"Deus quer, a homem sonha, a obra nasce."

As you may know since you're reading this (and I've been talking nonstop about it for MONTHS), I'm studying abroad in Portugal this summer. It's just been something on the horizon since I decided to minor in Portuguese when I arrived at SJSU last fall, but my plane leaves tomorrow and it's finally starting to hit me that I'm going to spending the whole summer experiencing the things I've been reading, studying, and writing about all year.

So while I'm keeping this blog to record my experiences, I wanted to start by showing how my journey began. Before I transferred to SJSU, I took a poetry class at West Valley with Julie Maia. When I read the syllabus, one of the options for the final paper caught my attention. Bilingual students could choose a poem in a foreign language and analyze different translations of it. I'll admit I picked it because I thought it would be an easy A. I did get that A, but I didn't make it easy for myself.

While I went to Portuguese school as a kid, we focused on language and history. Literature, not so much. So I was just Googling up Portuguese poets, looking for anything interesting, when I met the man that made me decide to minor in Portuguese: Fernando Pessoa. To be more specific, I discovered Mensagem, his epic collection of poems detailing the rise and fall of the Portuguese nation. I ended up writing about two poems: O Infante and Mar Português. Check out the links for a good analysis and translation into English, but for now, it's the opening line of O Infante that interests me.

"Deus quer, o homem sonha, a obra nasce." God wills, man dreams, and the work is born. Pessoa was writing about Prince Henry the Navigator, but that became my motto as I worked on my final project. It was just for an elective class, but it absorbed my semester. It was my baby, and I went above and beyond what the assignment called for. I submitted it to the Bay Honors Symposium, and the following spring I presented my research at Stanford. I'm Portuguese enough to be fatalistic, and I now believe that I was meant to study Portuguese.

I'm not going into this just as a Portuguese scholar, I'm a writer too. I'm no Pessoa, but while I was working on my project, I became one of a long line of Portuguese poets obsessed with the ocean. My paper was trying to explain saudade, that untranslatable word (think German and schadenfreude) that pervades Portuguese culture. I wrote a sestina, because I love intricate poetic forms, to try and explain that word to myself:

Chasing Atlantis

The happy sadness is called saudade,

The nostalgia for what never was,

The cursed blessing of Atlantis.

Barren rocks were all that remained

Of that doomed earthly paradise

That my ancestors called their home.

That wandering blood has found a new home,

But that which remains is what we call saudade.

It changes bitter childhood to a lost paradise

That deep down we know never was.

Otherwise we would have remained

On the nine remnants of Atlantis.

You don’t have to believe in Atlantis.

After all, you never called it home.

But those nine rocks are all that remained

And are a fitting cradle for the word saudade.

We long for a place that probably never was,

Because in our hearts we all long for a paradise.

My ancestors made those islands a paradise,

Molded the barren rocks into an echo of Atlantis.

If I wonder if that that place even really was.

I do know that it calls my wandering blood home.

Though those islands fill me with saudade,

I’m still glad that my parents never remained

Now they recognize nothing that remained.

They’d fled the old world for a new paradise.

All that was left behind was their saudade.

Their childhood world is as lost as Atlantis.

The new world is now what calls them home.

Their daughter’s heart longs for a place that never was.

I can’t believe that it never was,

Because something remained!

The Azores call my blood home,

Leave me longing for paradise.

And so I’m chasing Atlantis:

My only compass is my saudade.

When I learned that place was never really paradise

What still remained was my longing for an Atlantis

So the Azores will always be the home to my saudade.

The chase is still on. I've learned so much in the past year by looking at my culture academically, from the outside looking in, instead of just growing up in it. Now, I get to experience it! Saudade is something I think that can never be satisfied, but that's okay. I'm going to keep chasing it.

And I want you to follow me.