Sarah Correia, who blogs at Café Turco, is on the move: from Portugal to Norway. I wish her all the best, and hope she’ll carry on blogging from her new location.
Sarah writes in her post about saudade, a supposedly untranslatable Portuguese word meaning nostalgia tinged with fatalism and ‘strongly connected with the act of leaving’. It’s obviously a feeling shared by Portuguese speakers in other countries, including Cabo Verde. Here’s Cesaria Evora:
Reading Sarah’s post reminded me that it’s three years to the day since I visited Lisbon - drawn by my growing attraction to the language, literature and music of Portugal - and immediately fell in love with the city. To wish Sarah 'boa viagem', here's Mariza at the Torre de Belem, with the lights of Lisbon in the background, singing ‘Gente da minha terra’ (People of my land), a song that’s about as full of saudade as you can get. The fact that it’s a setting of a poem by Fernando Pessoa, perhaps the greatest Portuguese writer of the last century, is a bonus.
5 comments:
That's very nice of you! Thank you! The songs were both very well chosen. I don't particularly appreciate Mariza as a singer, but this fado is beautiful, a very well chosen poem.
I would also like to let you know that I now sign as Sarah Correia, not Franco anymore, because I got back to my original family name.
Thanks for the comment, Sarah. I've corrected your name in the post.
It took me a while to get to like Mariza, and I don't like everything she does, but I love the Lisbon concert DVD, and find this song particularly moving.
Martin
Good luck to you, Sarah. Martin, many thanks for the post--I love Cesaria Evora, but am no afficionado of music so was glad of the second clip. All the best, Martin
Gorgeous
Glad you liked the clips. Fado's got something in common with rebetika, hasn'it it?
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