We are coming to the end of 2020 and I don’t have much that I want to say about it. Instead, I am simply grateful that the Christmas Season is here, with the lights and decorations up in both public spaces and private homes. We need to see more light this year, not only the physical light of the sun or ornamental lights, but inner light. It’s been a dark year, regardless of whether you live on the sunny part of the planet or where the days are short and dark in December.
I wish you all much light to give you comfort and hope as you wait for the start of 2021 and, hopefully, a new beginning for all the people of earth. For all of us who have survived this pandemic I hope we will see joy again, and a restoration to life as we know it, as much as possible, with resiliency to face the challenges of inevitable change and new ways of living our lives.
I leave you with some photos of simple decorations that I have come upon on my walks and that have given me comfort. I wish I knew who took the time to lovingly decorate the trees in the park so that I could thank them for this simple gesture of kindness to gift beauty and joy to those who walk by. They are signs that the world will be all right as long as we, in our own way, give light to each other, and thereby, light to the world.
Wishing everyone a Happy Christmas, a Feliz Natal, with many thanks to you for dropping by my blog this year. I don’t have many followers. Mine is a modest endeavour, but I am very grateful for those of you who have found me here. I enjoy meeting you on your blogs from where you are in Canada, USA, Philippines, South Africa, Portugal, Brazil, and other parts of the world. It always delights me to see new notices from each of you in my inbox and I look forward to your posts and your thoughts, photos, and writing in 2021. To all of you, a big thank you, a grande obrigado for your virtual presence and support.
I have done a Christmas post since I started my blog and have gathered them here in case you feel inclined to have a look:
The elements that have gone into the creation of these stained glass views: sunlight, sky, water; trees for framing, and a camera for capturing the moment. It’s that simple. It’s that beautiful.
Photos taken on my mid-morning walk by the edge of the Scarborough Bluffs overlooking Lake Ontario. December 11, 2020.
It is truly a winter wonderland after the first dusting of snow covers the Scarborough Bluffs. It didn’t last for more than a day but that’s the way winters in Toronto go.
So many of us are fascinated with sunrises. There must be as many photographs of the rising sun as stars in the firmament. What is it about the daily recurrence of the arrival of the sun that enchants us, transports us into a state of wonder; awakens our longing for the infinite with a smile on our face.
Every sunrise is the same, eternal, yet shows itself in daily newness and difference. These photos, which I took a month ago, made me think that this is what the first primordial sunrise might have looked like as it came out of the universe’s womb.
It rains today. It’s cloudy and it’s best to stay inside and enjoy the memories of an unseasonal November in Toronto. We have had glorious days of sunshine and warm weather well up to yesterday. Perhaps there will be more days like this to come. The month is only half way done. For now, here’s some photos I hope you will enjoy from my walks at Rosetta Gardens and surrounding area at the edge of Lake Ontario, on the east end of this big city of Toronto.
A bit of red still hanging on, not wanting to let go of summer.
Smiling in the Darkness was published earlier this year but, because of the pandemic, a book launch event could not happen in the physical world. Luckily, FresnoState’s Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute held a virtual book launch on November 10th, 2020.
I am grateful to Diniz (Dennis) Borges, Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute Director and Portuguese Language Lecturer, for hosting and facilitating a panel presentation made up of Portuguese-American authors Anthony Barcellos and Katherine Vaz, Mário Pereira, executive editor of Bellis Azorica-Tagus Press-Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
I was also a panelist, as one of the co-translators of the novel, but it was really Katharine F. Baker who should have been on the panel, not me. She is the one who lead the translation of Adelaide Freitas’ important book, and her absence from the panel discussion was sorely missed by me. It’s not that she was not invited, far from it. Kathie chooses to limit her on-line social media connectivity, and so we do respect her for it.
Here is the text of my remarks from the panel presentation:
I feel deeply honoured to be associated with the translation project of Smiling in the Darkness. I am also thrilled that Mario Pereira’s team at Tagus accepted one of my photographs for the book cover.
My introduction to Adelaide Freitas happened many years ago while I visited Ponta Delgada, São Miguel, Açores. I was browsing for books to bring back to Toronto at Gil’s, a wonderful bookstore, now gone, when I came across, nas duas Margens: da Literatura Norte-Americana e Açoriana, a book of essays, including Adelaide’s masterful dissertation on Moby Dick. Alas, I had not seen Sorriso por dentro da noite on the shelves. If I had, I am sure I would have bought it, too. I still don’t have a copy of the novel in Portuguese.
By that time I had already met Katharine F. Baker and knew that she was working on the translation of Sorriso por dentro da noite. She assumed, rightly, that I would be interested in the story of Xana, the 12 year old girl protagonist in Adelaide Freitas’ heartbreaking account of what it means for a child to experience the fracture of family ties. One of the strongest themes in the novel for me is the idea that you can’t ever really go back and recapture the past and that the present is not always a better place. The damage has been done.
I related to Xana because I, too, experienced the tearing apart of being taken from one culture to another, from losing beloved family members through immigration, and the ultimate realization that something deep within the soul gets damaged or changed. The ending of the novel has Xana clinging desperately to hold on to her world just as it is about to change forever. It’s a profound moment that captured my own moment of leaving the island of São Miguel for Canada at the age of nine.
While my life has been mostly lived in English, I miraculously maintained an “intuitive feeling” or “soul” understanding of my maternal language over the years, although at times, it feels like a distant memory, too.
This is the background I had and so Sorriso was a very emotional read for me. Although Kathie Baker is a very competent and careful translator, she only learned Portuguese in her mid-fifties after discovering that she had Azorean ancestry in her family. Since then, she has been a tireless champion of bringing Azorean writing to the English speaking world. We owe her a great debt of gratitude for this. I owe Kathie a great debt of gratitude for trusting me and bringing me along on this translation journey.
She had done a meticulous job, but I felt the translation still needed some wordsmithing to capture more deeply the nuance, richness and texture of Adelaide’s lyrical writing, and so I tried to make some polite suggestions to Kathie as to where to change a word here, a phrase there. To my surprise and delight she was open to my suggestions and invited me to collaborate fully on the final draft of the translation. So as I compared the texts, side by side, I guided Katharine into bringing out as much as possible the flavour and soul of the novel.
I suppose the first attempt at any translation is to try and get the words, the sentence structure, the syntax, the equivalents down on paper as much as possible. It’s like jigsaw puzzle pieces all in front of you. Some pieces are hard to make fit, while others are so self-evident that they lull the translator into a false sense of “getting it right.” It’s also like seeing a painting in front of you with all the colour foundation but still in need of some additional brush strokes, some smudging, or even small additions of colour to fill out the complexity of the image. That’s where I came in, at this final stage after the groundwork had already been done.
When we completed the translation, all that was missing was its English title. Sorriso por dentro da noite is one of those phrases that is very hard to find the equivalent of in English, but we finally settled on Smiling in the Darkness. I think it’s a fine equivalent, but for me, a native Portuguese speaker, the Portuguese contains a richness and a nuance that I can’t really explain or translate. I can only experience it through a feeling in my most inner self.
This is the challenge of all translation. It’s not just words. It’s a culture, a people, a geographical landscape, it’s everything to do with how we identify and belong in the physical world, but put down into words.
Given the beauty of Adelaide’s writing, so drenched in local language, so poetic in its prose, it was indeed a challenge to get the translation right as much as possible, without losing the lyricism of the book.
I think we have done justice to Adelaide’s novel and I hope it will please those who will read it in English, that it will help them enter Adelaide’s world, see it, touch it, taste it, in translation, yes, but still connecting with the essence of the original.
I once wrote a reflection called Being Through Words, which you can read on my blog posting of March, 2018 and which has recently been published in a new anthologyAntologia Literária Satúrnia, Autores Luso-Canadianos (available as a PDF download).
In my reflection on the meaning of translation of not only words, but of the self through words, I would like to end with a poem by Avelina da Silveira, a visual artist and poet, born in Angola but who lives in both the Azores and Canada.
When I first read her poem, Palavras onde me perco, (Words where I lose Myself) it was like having a knife-stabbing-to-the -heart experience, especially the line: “Já não sonho em português.” “I no longer dream in Portuguese.” This is the painful moment I had experienced through immigration when eventually my mother-language receded to make room for the new language of the country that became home. This, I suspect would be something Xana would experience eventually, and that Adelaide would be conscious of in her own reflections of language and identity. I think this poem captures the heart of Smiling in the Darkness, and so I’d like to finish here by reading it.
Palavras onde me perco
How I long for the days when words were essential!
Outros tempos quando a palavra encerrava uma certeza
existencial
— coeur et mots, moi même in a fabric of being.
Foi há tanto tempo que parti…
As palavras custam a vir;
como se eu as quisesse articular mas houvesse uma pedra
na garganta.
A voz lusitana escorre sem que dela eu beba,
quase alien, porque já não sonho em português.
Palavras, words, mots perdus…
Labirintos de imagens onde me perco
na ânsia de chegar à outra margem de mim.
J’ai changé le profil du jour
et j’ai perdu mon visage en ce temps,
never again myself between the sea and the maples.
Oh tragédia de imigrar, de partir sem chegar
tecendo na diáspora un être d’ici et de toujours.
Demain será un autre pays, un autre matin,
De identidade dispersa
I’ll be searching in yesterday
for the name of a water bird among the snow.
I think I could live here: Achada, São Miguel, Açores
While the colours of autumn in many parts of Canada are reds and golden yellows, in the Azores it still remains green well into October. Or so that’s how I remember it from several visits I made to São Miguel over the last ten years. It’s one of my favourite months to meander through the trails and roads along the Nordeste region, especially in the village of Achada, where I stay.
Hortênsias, or novelões, as I learned to call the hydrangeas of my childhood, had already faded their summer colours of deep blues, vibrant pinks and whites, but I still loved walking by them, growing wild along the edges of roads and stone fences.
The Conteira (Hedychium gardnerianum), is also a plant that grows wild everywhere. I was lucky to see many of these flowers still holding on to their summer yellow.
Ideally, I should have gone in summers to see the vibrant colours that adorn the island, but there is a beauty in the lingering plant life of October. I don’t know if all this changes in November as the days become shorter and the weather less amenable. I suppose it does, but I have never gone to visit that late in the year. Suffice it for me to be content with the memory of green.
I hope to walk here again someday. Oxalá, se Deus quizer.
Manuel Carvalho, a writer and editor from Montreal, has been collecting the contribution of Portuguese writers in Canada for over twenty years. His work has culminated in an important publication of over 120 Luso-Canadian writers, Antologia Literária Satúrnia – Autores Luso-Canadianos.
The anthology of over 400 pages, a significant addition to the documentation of the canon of the Portuguese diaspora in Canada, is primarily in Portuguese, with a few texts in English and French. The selection criteria for inclusion in the anthology was that a writer be already published in book form. However, Manuel Carvalho made a couple of exceptions and included two texts from writers not yet published. I am overjoyed to be one of them.
I am extremely honoured and delighted that he chose my English written essay, Being Through Words, originally posted on my blog, as one of the exceptions made. I am very proud to be included in this collection (page 379) and offer my heartfelt obrigado to Manuel Carvalho.
Making the anthology available to readers during a pandemic has proven a great difficulty. However, despite no official book launch dates, copies were distributed to those who attended the Toronto launch for Avós: Raízes e Nós this past September.
The anthology is currently available for download on PDF and I encourage all those who can read in Portuguese to have a look at this collection which gathers a wide variety of Portuguese writers in the diaspora who, despite living far from their geographical roots, continue to write in Portuguese but also in the languages of acolhimento, the official bi-lingual languages that welcomed us into the Canadian social landscape.
Here’s a couple of articles, in Portuguese, about the anthology:
Watching the way that some trees shed their green in autumn to reveal a fiery red before the inevitable end of their live cycle reminds me of the line, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” from the Dylan Thomas poem, Do not go gentle into that good night.
These photographs were taken at Rosetta McClain Gardens where I have the pleasure of walking every day.
Photos taken on my mid-morning walk by the edge of the Scarborough Bluffs overlooking Lake Ontario. December 11, 2020.
So many of us are fascinated with sunrises. There must be as many photographs of the rising sun as stars in the firmament. What is it about the daily recurrence of the arrival of the sun that enchants us, transports us into a state of wonder; awakens our longing for the infinite with a smile on our face.
The same sunrise seen from afar
View of Lake Ontario from Rosetta McClain Gardens
A bit of red still hanging on, not wanting to let go of summer.
The Last Leaf
I think I could live here: Achada, São Miguel, Açores
I hope to walk here again someday. Oxalá, se Deus quizer.
