While exploring the public statues of the city, Stephen Gray tracks the literary links between Portugal and South Africa
The football-inspired presence of South Africa’s old ally, Portugal, is currently at Johannesburg’s Melrose Arch. Until mid-July, the venue is holding a festival, Portugal at Heart, that includes art exhibitions, jewellery displays, food, folk dance, music and movies. “Live out your passion” is the slogan they have adopted for the event.
Was there a mad cow calving, a bewildered and probably newly arrived translator asks me as I stroll through the yellow-fevered crowds? (He would soon become accustomed to our welcoming blasts.)
He guides me past the Portuguese flag to a sculpture exhibition. There is a suspended heart shape (flown in to the land of organ transplants). Called Red Independent Heart, it is one of three by Joana Vasconcelos. The accompanying soundtrack is vintage fado by Amália Rodrigues, to the effect that her heart is entirely her own.
Piri-piri coloured, it is made of the plastic knives, forks and spoons you would use under a flapping sail to apportion your Friday bacalhau (dried, salted cod). Beyond the exhibition is a fashion show and a folk dance.
In Parktown’s Brenthurst Library Portugal’s consulate general has been the inspiration behind an exhibition showing how the bond between our two countries began. There are medieval maps, charts and compendiums from the Ernest Oppenheimer collection. They illustrate how, with the infidels invading Europe, reaching Vienna, the continent’s westernmost kingdom had to shift from its mountain barriers to the surf. The scheme was to circumnavigate Africa and get back at them from behind.
In Lisbon itself you can still see at the Discovery monument where this brave outflanking manouevre was launched. There the River Tagus pours into the boundless North Atlantic, which, past the Guinea slave coast, connects to the South Atlantic (new stars to steer by, waterspouts, scurvy), which connects with those exotic coastlines of a fuzzy landfall called Goa (or Macau or even Timor). The grandson of John of Gaunt, Henry the Navigator, strides forth, a two-masted, lateen-rigged caravel in hand, the first of the European imperial seafarers.
Beneath it is the paving sponsored by the fellow fascists of our land 50 years ago. This is an immense mosaic in which the entire world is unscrolled about a wind rose, rhumb lines indicating compass bearings.
Of interest nearby is the shrine in the Jerónimos Monastery, built in the Gothic Manueline style, ropes and anchors coiled in stone. There both Vasco da Gama and Luís de Camões repose, each in a sarcophagus, their remains retrieved from oblivion in the 19th century. In fact, Camões was born the year Da Gama died (1524), although he often seems to be Da Gama’s contemporary because Camões’s epic, The Lusiads, is written largely in the rich voice of the seafarer who preceded him eastwards.
The key obstacle was always rounding that lousy Cape of Storms. Personified as a fearsome Titan of the old guard, he would tolerate no trespass to the trading flood:
An immense shape
Materialised in the night air,
Grotesque and of enormous stature,
With heavy jowls, and an unkempt beard,
Scowling from shrunken, hollow eyes —
The translation is by Landeg White, from his edition of 1997.
And, sure enough, past Camões Square, with its column holding the one-eyed poet aloft, I come across a corner bar named after our monster, Adamastor. Below him in the public square is a depiction of the hulk himself, in huge pitted limestone. A tiny bronze Hottentot perches upon his knee, like an ally pacifying the old curmudgeon.
White has since produced an admirable edition of Camões’s lyric poems, the first translation in English. He was the first of all Renaissance writers to have crossed the Equator, finding the Cape somewhat mellower than expected and naming it the Cape of Good Hope, after all.
The other poetic link for us has to be that polymath genius of the first half of the 20th century, Fernando Pessoa. His stepfather was dispatched as the Portuguese consul to Natal and the bardling of Berea (as he styled himself) was to take all the class prizes at Durban High School. Indeed, in the Casa Pessoa museum his report cards are on display (“Composition: very good. Has worked well and is a credit to the chaps. 93%”). Nowadays exhibitions and other events are held there in the library.
Images of the poet in a Homburg with his granny glasses and soup-strainer moustache are in every bookshop window as still more editions of his work appear. To think Pessoa spent his adulthood rubber-stamping bills of lading and drafting agreements (in Portuguese, English and French) while privately inviting his reader to dream of the white circumflexes of seagulls, over tides salty with the tears of widows.
He foresaw his empire would leave behind little more than the fifth most-spoken language.
In Rua Garrett I find a seated statue of Pessoa, outside the Brasileira Café, as if he is still enjoying his breakfast of that colonial crop, coffee, his nose rubbed with kisses. A foreign TV team has come to “interview” him, although it seems he is trying to put them off.
The citizens of the Chiado quarter are used to this kind of absurdity. A block further down is another statue of Pessoa, outside his birthplace. This time his head is actually hidden in a book.
Further along has to be Roy Campbell Avenue. This is a commercial route leading up to one of the capital’s huge hillside parks, named after our rackety poet who gave up on South Africa and spent his last years nearby. Campbell is remembered here for the deft translations he knocked out from a literature otherwise hardly known beyond Lusophile circles.
Especially influential were his renderings of the 19th century diplomat, Eça de Queiroz. The 1953 edition of his novel, Cousin Basilio, has recently been reprinted by Carcanet in the Campbell version. Naturally there has to be a statue of this superb Eça, too, and there is the frock-coated old grandee. He is holding up what must be his nude muse, fainting at his revelation of her sexuality. Apparently students regularly paint over her parts so that she has to be scraped clean.
So much for their public monuments over there. But then Lisbon alone also has more than 30 museums. So spare a toot for this historic stopover of ours.
The exhibition of the Portuguese Presence in Africa and the East is on at the Brenthurst Library, Federation Road, Parktown, until October 31. Groups can visit by appointment. Phone 011 544 5400