!!

I take that as a VERY good sign. ;)

Nicknames

There is a Portuguese word for a nickname that people have, a name they never learn themselves.

A name that is only a reference when they are out of earshot, not something that they would respond to.  An affectionate name (one hopes), yet also something that identifies a characteristic about them, which they may or may not recognize.

What do people around you know about you that you don't know yourself?

Who Am I? (Indeed)

Wondering who I am, who I am alone, in relation to my family, in relation to the distance I travel from my childhood home, the family who loves me.

The distance I feel I have traveled in this world.

I feel like Pessoa, all the different Personas he hid behind, or brought forth.

I am everyone, I have grown beyond my boundaries.

Sabes quem eu sou? Mi-Carena and Quaresma

Mom told me tonight about the 4 Thursdays before Lent.

The celebrations of Girlfriends, Boyfriends, then Godfathers and Godmothers.  And then just before Lent begins, like the Brazilians celebrate Carnivale, the children in the Azores wrap themselves in a white sheet like a ghost and go to their neighbors.  "Do you know who I am?"

During Lent, there was NO dancing, whatsoever.  She remembers at school, kids dancing and the teacher came over and STOPPED them.

But there was a repreive, during Micarena, the mid point of Quaresma (Lent).  Only in the middle, like relief from holding your breath, could you take a break and gain the strength to go another 20 days without dancing.