Portugal through Her Literature; an Anthology of Prose & Verse     by A.R. Bartes (Anthology) Original language: Portuguese Country: Portugal   Published by Walton P: Glastonbury Pub. Date: 1972 Pub. Place: UK Format: 185 pages Not available for ordering

This is a mini-anthology of Portuguese literature in parallel text format, with each extract side-by-side in both languages, especially helpful for people learning or thinking of learning the language. At the moment it is the only book of its kind available, and only in library copies as it’s thoroughly out-of-print.

The book is divided into separate prose and poetry sections and in both its editor has decided to show a very wide range of writing in Portuguese. The collection therefore runs from the fifteenth century Padre H Francisco Álvares via Fernão Mendes Pinto’s extraordinary Peregrinations, an early travel book, up to Manuel Texeira Gomes who is included in the Dedalus Book of Portuguese Fantasy, also reviewed in this guide.

The extracts are rather shorter than is usual with anthologies as they’ve all been fitted on to one page each, but they do shed some light on authors and books otherwise completely inaccessible to English-speaking readers who don’t read Portuguese. Portugal through her Literature also includes in its poetry section seventeen poets spanning the 15th to the early 20th century.

‘In this period (September and October) every self-respecting Englishman.....prepares ten or twelve trunks and leaves for the countries of sun, wine and happiness.....Sometimes he travels with his wife, his sister-in-law, a female friend of the sister-in-law, an acquaintance of this friend, seven children, six servants, ten dogs, and other doggy acquaintances of these dogs, and pays for all this without grumbling! No: I do not put that correctly, always grumbling. This pleasure trip, the Englishman almost always spends it grumbling.

The truth is that the Englishman does not amuse himself on the continent; he does not understand the language; he finds the meals strange; everything that is foreign shocks him; he suspects that they want to rob him; he has a vague belief that the sheets on the hotel beds are not clean; to see the theatres open on Sunday and the crowd amusing itself embitters his Christian and puritan soul; he dare not open a foreign book because he suspects that there are obscene things in it; if his guide informs him that such and such cathedral has six columns and if he finds only five, he remains unhappy for a whole week and furious with the country he is passing through, like a man who has been robbed of a column; and if he loses a walking-stick, if he does not arrive on time for the train, he shuts himself in the hotel for a whole day composing a letter to the ‘Times’, in which accuses the continental countries of being in a completely savage state and wallowing in putrid demoralization. In a word, the Englishman when he is travelling, is a miserable creature. (p73) (Eça de Queirós; newspaper article)