Posted in English, Portuguese

Capitão Fausto – Santa Ana

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Well, I can’t see my new pro-Fausto stance lasting long because, as I said yesterday, their studio output is quite bland and overproduced, but while I am in the zone, let’s try a translation. This is Santa Ana from their first album, Gazela, and one of the songs they played as the finale for the show.

PortuguêsInglês
Está a chover dentro da sala de estar
A casa ardeu; ninguém parou de dançar		It’s raining in the living room
The house caught fire. Nobody stopped dancing
Ela diz que devo aprender
As noites simples e o que é ficar
Ela é linda e o seu parecer
Faz-me sentir que é tempo de mudar		She says I should learn
The ordinary nights are what it is to stay
She’s lovely and her appearance
Makes me think it’s time to change
Está a chover dentro da sala de estar
A casa ardeu; ninguém parou de dançar		It’s raining in the living room
The house caught fire. Nobody stopped dancing
Ela diz que eu devo aprender
As noites simples e o que é ficar
Ela é linda mas não quer ver
Que qualquer dia já cá não vou estar		She says I should learn
The ordinary nights are what it is to stay
She’s lovely but I don’t want to see
That someday I won’t be here

Is that all? 8 lines? I don’t feel like I’ve had much of a workout. That’s a long instrumental break they did at the end there. OK, well, I like the lyrics anyway, even if they are a bit terse, sometimes it’s best to keep it tight and not waffle on for 4 verses. I hope you enjoyed it.

Posted in Portuguese

Capitão Fausto

Posted on by Colin Lusk
Capitão Fausto, Dingwalls, Camden

Acabo de assistir ao concerto dos Capitão Fausto. As minhas expectativas foram extremamente baixas. Subterrâneas, pá. Ouvi os discos deles e achei o seu som fraco. Mas afinal as expectativas baixas foram facilmente ultrapassadas. E fiquei feliz que fui ver o concerto. E como não? Aqui temos uma das bandas mais conhecidas em Portugal a tocar no Dingwalls, em Camden, numa sala de espectáculos muito pequena e íntima. Quem recusaria uma oportunidade assim?

Tocaram os meus favoritos, mas soaram mil vezes melhor do que as versões dos álbuns. A sua presença no palco, o seu empenho, chamou-me a atenção e tornaram as canções mais animadores. O público curtiu tudo e até os ingleses que viram com as suas namoradas portuguesas e não entenderam nada tiveram uma noite divertida, acho eu.

Estou entusiasmada para ouvir o álbum “Gazela” novamente para ver se soar melhor agora que vi a banda ao vivo.

Estou a escrever no comboio com duas cervejas na barriga. Espero que a minha gramática não seja ainda pior do que normal!

Posted in English

Second Exam Result and The Next Stage

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Got the result for the second of the exams. It arrived via a completely different route from the other, contributing to my impression that the Universidade Aberta’s systems are a bit more random than the Open University in Britain. Anyway, never mind. As for my own performance, well, it was pretty terrible. Worse than expected, even. 7/12, which is only just over the pass mark. Luckily, this one has 40% for continual evaluation though, and I did pretty well in that so the average was dragged up. 13.7/20 which is what? 65 +3.5 = 68.5%. That’s not bad really! If I’d had 5 more minutes for a quick grammar check Iºd have probably gone up 5 or 10%, I think, but it was not to be!

The final stage of the course is starting now: Literatura e Cultura Portuguesas – Época Contemporânea. It seems to be all about the colonial wars and the end of empire and there are three set books, two of which I have read already and one is on my TBR: respectively “O Retorno” (Dulce Maria Cardoso), “A Costa dos Murmúrios” (Lídia Jorge) and “Os Cus de Judas” (António Lobo Antunes). I’m excited to get started because I enjoyed the first two books but don’t remember them well, so a guided re-read of them would be great, and Os Cus de Judas comes highly recommended too!

Posted in English

Final Mark’s In For The Literature and Culture Exam

Posted on by Colin Lusk

And it’s not exactly easy to find. Nobody told me I had passed or anything but according to the site I got “18.00”. OK, well fine but out of what? Not 18% I hope!

I had to go back to the course description in the end and it says that…

O Exame Final consiste numa única prova escrita, realizada na plataforma WISEFlow e classificada numa escala de 0 (zero) a 20 (vinte) valores.

So… I think I got 90%! Pretty pleased with that! The pass mark is only 50, and 90% is way beyond what I’ve got in any exam since O-Levels, so yeah, pretty pleased!

Posted in English

Oof, Well That Went Sightly Less Well…

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I’ve just finished the literature exam. I think I gave pretty solid answers, but I was much more pressed for time in this one than the last and crucially didn’t have time to go back and fix typos. And the browser they use for the exams doesn’t even have spellcheck or any of the other features I take for granted when writing here, say, so I imagine I will be losing some marks for my shit grammar.

Chewing over other things I probably could have done better, I discussed a narrative told to the narrator by a character she interviews and I probably should have slipped the word “intradiegético” in there somewhere. Likewise, when discussing other forms of art used as framing devices in Os Memoráveis (the fact that they are making a film, and the fact that they have a photograph with them which they are using the jog people’s memories) I think I explained the mechanism pretty well but I should have used the word “intermediality”. Just throwing away points, there.

Half way through, a parakeet came and landed on the bird feeder near where I’m sitting. It’s really only for little birds like robins and tits, so if I see a parakeet, a crow or a pigeon out there I usually chuck a pen, or whatever is to hand, at the window to scare them away. This time I only had my wallet so I threw that, realising, just as it left my hand, that the window was open in the direction i was throwing. Luckily, I hit the glass and disaster was averted. Imagine how embarrassing it would be to have to come on here and say “Well, I was failed for leaving the table for 3 minutes while I ran downstairs to retrieve my credit cards from the pavement after lobbing them at a ring-necked parakeet”!

Posted in English, Portuguese

Revision

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Since the final exam of the literature module starts in an hour and a quarter, I might have left the revision a bit late. In truth, I haven’t even finished the third book. It took me ages to get into it although now I have, I am flying along but I haven’t reached the end. Oh well, never mind, I can finish it in my own good time

Conceitos

Intermedialidade

A intermedialidade é a possibilidade de descobrirmos interações entre discursos em mediáticos autónomos: livros, filmes, bandas desenhadas podem dialogar entre eles.

-> e intertextualidade é um sub-genero disto.

Transnarratividade

A transnarratividade é a disseminação da narratividade em práticas para além das narrativas formalmente constituídas como tais.

Transmedialidade

A transmedialidade trata-se de uma passagem de uma narrative de uma forma para outra. Por exemplo, uma adaptação de um livro no cinema.

Figuração

Processo de construir uma “figura” ou seja um “ser de papel” (Barthes, citado por Carlos Reis) o que não se restringe a uma aceção personalista ‘ veja por exemplo a Casa do Ramalhete d’Os Maias ou a Manderley no Rebecca. “Os Cinco Mil” é um exemplo disto

Liberalismo e romantismo – interlogados

Oitecentista

Extradiegetica « o narador

Intradiegetica – contado por uma personagem

Metadiegética – dito por uma pessoa em curso de uma narrativa contado por uma personagem!

Viagens na Minha Terra

1846 – entre 1789 e 1848! (uau! a serio?)

Joaninha – Ultrapassa o arquétipo da “Mulher Anjo” ou mulher siflide – “a menina dos rouxinois

Carlos – herói liberal de sangue quente, dividida entre a Georgiana e a Joaninha. “Rousseauniano” . Acaba gordo e um deputado.

Frei Dinis – Inflexível, consciente do seu grande pecadp

A terra como figura

“Fashionável”

Trio em Lá Menor

Os Memoráveis

“De todos os testemunhos, sem dúvida o mais emotivo aquele que é dado pela viúva de Charlie 8 “o rapaz dos tanques e dos chaimites”, aquele que pôs o relógio da história a andar, mas que o regime maltratou, negando-lhe uma pensão que não negou aos torcionários da pide.” here

Aaaaand thatºs all i had time for really…

Posted in English, Portuguese

This Made Me Giggle

Posted on by Colin Lusk

I love a dad joke and this is a good example of the genre. It’s a good example of how prepositions in Portuguese are often different from what we’d expect on English. Where we would say “You can count on me” as a way of saying I’ll always be there when you need me, in Portuguese you say “Podes contar comigo” (You can count with me”. So…

Posted in Portuguese

Parabéns, António José Seguro

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Existem poucas coisas mais satisfatórias do que a cara desiludida de um populista que acabou de perceber que o populismo não é assim tão popular.

Não sei nada sobre o novo presidente mas espero que tenha muito sucesso em lidar com os problemas que vai ter de encarar no palco mundial e no seu próprio país. .

Posted in English

That Went Well

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Or at least I think it did. The exam has just finished. It was only an hour and 45 minutes. The assignment had two parts:

The first was to rewrite a text that had a load of errors in it. For example, it said the aim of the course was to see how Portuguese identity had changed and the role of literature on this process, which true to a certain extent, but that’s not the stated objective of the course. Then it said that there were four key figures of the course. I rather snippily added a parenthesis saying it was three individuals and a couple. I suppose arguably two couples but the Marquês of Chamilly has no rights. We do not stan. The four, it claimed, reinforced traditional stereotypes (yeah, sure, Brites de Almeida is a typical girly girl). It described Teorema by Herberto Hélder but made some straightforward mistakes – the identity of the protagonist, his first name, and the centuries in which the story takes place. The story is so good that I was able to spot the mistakes pretty well, except that the text said it took place in Santarém and I honestly have no idea where it’s meant to have happened, so although I thought it was probably wrong, I left it as it was.

The second question just asked in what way this statue represents Dom João II. I had included it in my revision first thing this morning, so I had all the vocabulary to hand.

Where might I have gone wrong?

Well, first of all, the setup of the question seems to imply that there are certain indisputible mistakes in the first text. I thought some of them were a bit debatable and probably waffled on a bit, explaining to what extent I thought the statements were false and why. But I still finished early, so… Well, i surely wasn’t supposed to do less was I?

And secondly, in expressing my fascination with the story of the Portuguese letters, I came down pretty unambiguously on the side of the non-marianistas. The question didn’t really ask for a discussion of the pros and cons of this point of view so I thought I was pretty safe there but I’ve probably expressed it too strongly. I say she was the victim of a lie (because tbe letters were probably fake) but now I think of it again, I wonder if it comes across as me saying the romance itself didn’t happen. That was probably clumsy.

On the whole, I really enjoyed this challenge. It was nice to write a piece of graded work in an exam setting where the aim was to communicate, and to make a particular case, and not to be grammatically correct. I checked the grammar, of course, but the grammar wasn’t the point, as it would have been in a CAPLE exam.