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review 2018-06-22 19:02
Fin-de-siècle Urban Nightmares: “Lucio's Confession” by Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Margaret Jull Costa (translator)
Lucio's Confession - Mário de Sá-Carneiro


"Deep down, I did hate those people – the artists. That is, those false artists whose work consists of the poses they strike: saying outrageous things, cultivating complicated tastes and appetites, being artificial, irritating, [and] unbearable. People who, in fact, take from art only what is false and external.”

 

In “Lucio's Confession” by Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Margaret Jull Costa (translator)

 



From the street, two floors below my hotel window in a dreary urban business park slash hotel district, I heard desperate, blood chilling cries for help. I rushed to the window, expecting to see the victim of a hit and run car accident lying bloodied at the curb-side but instead, I saw a young man with a tear stained face wearing only a long sleeved, open-cuffed shirt walking this way and then that, each time with purpose, until the moment he changed his mind. Shouting, pleading with his hands outstretched. For a heartbreaking moment, I thought he looked like my estranged stepson.

 

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.

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review 2017-07-23 16:17
A Country Without (SF) Readers: “Antologia Cyberpunk” by Editorial Divergência
Proxy - Divergência

Published 2016.

 

“O Neuromante foi publicado por mim em Portugal apenas dois anos depois da primeira edição em língua inglesa. Talvez tenha sido a primeira tradução para uma língua estrangeira. Estremeci de alegria quando o livro veio à estampa. Pensei: agora sim, agora os detractores da FC vão engolir mil sapos.

Infelizmente esqueci-me de que vivemos em Portugal. Num país sem grande futuro, nem mesmo o do Gernsback. Um país sem leitores. Trataram-no como se nem sequer existisse. Ou como se se tratasse de mais umas tantas páginas de lixo escapista. Nas livrarias, foi parar às secções de literatura infantil ou às prateleiras de estudos informáticos. Enfim, não vendeu. Nas Feiras do Livro que se lhe seguiram, foi vendido a retalho por tuta e meia, como se o quisessem oferecer a um pobre. [….] E por não ter vendido, nada de nada, foi razão mais do que suficiente para o Editor me olhar, imbuído de um triste desprezo, me dizer que eu só escolhia coisas muito más, e que por isso teria de pôr fim à colecção de FC. Meu dito meu feito.”

 

("Neuromancer was published by me in Portugal only two years after the first edition in English. Maybe it was the first translation into a foreign language. I jumped with joy when the translation first came out. I thought: 'Yes, now the detractors of SF must bite the bullet.' Unfortunately, I forgot that we live in Portugal. In a country with no great future, not even Gernsback's. A country without readers. They treated the translation as if it did not even exist. Or as if it were some more pages of escapist junk. In the bookstores, it went to the sections of children's literature or to the shelves of computer studies. Anyway, it did not sell. At the Book Fairs that followed, it was sold to retail stores for nothing, as if they wanted to offer it to the poor. [....] And for not having sold anything at all, it was more than enough reason for the Editor to look at me, imbued with a sad contempt, to tell me that I only chose very bad things, and thus end the SF collection. No sooner said than done.")

 

In the foreword by João Barreiros in “Antologia Cyberpunk” by Editorial Divergência.

 

 

I've been reading some old best-of-the-year SF anthologies lately, bought on eBay, as well as this one by Editoral Divergência, a Portuguese book publishing house; it was the last one of the bunch, and in there the cyberpunk trope seems to be swimming in foreign waters, literal and figuratively speaking. While the cyberpunk stories in these anthologies are generally good, there's a distinct sense of hardening sub-genre assumptions about them -- the shared idea that computer criminals would largely be members of street gangs seems particularly far off. By the 1989 anthology, most of the authors who'd been doing cyberpunk had gone on to other things. What about 2016 when this Portuguese cyberpunk anthology came out?

 

 

If you're into SF, read on.

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review 2015-02-25 14:12
1930: BRAZIL IN REVOLUTION
O País do Carnaval - Jorge Amado

'O País do Carnaval' is the debut novel of one of Brazil's most celebrated writers of the 20th century, Jorge Amado. Largely autobiographical, it is based upon the life of an idealistic young man (Paulo Rigger) from an affluent background in Brazil's poverty-ridden Northeast with communistic sympathies.

The year is 1930 and Paulo is a law student in Rio de Janeiro, where he is leading a life that is at variance with his beliefs. Amado shares with the reader the rich and colorful life a person of means could enjoy in Rio at the time. In essence, 'O País do Carnaval' can be read as a polemic on social inequality in a Brazil that was (at the dawn of the 1930s) on the cusp of a wrenching transition from an agrarian to an industrialized nation.

I bought this novel during my second trip to Brazil in June 1990 and found it fairly easy to read - despite my threadbare, less than fluid Portuguese. For anyone who has read other novels from Jorge Amado and has a fascination with Brazil --- as I do --- I highly recommend 'O País do Carnaval.'

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review 2010-11-15 00:00
Essential Portuguese Grammar (Dover Language Guides Essential Grammar)
Essential Portuguese Grammar - Alexander da R. Prista This is a great reference for Portuguese grammar. My only reasons for not giving it 5 stars are that it is a little dates (published in 1966, and a couple formal changes to the language have occurred since then) and the layout is not as clean as it could be. The latter is more an issue when one is flipping around looking for something - the poor layout makes it easier to miss what you're looking for.
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