This Year’s Mammoth

I accumulate so many goals in the beginning of the year and the beginning of each month. This year, when January rolled around and lounged before me, I wanted to try making my own teas. That remains to be materialized, but now, as we plunge into March, I have made great progress in my studies of Portuguese.

As I may have said on this blog before, I had never been interested in Portuguese. I am passionate about so many languages, I like to study languages for fun, and I am obsessed with the machine of grammar and typology. I dissected Arabic, Japanese, Turkish, Persian, even Italian, but never Portuguese. All that changed when I read The Book of Disquiet, which a reader of this blog may roll their eyes (“Talk about something else, will ya?”). The beauty of that book and its exquisite language clobbered me. Fernando Pessoa turned out to rank alongside Edgar Allan Poe as my favorite writer.

March is, in some online book communities, dedicated to reading “mammoths,” otherwise known as books over eight hundred pages. I have never had enough common sense to be intimidated by long books, in much the same way as some people are not frightened by large dogs. It is what it is.

This year, I want to devote a few months to Sr. Pessoa, from reading Richard Zenith’s Brobdingnagian biography (over a thousand pages!), to checking out Zenith’s translation of that glorious book. I am ready. I made my annotation key and set out the pens that I will be using to mark up the pages, the knowledge of an enigmatic writer who has so deeply reconfigured my approach to language, from learning Portuguese to challenging my own native English to do more, be more, slam open more doors.

I write this shortly after my daily Duolingo lesson in Portuguese. I am at a 409 day streak, and I am working on complex sentences that combine multiple verbs and helper verbs. This is all paying off, and I also write in my textbook that I found for cheap on the internet. Before my mother died, one of our Uber drivers who shuttled us to the hospital spoke in Portuguese, and I picked out a few words here and there to understand that he was asking about whether we needed more air conditioner. I have twice had very simple dreams in Portuguese.

I now dream of someday seeing Brazil, Portugal, picking up Machado de Assis and Pessoa in their native tongues. My passport itches to be taken out. If I cannot travel, the next best thing is a book.

So, that is the news: Richard Zenith’s Pessoa: A Biography is this year’s mammoth for the month of March. Even when I log off here, I will be sitting down to my first steps with Pessoa once again, be enamored once again.

Happy reading!