Portuguese Language Blog

I went to Brasília this past weekend, for the first time, to visit a friend, and was blown away by the architecture and the overall city planning. My friend and her husband took us everywhere in Brasília and gave us a good background on how the city was built and what Niemeyer, the architect, was thinking when he built it.

Here is a picture of a mock up of the city, as Niemeyer had it built:

I don’t know if you can tell by the picture, but it’s shaped like an airplane, and the wings are all sets of blocks with identical building and commercial streets within the blocks. Anyway, I’ll stop talking now and let you watch an interview with the man himself who is 103 and still works!! This is a great interview I would on The World’s Best Ever in Portuguese, with English subtitles.

I was in Ouro Preto this past weekend, one of the more famous historic towns in Minas Gerais, in the southeast of Brazil. The town has maintained its historic look and feel with stone streets, Portuguese architecture, and gorgeous Baroque Catholic churches. A couple of the churches contain the sculpture of Antonio Francisco Lisboa, more famously and endearingly known as Aleijadinho (loosely translated as a Little Cripple), due to a series of illnesses he had throughout his life… although he kept on working!

I was blown away by some of his work!! We weren’t able to take pictures inside the churches, but here are some outside São Francisco de Assis:

And here’s a great video on a little bit about his life and work.

A few comprehension questions:

1. Why was Aleijadinho given this nickname?

2. Where are his most famous works found?

3. When and how did Aleijadinho die?

As those of our non-Brazilian students may know, once you fall in love with Brazil, there’s no going back, and sometimes you end up staying longer than you expect. Such was the case with one of the United States’ most brilliant poets, Elizabeth Bishop.

Bishop (1911-1979) was born in Massachusetts, and traveled extensively after graduating from college. She won a fellowship to visit South America, and she arrived in the port of Santos in 1951, expecting to stay for two weeks. Instead, she stayed in Brazil for fifteen years.

During her time in Brazil, she wrote four collections of poems, including the anthology North & South. She also translated Portuguese poems into English, including works by João Cabral de Melo Neto and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. She won various awards in the US and Brazil for her writing, including the Pulitzer Prize and A Ordem do Rio Branco.

Let’s take a look at one of her poems in both English and Portuguese.

One Art  – Uma Arte [translation]

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
A arte de perder não é nenhum mistério
tantas coisas contém em si o acidente
de perdê-las, que perder não é nada sério.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Perca um pouco a cada dia. Aceite austero,
a chave perdida, a hora gasta bestamente.
A arte de perder não é nenhum mistério.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
Depois perca mais rápido, com mais critério:
lugares, nomes, a escala subseqüente
da viagem não feita. Nada disso é sério.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Perdi o relógio de mamãe. Ah! E nem quero
lembrar a perda de três casas excelentes.
A arte de perder não é nenhum mistério.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
Perdi duas cidades lindas. Um império
que era meu, dois rios, e mais um continente.
Tenho saudade deles. Mas não é nada sério.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied.  It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Mesmo perder você (a voz, o ar etéreo, que eu amo)
não muda nada. Pois é evidente
que a arte de perder não chega a ser um mistério
por muito que pareça (escreve) muito sério.