Last weekend I went to Sao Paulo and, naturally, I visited the Museum of the Portuguese Language. If you still didn’t have the chance to visit it, please hurry up. Not only the museum offers beautiful attractions to the speakers, lovers and appreciators of “the last flower of Latium”, the temporary exhibition is currently on Rubem Braga. For this reason, I chose him to be the theme of my series Brazilianisms part 2.
I got to know Rubem Braga by reading the collection Para Gostar de Ler when I was a kid. From that moment on, I fell in love with his short stories, as well as others from those who crafted my literary character. They are: Paulo Mendes Campos, Fernando Sabino, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Vinicius de Moraes, Sergio Porto (aka Stanislaw Ponte Preta) and so many others who will not fit in this sentence.
Therefore, I leave you a brief translation into English of one of his texts, so you can understand a bit about how our “Brazilianism” works.
The good things in life
A rather frivolous magazine asked many people to say “ten things that make life worth living.” Without mulling over this for too long, I made this brief list:
- To occasionally come across some childhood food, for example: boiled cassava, still warm, accompanied by sugar cane syrup that comes in a bottle whose cap is made out of a corncob. I wonder if it’s the corncob that gives a sort of taste to the syrup? It does give: a taste of childhood in the afternoon at the farm
- To take an outstanding shower in a fine hotel, put on some comfortable clothing and go out for the first time in the streets of an unknown city, thinking of all the amazing and beautiful things that will happen. And then they do happen.
- When you are walking around and there’s an informal football match in the street. To feel that the ball is coming your way and suddenly give it a perfect kick – to the point construction workers start applauding you forr your feat.
- To read, for the very first time, a truly good poem. Or some prose, that kind that makes us feel envy and looking forward to reading it again.
- That moment when you realize that from an old love now remains a great friendship – or that a great friendship is suddenly turning into love.
- To feel you no longer like a woman who, after all, to you, meant only spirit afliction and frustation of the flesh – the woman who did not give it to you and does not give it to you, the damned one.
- To travel, go away…
- To get back.
- While living in Europe, get back to Paris, while living in Brazil, get back to Rio
- Think that, no matter how bad things are, there is always a solution, death – the so-called eternal rest.