(Vincent van Gogh, 1853-1890)
Physiology
While the sonnet is friendly to the tragic
situations of saudade, the haiku is not,
for such spasms of feeling depend from
a fact: it is not that people suffer their
saudades (they do) but it is that destiny
decrees that they will suffer them time
and time again. If a minha patria é a
minha língua, saudade is its pathology.
July 4, 2013
(This poem was first published in July 2013, Comunidades RTPcores)
George Monteiro is Professor Emeritus of English and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Brown University, and he continues as Adjunct Professor of Portuguese Studies at the same university. He served as Fulbright lecturer in American Literature in Brazil–Sao Paulo and Bahia–Ecuador and Argentina; and as Visiting Professor in UFMG in Belo Horizonte. In 2007 he served as Helio and Amelia Pedroso / Luso-American Foundation Professor of Portuguese, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Among his recent books are Stephen Crane’s Blue Badge of Courage, Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature, The Presence of Pessoa, The Presence of Camões, and Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop and Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Among his translations are Iberian Poems by Miguel Torga, A Man Smiles at Death with Half a Face by José Rodrigues Miguéis, Self-Analysis and Thirty Other Poems by Fernando Pessoa, and In Crete, with the Minotaur, and Other Poems by Jorge de Sena. He has also published two collections of poems, The Coffee Exchange and Double Weaver’s Knot.
IMAGE: Vincent van Gogh, Sower at Sunset (1888)