São Paulo

by Teixeira de Pascoaes, António Cândido Franco (Editor)

Como afirma António-Pedro Vasconcellos, na sua apresentação a esta obra de Teixeira de Pascoaes, São Paulo é um livro genial. Nele se descreve admiravelmente o percurso místico de Paulo, "divino poeta da vida e da loucura", e episódios como o martírio de Santo Estêvão, a conversão, a evangelização, o retorno a Jerusalém, a prisão e o julgamento, a loucura de Nero e o incêndio de Roma. Foi após a publicação de São Paulo, livro muito elogiado, por exemplo, por Miguel de Unamuno, que Teixeira de Pascoaes ganhou projecção internacional, tornando-se o escritor português mais traduzido no estrangeiro.

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1934

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

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think many of you have heard this passge said usually at a wedding:

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.” 1 Corinthians 13:4-5

That was Saint Paul’s letter to the Corinthians written around 53-54 CE. It was a turbulent time for the fledgling Christians in the Greek city and he wrote to counsel them. Initially it may not have worked as he wrote three more follow-up letters.

An equally famous incident happened on the road to Damascus around 31-36 CE. Paul was originally known as Saul, a Roman citizen from a Jewish family from Tarsus who heartily persecuted the early Christians. On the road, he was struck blind by god who called out “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He was taken to Damascus and nursed back to health and regained his sight by Ananias of Damascus. Saul converted to Christianity and began as an apostle founding churches in the Near East and Greece.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...

I was curious when I came across this book by the Portuguese writer Teixeira de Pascoaes (1877 - 1952), an author that is new to me. Born as Joaquim Pereira Teixeira de Vasconcelos, he took on the pen name Teixeira de Pascoaes and was nominated five times for the Nobel prize in literature. He started out poorly in school, carried on and reluctantly started his career as a lawyer. After two years he gave it up thanks to being a wealthy landowner. He also started to write poetry. By the time he died at age 75, he had written numerous books while his estate São João do Gatão became a meeting place for intellectuals (Wikipedia). A wise move on his part.

This leads to the book. What a bizarrely, strange and unique way to tell a story. On the face value it comes across as a historical romance, although romance isn’t quite what one uses for a saint. It’s like a travelogue, we travel through the Middle East, heavy with an emphasis on the poverty, the cruelty and hatred between religion and peoples. Paul meets Christians and makes converts. His life is full of incidents. Eventually we get to Rome in the time of Nero, complete with the burning of the city and the Christians made to be the scapegoats, dying in the Colosseum. It’s a very bleak time.

At the same time, the book is not a hagiography as this saint has a lot of flaws, but don’t they all? What makes it unique is that, despite the book is rooted in the first century CE, Teixeira de Pascoaes constantly makes all sorts of historical and literary references. From referring to Dostoyevsky and Napoleon he moves easily right back to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and his favourite Lucretius. He loved to make comparisons between Paul and Lucretius, “Paul the supreme poet of madness and hunger; Lucretius, the supreme poet of satiety and reason. Paul lived surrounded by angels and ghosts; Lucretius lived in a desert.” And on it goes (and time to read Lucretius).

One of his recurring methods is to make a statement and/or contrast things. Here are some examples:

“We are men, not gods.” This is a reference to their human conversion work as opposed to the ancient view that a god must have been involved (see Homer or Virgil).
“The Middle Age is a fiction.”
“Virgil is a temple; Paul is a church.”
“The temple of Jehova is an apocalypse, like Jerónimo in the Lusíadas.” A shout out to his native epic poet Luís de Camões.
“Rome is the belly of the world, the head is Athens, decrepit and bald, the heart is Jerusalem, losing more and more rhythm, beating wildly until it bursts.”

Everything becomes a contrast between Christianity and Paganism., old and new, good and evil, Christ and the Antichrist. There is even a reference to the modern world of 1934. “In this modern industrial orgy, a parody of iron and steam pagan orgy, man is dead or isolated from his spirit.” One could say that Teixeira de Pascoaes seems to pine for the good old days, with poetry at the heart of his vision, even though he paints a very troubled time. The times are changing one might say…

The book surprised me. 3.5 stars

Nota bene: I read the Projecto Adamastor ebook, 978-989-8698-87-2.