World Portuguese Language Day: Five choices by Jorge Vaz de Carvalho
In the week in which we celebrate the World Portuguese Language Day, on May 5, the Universidade Católica Portuguesa will be presenting the literary works chosen by three members of the academic community to commemorate the Portuguese language.
Today we present the five books chosen by the professor of the Faculdade de Ciências Humanas, Jorge Vaz de Carvalho. To mark this day, the professor presents us with books by Portuguese authors and also translations of works by international authors, since a good translation of a great foreign author is also a way of elevating the Portuguese language, in the words of Professor Jorge Vaz de Carvalho.
1. O Romance de Tristão e Isolda, renewed by Joseph Bédier
Translation and presentation by Aníbal Fernandes
Sistema Solar, 2012
"Happy love has no history", says Denis de Rougemont. This is the great medieval story that would be exalted as a model for the Western love novel: the passion that conquers reason and breaks moral laws, that overcomes obstacles and transfigures beings, and that, by its immense fatal force, leads lovers to death to make them immortal.
2. Almeida Garrett, Viagens na Minha Terra
BI – Biblioteca de Editores Independentes
A journey from Lisbon to Santarém is, after all, the pretext for an intellectual and moral journey through the state of the country following the Liberals' victory over Absolutism, to find an unhappy love story in times of enmity between the sons of the nation. In narrative plans, Garrett writes the most remarkable fiction of Portuguese Romanticism, modernizing the homeland language in the perfect balance of an art whose intentionality should still today be a model of creativity and pleasure.
3. Lev Tolstoi, Anna Karénina
Translation by António Pescada
Relógio de Água, 2006
"All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". From this initial theme, the most remarkable polyphony of the nineteenth century novel (of all novels?) develops, under the command of an omniscient narrator (from attitudes and decisions to the intimate thoughts and deep feelings of the characters, as of the various political, economic, social and moral matters) who truly makes everything visible, in space-time, with the unsurpassable art and absolute energy of verbal composition.
4. James Joyce, Ulisses
Translation by Jorge Vaz de Carvalho
Relógio d’Água, 2013
The crossing of Dublin city in the course of a lifetime, or on Thursday June 16, 1904, may require the wit and the audacity, bring the pleasures and the misfortunes, the comical and tragic of Homeric dimensions. The pathetic lives of everyday, lowly heroes rise to epic status through the most extraordinary recreation of language ever elaborated by modernist fiction. Those who do not read Joyce cannot admire from the top the landscape of the novel as a literary genre.
5. Jorge de Sena, Sinais de Fogo
Guimarães Editores
In the futile time of a summer holiday, a young university student awakens to political awareness, the discovery of erotic love, the revelation of his vocation as a poet. A story of learning and maturing by the hand of a major writer and intellectual of our literary and cultural history. The best novel in Portuguese literature, together with Os Maias by Eça de Queirós.