By Jake Henson.
Recalling my recent trip to Lisbon, Portugal, and reading three of the City’s most influential poets, I consider some of the peculiarities and problems of modern-day travelling.
Lisbon has boasted huge popularity with travellers in recent years. For the high-speed and low-budget lifestyle of a student, a September trip to Portugal’s capital, the ‘coolest city in the world’, and the dreamlike surf town of Ericeria felt like it would be the perfectly tailored trip. With the Lisboa region saturating internet travel trends and recommendations from friends, partially due to the ease of visiting the city cheaply and the liveliness of its bars, I had thought very little about booking the trip for some travelling in September before returning to University. But it was exactly this way of thinking that caused, whilst I was standing in front of the ominous tomb of poet Lúis de Camões in Lisbon’s Jerónimos Monastery, a mental crisis.
After days of adrenaline-fuelled surfing in Ericeria, eating in Lisbon’s diverse restaurant offerings and partying in the Barrio Alto district, the blank poet’s tomb acted as a stark reminder that the place I had travelled to extended unimaginably beyond what I could actually experience. I don’t think this feeling is unique as a 21st century tourist- it is becoming easier to reduce travel to a series of physical sensations that are unconnected to our surroundings: the taste of food, the dopamine hit of taking a photograph, the warmth of the sun or the spray of salt on the face.
I realised that I was doing what I now call ‘placeless travelling’, where people (often of my generation and spurred on by trends) ‘visit’ a place purely through a sequence of experiences, rather than connecting those experiences to culture and history. Lisbon, as a city that does best at sensory overload, invites this kind of travelling, but increasingly places and cultures can be commodified and consumed faster and easier than ever, with generic photographs taken to document travels in what is essentially an electronic picture-book.
‘O rebanho é os meus pensamentos
E os menus pensamentos são todos sensações
Penso com os olhos e com os ouvidos
E com as mãos e os pés
E com o nariz e a boca’
‘The flocks are my thoughts
And all my thoughts are sensations.
I think with my eyes and my ears,
And with my hands and my feet,
And with my nose and my mouth.
The extract from ‘Sou um guardador de rebanhos’ (‘I am the keeper of flocks’) by Fernando Pessoa, perhaps Lisbon’s most celebrated poet, echoes my considerations on ‘placelessness’ and reliance on the senses with an eerie precision. So I decided to put words to the pictures, and uncover some of the voices behind Lisbon’s culture. Poetry seemed most apt for this; not least because it was Camões’ art, but because I believed the local idiosyncrasies of poetry would challenge our obsession with generic trends and photograph tourism. What I didn’t expect was for Lisbon’s poets to share my own thoughts almost exactly.
Ericeria
The absent-minded atmosphere that surrounded my first stop, the seaside town Ericeira, was conducive for reading Lisbon’s best sea-poetry. Beach and reef breaks from the famous Praia da Foz do Lizandro and Praia do Sul give the world’s most ambitious surfers much to play with, and I loved the gentle thrill of looking at the waves in the morning from a small surf hostel on Rua Floréncio Granate overlooking the beach. However, I couldn’t help but find a tension between the daring repetition of the surfers, reliving the same feeling over different waves, and the voyaging fishing-boats, full of the potential for exploration.
‘E já no porto da ínclita Ulisseia,
Cum alvoroço nobre e cum desejo
[…]
As naus prestes estão; e não refreia
Temor nenhum o juvenil despejo,
Porque a gente marítima e a de Marte
Estão para seguir-me a toda a parte.
Pelas praias vestidos os soldados
De várias cores vêm e várias artes,
E não menos de esforço aparelhados
Para buscar do mundo novas partes.
All is ready in Ulysses’ harbour
With a noble clamour of desire
[…]
The ships at luff; and not a fear
Impedes my youthful career,
Because sailor and soldier
Are ready to guide me everywhere
The soldiers in all their finery gather
On the beach, each colour its own art,
Each with force fitted to further
Search the world – its unknown part.
In Camões’ ‘A partida para a Índia’ (‘Leaving Lisbon for India’), the poet holds in intimate proximity both the confidence of static, land-bound youth and the impending, aged and unknown voyage. As when observing Ericeira’s surfers, there is a feeling of youthful invulnerability, with the ship yet unused and the poem’s voice boasting that ‘e não refreia / Temor nenhum o juvenil despejo’ (‘not a fear / impedes /evicts my youthful career’). However, this confidence is tempered and ironised. The stanza-ending couplet of ‘marte / parte’ gives the rhyme a songlike quality which grates with the gravitas of the reference to the epic Ulysses, signifying the hardships of journeying, and the poem’s clarity of sound is betrayed by the half-rhyme on ‘desejo / despejo’. Rhyming the passion of ‘desejo’ (‘desire’) with ‘despejo’ (with connotations of forceful eviction) places the reality of being cast out (to sea) directly next to the burning, pre-voyage feelings of youth.
There was something in Louis de Camões’ verse that captured the spirit of the Portuguese coastline and my experience of Ericeira. While my attempts at riding waves were always exhilarating, I felt like Camões’ voice of youth, trying to ‘consume’ an ocean I was yet to understand. In the cobbled cafés and squares of Ericeira’s pale streets brawn-filled teenagers mix with the descendants of ‘navegadores’; Portuguese seafarers who travelled from their homeland on wooden ships. Standing and looking over Praia dos Pescadores to the horizon at Praia do Norte, Camões’ two states seem to exist physically, as the tumbling beginner is framed by the distant expert, whose arcing surfboard marks a mastery of the sea that mocks inexperience. Asking a local fisherman where to surf was fairly decisive: ‘speak to those who know the sea.’ It was a reminder that trying to squeeze the experience out of a place, as so many adrenaline-chasers do, doesn’t work without a connection to the place itself. The verses of Camões, who was instrumental in furthering Portugal’s identity as a seafaring nation and famously experienced a real shipwreck, allowed me beyond the sea’s foam and salt-spray to some of the past, present and mythical voyages that call from it.
Lisbon
Arriving in Portugal’s capital, and in the poetry of Cesário Verde and Fernando Pessoa, there continues a weaving between sensory experience and culture, and an abstraction of place. Staying in a small apartment in Barrio Alto and leaning out of the window, you can become consumed by senses- low throbbing music, the visual satisfaction of the undulating cobble-stones, colourful washing lines bridging the streets and smells rising from restaurants that hide behind graffiti-covered walls. There seems to be a general willingness to give in to sensations: if you walk down Rua do Alecrim to the station Cais do Sodre, people line the street drinking, smoking, speaking and dancing, connected by the tram-line and falling gradient.
‘In Lisbon there are a few restaurants or eating houses […which] frequently contain curious types whose faces are not interesting but who constitute a series of digressions from life.’ –
Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet, trans. Alfred MacAdam:
‘Porque tão longe ir pôr o que está
perto –
O dia real que vemos? No mesmo
hausto
Em que vivemos, morreremos. Colhe
O dia, porque és ele.
Why go so far for what is so
near –
The actual day that we can see? In a single gasp
We live and die. So seize the day,
For the day is what you are.
After Camões’ sober appeal to ‘search the world’ and shun childlike abandon, Pessoa’s verse seemed to draw me right back to the hedonistic, ‘placeless’ traveller, and Pessoa’s poetry reflects far more my initial thoughts on 21st century travelling. Like the young surfers in Ericeria, people are ‘digressions from life’, ‘not interesting’ but held in perpetual separation from ‘life’, or Camões’ idea of the voyage. In the short poem, ‘Uns, com os olhos postos no passado’ (‘With one eye on the past’) , there is an appeal to live not in a specific place or for a journey, but in the present moment. Living in Largo do Carmo from 1905 to 1920, Pessoa almost predicted Lisbon’s future popularity as place for revelling in the immediate experience of a place; time collapses as ‘No mesmo hausto / Em que vivemos, morreremos’ (‘In a single gasp / we live and die’) and the singular experience of the day becomes assimilated with the reader of the poem.
My final trip to the Cathedral, Tower and Padrão dos Descobrimentos monument at Belem, and reading Cesário Verde’s ‘O sentimento dum ocidental’ solidified the city’s oscillation between experience and culture. Both the poem and Jerónimos monastery pay homage to the dead Camões, and so reading Cesário’s poem in front of Camões tomb meant that I was connected physically and figuratively to the city’s cultural heritage. In direct opposition to Pessoa, Cesário’s sense of place is invested both in history, referencing the Camões Monument in Chiado, and in the future; by the waterfront, the poem’s voice considers the modernity of foreign cities. In two simple stanzas, Cesário seems to capture our three poet’s voices, and their respective conceptions of place:
‘A espaços, iluminam-se os andares,
E as tascas, os cafés, as tendas, os estancos
Alastram em lençol os seus reflexos brancos;
E a lua lembra o circo e os jogos malabares.
Duas igrejas, num suadoso largo,
Lançam a nódoa negra e fúnebre do clero:
Nelas esfumo um ermo inquisidor severo,
Assim que pela História eu me aventuro e alargo
‘Apartment lights come on in clusters,
And the taverns, the cafés, the tabacs, and stalls
Spread a sheet of white reflections against the walls
The moon reminds me of circus jugglers.
Two churches on a heart-rending square
Project the black and doleful stain of the Order:
I shade in a cruel, reclusive inquisitor,
And move through history, expanding as I dare.
Cesário collects Camões’ participation in a historic voyage, (‘move / adventure through history’) Pessoa’s ‘placeless’, anonymous experience of the city-scape (white reflections) and his own sense of the city’s cultural monuments (two churches) through the stanzas. Amazingly, I could read the presence of the three poets in Cesário’s work, each providing a different perspective on what it means to travel or explore a place. Read side by side, I had thought that uncovering some of Lisbon’s literary voices would simply give my trip some context. But it was never that simple- whether it was the in-the-moment experience of the sun-kissed Ericeria or the Barrio Alto nights, discovering the cultural mastery of the waves and the mythical voyage, or gazing at historical monuments to ground a place in history; each was, as in the poetry, a different method of travelling. I was initially disappointed with my (and my generation’s) probable reliance on ‘placeless’ experiences, but Lisbon’s poetry suggests that this view of travelling is probably as old as the city itself. simply begs the question,
When we visit somewhere, should we value in it the discovery of its subtlety, culture and history, logged in the mind like a fact-absorbing history book, or our immediate explosive experience, with all its sensory and emotional excitement?