Mrs Lusk showed me this this morning. The guy doing the voiceover sounds very authentic. I don’t know who they got to do it. (video *mostly* in English with Portuguese subtitles)
http://www.dn.pt/media/interior/portugal-tambem-ja-tem-um-video-para-conquistar-trump-5645581.html
—update—
Ooh look, a nice embedable version with a couple of minutes of introduction in Portuguese
If you have been following my witterings for a while now (unlikely, I know, but possible) you might remember that I took the pre-intermediate Portuguese exam (“DEPLE”) in May and passed it pretty well, and then in November tried the Intermediate (“DIPLE”) exam but wasn’t too confident of passing because I got tongue-tied during the produção oral. Well, much to my surprise, I managed to pass it anyway, albeit with a not-so-great mark (just “suficiente” instead of the “bom” I got for the earlier one)
Viva! Não chumbei!
OK, well, not great but better than I had feared, so now I just need to knuckle down and work toward the first of the two advanced exams in late 2017, assuming the world hasn’t been destroyed in the flames of a war provoked by Donald Trump’s coked-up 3AM tweets. I will need a full year to prepare, I think, because I have some catching up to do on the intermediate material.
The next exam apparently includes things like appreciation of poetry, and the produção oral is longer and recorded on *gulp* video instead of audio.
So someone just asked about music on iTalki and I suddenly realised I’d never plugged this gem of a song by the dodgily-named Peste E Sida
It’s a lot of fun, and a good antidote if you’ve ODed on Fado and just want to jump around and shout in Portuguese about listening to the Ramones and drinking beer. I first heard it while doing some listening activities on Nós Falamos Português, which I think I probably have mentioned it before but not for a while so here I go again.
Quite liking this little snippet from RTP Antenna 1:
“…que daria vontade de rir, se não desse vontade de chorar”
Which means
“…which would make me feel like laughing if it didn’t make me feel like crying”
It’s right at the very end of this podcast from “Contas Do Dia, which you can subscribe to on iTunes
Verso Alcançando o Infinito – Tradução
O poema nasce de um impulso,
The poem is born of an impulse
de uma febre, da tirania de uma miragem,
from a fever, from the tyranny of a mirage
da tentação sonora de uma metáfora,
from the sonorous temptation of a metaphor
do vazio que teme transformar-se em nada.
from the emptiness that fears becoming a void
Depois é a escrita, é o trabalho da mão
Then comes the writing, the work with the hand
sobre a matéria incandescente das sílabas.
on the incandescent material of syllables.
E, quando damos por nós, é de corpo inteiro
And when we discover ourselves, it’s the whole body
que estamos na fragilidade do poema
that we are in the fragility of the poem
como se tivéssemos ousado cavalgar numa nuvem
as if we had dared to ride on the back of a cloud
para desafiar todos os poderes do céu.
to challenge all the powers of heaven
Quem ousará explicar este sortilégio?
Who dares explain this sorcery?
Nem sequer os deuses, pois esses
Not even the gods, because they
nasceram da própria erupção do verbo,
were born in their own verbal eruption
da explosão da prece fingindo ser capaz
from the explosion of prayer that claims to be capable
de vencer o sofrimento e o assombro.
of conquering suffering and dread.
O poema nasce, afinal, da ilusão
The poem is born, after all, from the illusion
de que ainda resta algo para ser dito
that there still remains something to be said
e de que o silêncio é um cativeiro fugaz
and that silence is a brief captivity
em que as palavras se amotinam
in which the words rebel
para de novo voltarem a ser voz.
to return to being a voice again.
José Jorge Letria, O Livro Branco da Melancolia (2001)
So I placed an order with a company called Delícias for some Portuguese food and it included a pack of salted cod. The Cod was in a bag with a sticker (Autocolante) on it and the word “Crescido”. I was curious about this. It’s the past participle of “crescer” so it means “grown”. Did that mean the cod was grown and not just a little codling? Mrs Colin didn’t know and I couldn’t quite think what to put into Google to get the answer, so I asked around and sure enough, yes, it refers to the size (“Tamanho”-quite a useful word!) of the cod when it’s caught. Bacalhau can be Miúdo or it can be graúdo or it can be especial jumbo.
I’ve since found this page listing various sizes and grades of Bacalhau caught in various parts of the ocean. Crescido seems to be at the lower middle range of the scale. So now you know!
Well, I’ve heard a lot of far less complimentary things about Mario Soares since I wrote that obit the other day. Apparently he misused public funds a few times. Well, I don’t know, on this occasion I’m quite content for the good that he did live after him and the evil be interr’d with his bones, to borrow a phrase from a Roman.
Apparently that last post was the 200th on this blog. I can hardly believe it! My other blog only has about 5 posts on it!
OK, so news: I came across a podcast recently called sbroing which has – among other things – an audio recording of O Principezinho, one of the books I read during last year’s maratona de leitura. When I first found it, I was disappointed to find that the first couple of episodes had expired from iTunes and were no longer available but more recently I have found their website, where the complete set of chapters is preserved in the archive. Excitement! So I have downloaded the whole thing to listen to later, plus a few of their other episodes. If you like audiobooks too, you should definitely check it out!
I have no idea how “sbroing” is pronounced in portuguese. It’s one of those words – like “wook” that don’t seem like arrangements of letters that would happen in Portuguese but there they are anyway.
I feel like I’ve managed the post-exam slump better than last time and I haven’t lost any knowledge, but I have got a little rusty and I need to get back up to speed. I have been especially lazy over Christmas, not really studying much and instead devoting my free time to drinking too much and eating too many mince pies, which hasn’t done much for my fluency or for my waistline. Well, now I’m back on track! I’ve booked two lessons a week, upped my podcast intake and started reading daily. I’ve also made a new friend, a portuguese student who is planning to study in the UK, so I’ve been helping her with English conversation while she helps me with my Portuguese. I need to get back into running again, too, I think. It’s a bit cold for solo rowing and I need something to give me a sense of forward motion. I know I’m probably sounding a bit… I dunno, like some smug lifestyle blogger, but I definitely find that if I am getting some physical exercise it’s easy to just use that wave of energy to throw myself into some study, whereas if I am just at home, working and farting about it’s easy to just stay in that rut.
Blah blah blah… OK, I’m waffling. better get back to work!
The period after an exam is always a bit difficult. I’m taking the time to catch up on reading all the books that have been crying out to be read for the last couple of months. It’s lovely but I can’t let myself get out of practice or it’ll be hard to recover and get back to where I was.
Luso 