The 2022 cycle of the Stephen Spender Prize opens for entries (poetry in translation) on 4 May.
<autobiographical-note>
Going through some old papers recently I came across the typescript of my award-winning entry for the Camões Award...
<not-THAT-one>
(now defunct, along with its sponsors at Canning House, not the Camões Prize which is...awarded annually by the Portuguese Direção-Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Biblioteca[1] (National Book, Archive an Libraries Department) and the Brazilian Fundação Biblioteca Nacional[2] (National Library Foundation) to the author of an outstanding oeuvre of work written in Portuguese. The monetary award is of €100,000, making it among the richest literary prizes in the world.That was first awarded in 1989, 15 years after my coup. And I didn't get so much as a half-crown ...
<anachronism-alert>
In fact it was 3 years after decimalization, so the half-crown was a thing of the past.</anachronism-alert>
...postal order).
</not-THAT-one>
On it were some comments from my teacher at the time, Teresa Amado; and I wondered what might have become of her.
At about the same time I was choosing a Portuguese poem to translate for the Stephen Spender Prize and was beginning to do some research into the poet Vasco Graça Moura, described by Wikipedia as
...a Portuguese lawyer, writer, translator and politician, son of Francisco José da Graça Moura and wife Maria Teresa Amado da Cunha Seixas Navarro de Castro, of Northern Portugal bourgeoisie....
He was Library Director of the Cultural Foundation Calouste Gulbekian [sic - no dubt they meant "Gulbenkian"]
He married three times, firstly in 1964 to Maria Fernanda de Carvalho de Sá Dantas, secondly in 1985 to Clara Crabbé da Rocha (daughter of Miguel Torga) and thirdly in 1987 to Maria do Rosário Bandeira de Lima de Sousa Machado (b. c. 1951)....Now, writing as someone who was born precisely in 1951, and as Teresa was a postgraduate (and so not much older than me, if at all [as, with a September birthday, I was older than most of my peers]) I put two and two together and made something other than four.
It was the chance juxtaposition of "Teresa" and "Amado" that led me astray, as that first sentence refers not to Graça Moura's wife but to his mother; the strange (not to say unnecessary) inclusion of the word "wife" in that sentence didn't help.
So Teresa, (who may well have been Maria Teresa, as are many Portuguese Teresas) probably had nothing to do with Graça Moura. But she did point me towards a scholarship awarded by the Calouste Gulbenkian foundation, so may have had a family connection. Probably not, but it afforded a jaunt down memory lane.
</autobiographical-note>
Noticed in passing
- In this week's edition of the Westminster Hour Carolyn Quinn used the expression 'showed a bit of ankle' to suggest that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had indicated a willingness to – maybe – consider something (a windfall tax on the oil companies, or something like it – sugaring the pill in some way that would make it acceptable to a majority of his colleagues. This was an unusual image to use (akin to the more raunchy 'open the kimono' – used in laddish business circles by middle managers I used to work with. But it occurred to me at the time that at the back of the speaker's mind there might have been an awareness of Richie Sunak's trouser length.
- In a recent edition of The Climate Question a Spanish speaker used the expression 'You cannot put all your baskets in one egg' (sic – messy) to refer to the idea of committing Chile to renewable energy to the exclusion of fossil fuels. I thought he had simply misremembered an idiom; but the interviewer didn't miss a beat in repeating it in her summary (at about 15'12" into that podcast). I wonder if she simply missed it, or whether she felt it would be tactless to correct him (which would have made sense in a conversation, but not in the editing suite).
- Catching up on my Christmas reading, I've come across a beautiful picture of a snail shell that demonstrates the role of a mathematical series in its growth. It is based on squares of increasing size following a series suggested by this clue:Continue on a path of mendacity, Mr Gemmill,
one hears, one hears, two hear, three hear,
five hear, eight hear, etc. (9)
 |
| How a snail shell forms (with apologies for the freehand bit) |
<mini-rant>
And while we're on the subject, "change A to B" = "substitute B for A". When people on the correction round in Richard Osman's House of Games say "change A for B" I die a little. I blame Ray Davies.
<inline-pps reason="correction">Not him; it was The Who.</inline-pps>
</mini-rant>
..."Mr Gemill" with "a poetic cockroach".
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