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REACHING FOR THE MOON, a movie (November 2013) about the love story of the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) and the Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares (1910-1967).
The scenery is Brazil in the 50’s and 60’s and the movie starts in 1951 when Bishop arrives in Rio de Janeiro for a short visit, which turned into a stay of 14 years.
The movie was inspired by the book “Flores Raras e Banalíssimas” by Carmen Oliveira, published in Portuguese and later translated into English as “Rare and Commonplace Flowers.”
The movie director, Bruno Barreto, was particularly touched by one of Bishop’s poems, “One Art”, which became the theme of the movie–that of loss and the art of losing.
See the poem “One Art”
About Elizabeth Bishop:
Visit the Poetry Foundation
About Lota de Macedo Soares:
Visit the Instituto Lotta
About Soares and Bishop:
Visit this blog from Stanford University
Watch the trailer of the movie
In addition to the music, SAUDADE has been present in the literature of Portuguese, Creole Portuguese, and Galician speaking countries. One of the best examples in the Portuguese literature is found in the work of Fernando Pessoa (Portugal, 1888-1935). In the first example, Pessoa suggests that equivalents to “saudade” do not exist in other languages; and in the second example he claims that one can feel “saudades” even of things that never existed.
One of the ‘quadras’ (quatrains) in Pessoa’s book “Quadras ao Gosto Popular” (Quatrains to Popular Taste) says:
Saudades, só portugueses
conseguem senti-las bem,
Porque têm essa palavra
Para dizer que as têm
“Saudades”, only the Portuguese
Can feel them well
Because they have this word
To say that they feel them
In “Eu nunca fiz senão sonhar” (I did nothing but to dream), Bernardo Soares, one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, says:
Não há saudades mais dolorosas
do que as das coisas
que nunca foram.
The most painful “saudades”
are those of the things
that were never there.
