However, in order to get the most out of my Brazilian teaching experience, I would need to seriously up my game. With the generous support of a Global Initiative Grant from Butler University's office of International Studies, I enrolled in a month-long intensive Portuguese immersion experience offered at the University of Coimbra, located just about two hours north of Lisbon. There, Adriano and I rented an apartment just a ten minute walk from the campus (one of Europe's most beautiful and historic, founded in 1290) for the month of July last year, and I dove head-first into studying and (hopefully!) learning.
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| Enjoying a short visit with Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa, in the Lisbon subway |
Most of our class time was spent in grammar classes, but we also had cultural studies, too. My favorite of all was our literature class. Taught by a very engaging Professor (Prof. Soares), he chose NOT to attempt to survey centuries of Portuguese literature. Rather, we focused the entire month on the poetry of one 20th century Portuguese writer, Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935).
It was a very good strategy, mainly, since the poems themselves were all quite short. In a class with 50 students from around the world, and each of us with a different level of language proficiency, each week's focus on a single poem of ten or twenty lines meant we could quickly resolve questions of vocabulary and meaning, and get right into the heart of the matter--context, nuance, interpretation. Good stuff!
I have always been a fan of poetry...credit goes to my parents (Mom's rendition of "The Whirling Dervish" or Dad's clever tropes of Meredith Willson's "Trouble" from "The Music Man"), and also to great teachers I had in school during my growing up years...Mrs. Reed had us memorize one poem per week in sixth grade, and Mrs. Distel introduced us to Shakespeare plays and sonnets along with contemporary literature. Plus, my work, as a choral conductor regularly includes in-depth examination of poetry set for chorus, including the Book of Psalms, works by Walt Whitman, Wilfred Owen, Goethe, Schiller and more.
I loved our studies of the poetry of Pessoa...written in the 20th century, each short work presented a time capsule of cultural history and attitudes that informed our understanding of Portugal to a very high degree. A relatively small country (about the size of Pennsylvania, though with fewer inhabitants), Portugal exerted profound influence through the seagoing explorations of the 15th century. Explorers such as Magellan and Vasco de Gama led expeditions across vast oceans, circumnavigating Africa, arriving in India and Brazil, among numerous other places. Though our view of expeditions like these is rightly changing, the impact they had both at home and abroad continues to reverberate to this day.
Portugal in the 20th century experienced much tumult, with the end of the monarchy, a short-lived republic, and the presence of dictatorial rule from the 1920s until the mid 70s. Pessoa lived during the early chapters of these turbulent years. His poems are gems that capture the zeitgeist of a culture, as the Portuguese, once a dominant world power, reflected on their current state of affairs.
One of the first poems we studied, "O dos castellos" ("The Two Castles"), takes inspiration from the national coat-of-arms, a graphic that features castles on a field of red, as seen in the center of the Portuguese flag. In English, the poems reads as follows:
Europe lies, reclining upon her elbows:
From East to West she stretches, staring,
And romantic tresses fall over
Greek eyes, reminding.
The left elbow is stepped back;
The other laid out at an angle.
The first says Italy where it leans;
This one England where, set afar,
The hand holds the resting face.
Enigmatic and fateful she stares
Out West, to the future of the past.
The staring face is Portugal.
Likening the European silhouette to a reclining figure, Pessoa continues the metaphor by his suggestion of Portugal as the figure's face. Staring oceanward Portugal gazes upon the watery expanses that once represented great fortune and promise. And, Pessoa infers, Europe's destiny may yet be found across that same vast ocean.
Each of the poems by Pessoa that we studied had a similar profound message...one that connected the present day to the past, and one that showed us an intriguing view of the culture and identity of our temporary home.
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