Tag: António Lobo Antunes

Posted in Portuguese

O Trabalho Mais Fácil De Sempre?

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Tenho nove horas e meia para desenvolver o trabalho do primeiro e-Folio do curso atual. A pergunta é a seguinte:

Atente na última frase de cada um dos capítulos de” Os Cus de Judas” de Lobo Antunes. Escolha, de entre essas últimas frases, uma que lhe tenha especialmente agrado e explique as razões da sua escolha.

Mas também…

Nota: é obrigatório citar a frase escolhida.

Então? Porque é que este blogue é intitulado “O Trabalho Mais Fácil de Sempre”? Porque as normas do exercício estipulam “o e-Folio não deve ultrapassar 1 página A4”. E olha o tamanho das frases que Lobo Antunes escreveu.

São quase todas iguais. Depois de citar a frase escolhida, sobraria espaço o suficiente para 3 palavras.

“É muito bom” 4 Valores se faz favor.

Posted in English

One Of The Hardest Things I’ve Ever Read

Posted on by Colin Lusk

Struggling a bit with Os Cus de Judas. I should have finished it by now really, but it’s non-linear, dense, grammatically complicated and has very long sentences full of very fancy, unfamiliar words. On top of that, the  cultural references fly right over my head, obviously, since he’s writing about a time when I was about 4 years old.

I’ve taken to reading it on a tablet which is easier since I can use the onboard dictionary and save a lot of tedious page flipping business. I can even have it read to me in a passable robot voice, which helps me sustain the momentum.

Of course not all the words are in its dictionary. Vitaphor isn’t capitalised but I believe it’s a kind of medicinal tonic drink… Maybe…

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!