PORTUGUESE
LISBON
Eduardo Lourenço is perhaps Portugal’s most distinguished literary critic. Pessoa is “an exception, being a great writer,” he said the other afternoon. “But he had a way of being that is distinctly Portuguese.” He paused to find the right words. “It has to do with everything and nothing — that we Portuguese can have everything, but still feel we have nothing.”
Portugal, he explained, had discovered half the world by the 16th century but still felt itself a failure for having not discovered the rest. The national mind-set, Mr. Lourenço said, is “a combination of megalomania and humility.”
“Also Pessoa was a loner,” he went on, “one of the great poets to express absolute loneliness — some of his poems are so sad they are difficult to read, which is very Portuguese. Listen to fado.” He was referring to the music that here connotes “saudade,” a nearly untranslatable word meaning homesickness but also something more, something, he suggested, like paradise lost.
in Michael Kimmelman's article for the NYT, Portugal Holds on to Words Few Can Grasp.
