Livro de Memórias

by Teixeira de Pascoaes, António Cândido Franco (Editor)

Aos cinquenta anos, Teixeira de Pascoaes manifesta a intenção de realizar uma autobiografia, para que lhe fosse possível reviver as personagens e os cenários da sua infância, que com o tempo se alteraram. Escreve, assim, "Livro de Memórias", retornando a si mesmo para recriar um passado que cessou de existir. Imagina Lucrécia, a velha criada contadora de histórias terríficas e a Viscondessa de Tardinhade, louca no seu vestido de seda preta. Desenha o seu auto-retrato e o da sua família, escreve sobre o Marão, a paisagem que consigo se confunde. "Sou os outros, e é outra esta paisagem que me cerca de aparições. (…) Sou terra onde as árvores deitam fundas raízes que só o machado pode derrubar. (…) Já não sou eu; sou os outros."Neste extraordinário retrato de família, Pascoaes dá voz à afirmação de Proust segundo a qual existe, "nas pessoas que amamos, um sonho que não sabemos decifrar, mas que perseguimos".

260 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1928

About the author

A mystic poet who felt profoundly connected to the humblest things and to the brightest stars, Teixeira de Pascoaes was born and died in the small town of Amarante, in northern Portugal, and led a relatively uneventful life. In 1896 he went to Coimbra to study law, though poetry and contemplation were his favorite endeavors. University life was, at the time, a rather boisterous affair, but Pascoaes kept out of student brawls and political rows, devoting himself to study and writing. He published his first three books of poems while at university (not counting the book, later repudiated, that he had published a year before arriving at Coimbra), and these already show his attraction to an idealized nature, to the darkly mysterious, to the vague and ethereal. He worked for a few years as a lawyer and a judge, but then retreated, as it were, into his inner life. He was by no means a recluse, however. His religiosity had a missionary side: Pascoaes became the chief apostle and theoretician of saudosismo.
Saudosismo was a movement that promulgated saudade as a national spiritual value that could have transformative power. Saudade means “longing, nostalgia, yearning” for something absent, but it is a feeling fraught with more emotional weight and affective intensity than corresponding words from English and other languages convey. Pascoaes gave this unique Portuguese word a philosophical and spiritual twist. In an article published in 1913, he wrote that “saudade is creation, a perpetual and fruitful marriage of Remembrance with Desire, of Evil with God, of Life with Death . . .”. And in a conference delivered that same year, he spoke of “the action of desire on remembrance and of remembrance on desire, the two intimate elements of saudade”, described elsewhere in the conference as “the perfect and living fusion of Nature and the Spirit”. Saudade was, in Pascoaes’ conception, a species of élan vital.

From 1910 to 1916, Pascoaes was editor of A Águia, an Oporto-based magazine that became the mouthpiece for the Renascença Portuguesa (Portuguese Renaissance), a movement of which saudosismo was part and parcel. It was by cultivating saudade, considered to be the defining characteristic of the ‘Portuguese soul’, that a national renaissance was supposed to take place. This signified not “a simple return to the Past” (wrote Pascoaes in A Águia in 1912) but a “return to the original wellsprings of life in order to create a new life”. To achieve this Renaissance he advocated, among other things, the establishment of a Portuguese Church, which could better accommodate the original spirit of the nation, part Christian but also part pagan.

The nationalist program of saudosismo is only latently felt in most of Pascoaes’ poetry, for his bent was predominantly spiritual, and in a lecture delivered in the last year of his life, he remarked: “Man does not belong only to society; he belongs, first and foremost, to the Cosmos. Society is not an end but a means for facilitating man’s mission on earth, which is to be the consciousness of the Universe.” This point of view informs virtually all of his poetry, which is, in large measure, a pantheistic celebration of life – not just life on earth, but also the life of the imagination and the universe. In the early poem ‘ Poet’, he states that “I am, in the future, time past” – the embodiment, in effect, of saudade. He claims to be “a mountain cliff”, “an astral mist”, “a living mystery”, “God’s delirium”, and so on, which is why he also says, “I’m man fleeing from himself”. Not limited to his own body, he connects with the rest of reality, to the point of interpenetrating and becoming its other manifestations.

Pascoaes’ universe is one of correspondences between seeming opposites: the past with the future, nostalgia with hope, sorrow with joy, the material with the spiritual. The dynamic nature of this unity of opposites is well expressed by two verses greatly admired by Fernando Pessoa: “The leaf

Reviews

[Ana Marinho · Rating 5 out of 5]

Este livro de Teixeira de Pascoaes vai direto para a minha lista de melhores do ano. Sem dúvidas ou reticências. Foi amor à primeira página e acho que a paixão que se fez sentir permanecerá para sempre. Ler um livro de memórias pode aparentar ser aborrecido e não convencer todos os leitores - é válido, se não tivesse sido escrito com tamanha sensibilidade e delicadeza. O autor escreve prosa poética com uma mestria que poucos têm. A sua simplicidade vem de braço dado com a maior beleza do mundo e a banal descrição do cheiro a broa consegue encher-nos de lágrimas pelas memórias que evoca.
Teixeira de Pascoaes aborda a saudade como poucos o fazem. As descrições das pessoas da sua vida lembram-me as pessoas da minha. Os objetos que personifica assemelham-se aos meus. As dores são partilhadas. As saudades do que foi, de quem era, de quem existia comigo.
O tempo não pára - excepto quando nos lembrámos do nosso passado. Sabem aquela sensação de deja vú? De provarem um sabor que vos lembra o prato que a vossa avó preparava? Ou de sentirem um cheiro que é exatamente o mesmo perfume da tia que já não está entre nós? Agora imaginem um livro que explora estas memórias para o autor e que nos remetem para as nossas próprias memórias.
Deliciei-me.
Emocionei-me.
E soube que Teixeira de Pascoaes seria para me acompanhar o resto da vida.