Portugal: Poetry = Emotion, Motion

Before my week in Senegal (which you can read about here) I spent a week in Portugal, a country which was also new to me. I had friends to visit in a couple of different cities, so a few days in Lisbon were followed by a few days farther north in Coimbra.

Lisbon has an extremely dramatic setting on the Tagus estuary, amazing beaches and many different and fascinating areas, but it felt a little elusive. It was, as well, a city with the feeling of a chessboard or a game board. Of course I cannot explain this, but it may be some feeling left by the patterns of the huge mosaic world map in Belem, or the landmarks such as the castle above the city and the Belem tower, which seemed like iconic game pieces. It could also be some historic impression. One of my main discoveries was that the Portuguese, who I did know had explored widely, went absolutely everywhere in the age of exploration - and I do mean everywhere. When I arrived in Senegal I found that, of course, they had been among the first there from Europe, and the nearby Cape Verde was colonised by the Portuguese. You end up mentally consulting a world map a lot while in Portugal. It is pre-eminently a maritime nation, a small country which had an enormous impact on world history, and one with a very long coastline.

Poetry is an important part of Portuguese culture. When I was flying to Lisbon on TAP Portugal, I noticed that the in-flight magazine had more mentions of poetry and poets than I have probably ever seen before in an in-flight magazine (I watch out for these things). Everywhere in Lisbon I found traces of poetry, which so far have left me with more questions than answers.

Then there was Fernando Pessoa, who for many embodies Lisbon. This great writer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century wrote under heteronyms, which were personas rather than pseudonyms: this adds to the impression of Lisbon as a many-faced or many-masked city. Pessoa has a couple of statues dedicated to him, quite close to each other, which in itself I found unusual. Yes, that is me in the photo with the first statue (doing my best poet-face), outside some of the cafes he frequented. The second and stranger statue is outside his birthplace.

Coimbra was my next stop in Portugal. This ultra-historic city has a famous university with an extraordinary library (populated by bats), a beautiful old town centre and nearby Roman ruins. I didn't have a lot of time to explore its poetry, but Luís de Camões, the sixteenth century poet who is considered Portugal's Shakespeare or Dante, may have been born in Coimbra and definitely attended the university.

And then there were the cork poetry bookmarks. Portugal is famous for its cork production and you can buy all sorts of things in this versatile material. Shopping for souvenirs in Coimbra, I found a cork box of chocolates which also detached into three literary bookmarks. Obviously this was a must-buy.

I had to look up Queiroz. As well as realist novels and short stories, this great 19th-century writer wrote prose poems and translated Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines into Portuguese.

Of course, there is another world of contemporary Portuguese poetry. I can always do some reading, and maybe I'll discover more of it on a future visit.

Poetry Is Everywhere (Like Spies and Sherlock Holmes)

Portrait of Sherlock Holmes by Sidney Paget


Amidst being sick on and off in February and early March, a welcome trip to Barcelona, and all the vicissitudes of life which have contributed to not writing in here much lately, I've started reading novels again. Not that I ever stopped. I seriously doubt I'll ever hit the several-books-a-week levels of my childhood again, but I don't read as much as I used to, and that's particularly true when it comes to novels. Poetry takes up a lot of my headspace, and besides that, I haven't lately come across a lot of novels that I badly want to read. (Often, when I read prose these days, it's non-fiction about travel or current affairs, and often far more interesting than the average contemporary novel.)

Having immersed myself in a few novels recently, I was reminded that they can have a kind of calming effect on me that poems don't necessarily have. Of course, individual poems can be reassuring and uplifting, if that is their aim. But poetry has a couple of attributes which make it rather more stimulating than calming: it tends to be emotionally high-keyed, and in any case, reading various poems requires a constant sort of changing of emotional gears. Even a thrilling novel, with many twists and turns, is more like floating down the same river for a long period of time, rather than leaping from the river to the ocean to the mountaintop.

I couldn't get away from poets while immersing myself in various novels, even if I'd wanted to. Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety, a superb novel about the French Revolution, accompanied me for a few weeks. One of its hundreds of characters was Louis de Saint-Just, a leader of the Revolution, who fell along with Robespierre. He was also the author of the epic poem Organt and the novel often makes reference to his status as a poet.

I have also been catching up on Laurie R King's series about Mary Russell and her partner, Sherlock Holmes - yes, you read that correctly. These rather wonderful books (although they vary considerably in quality, as series fiction often does) constitute my favourite Holmes stories by someone other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, although it's fair to say that in Holmesian terms they are rather iconoclastic. I was three books behind, although one of the three has just been released. Pirate King, a rather silly episode in Holmes and Russell's careers based on The Pirates of Penzance, rose in my estimation when I realised that it featured the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa as a major character. Russell comments on Pessoa, in a letter to Holmes: "He carries about him an air of distinction, as if his mind is on Greater Things than translating for a moving picture crew. (He is a poet, which you might have guessed.)" Garment of Shadows, which follows on directly from Pirate King, didn't contain much about poets in the story, but the title is taken from the work of a Persian-Arabic poet, Ebn El Roumi (who, as far as I can tell, isn't the same as the much more famous Rumi who wrote a few hundred years later):

...the breath of Chitane
Blows the sands in smoky whirls
And blinds my steed.
And I, blinded as I ride,
Long for the night to come,
The night with its garment of shadows
And eyes of stars.

Finally I have moved on to the new novel, Dreaming Spies, which I haven't finished yet. Poetry features very prominently here. The title is a pun on Matthew Arnold's "city of dreaming spires" (Oxford), and there are other references to Arnold's work. The chapters have epigraphs in haiku form, and above all, a priceless book of poetry by the great Japanese haiku poet Matsuo Basho plays a key role in the novel. I'd really recommend that anyone interested in this series starts with the first and best book, The Beekeeper's Apprentice, but all the poetic references in these three latest have added a lot to my enjoyment.

Speaking of Sherlock Holmes, I finally went to the wonderful exhibition at Museum of London which has been on for some months, and also attended a discussion by the curators. This week, the title of that Laurie King novel about Sherlock Holmes, Dreaming Spies, was a keyhole opening which my mind's eye peered through to see that poetry (and poets), Sherlock Holmes and spies have something in common: they're everywhere. Holmes, to me, is something in the way of a guardian spirit of London, always somewhere in the back of my mind as I move through the city. While travelling on the Underground, I sometimes try to guess who in my vicinity might be working as a spy. And then I remembered two favourite quotations. One is from the great American poet Anne Sexton: "A writer is essentially a spy./Dear love, I am that girl." The other is from Polish poet Wojciech Bonowicz, who was in part quoting a Polish critic: "The poet...is one who opposes the fossilization of language, one who attends to its fissures. In this way the poet remains a secret agent of elusive sense."