PORTO (December 10, 1998)
TWO POEMS By George Monteiro
On December 10, 1998, I found myself in Porto watching a news broadcast that was all about the ceremonies in Sweden surrounding the novelist José Saramago and his Nobel Prize. It was also noted in passing that the filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira, a native of the city, had turned ninety. Here in his birthplace the coverage of Manoel de Oliveira’s milestone birthday was tucked into a broadcast almost entirely devoted to footage of what was taking place in Stockholm. Later, perhaps to compensate for its earlier slight, the station ran Oliveira’s Vale Abrão (1993).
1.
Nosso Nobel
In Stockholm snow Saramago
strides ahead in his Alentejano
capecoat trimmed in dark fur.
He lauds his grandfather, then lets
his ghosts do the talking, since he,
Saramago, has walked his walk.
2.
Filmmaker at 90
At the Nobel ball
Saramago looks on
but will not dance,
not knowing how,
he insists, and not
liking dancing either.
But the lame Emma
in Manoel de Oliveira’s
remake of Agustina’s
remake dances her way
toward a new future.
So much older then,
the auteur ever walks us
through this minefield.
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.
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