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The Portuguese Poems of Joseph Furtado

Joseph Furtado (1872-1949) was part of an early twentieth-century generation of Goans who saw the end of the Portuguese monarchy and the implantation of the republic in 1910, which led to a situation of social and economic instability and the loosening of metropolitan control over Portugal’s Indian colony. He also lived through the first decades of the Salazar regime, which began effectively in 1926 and saw a hardening of colonial attitudes.

A poet who gained renown in British India and who is still read in Indian schools, Furtado is predominantly an English-language writer, having published eight volumes of poetry, between original works and collections. He also wrote a novel, Golden Goa (1938), and literary criticism, Principais Poetas Goanos [Principal Goan Poets] (1927), which reveals his proficiency in Portuguese language, as well as featuring a handful of Portuguese poems, which are my subject here.

Born in Pilerne, in the district of Bardez, Goa, Furtado did his primary education in Portuguese in Saligão before studying English in Nagpur. He lived for many years in British India, working for the Great Indian Peninsular Railway, first in Jubbulpore, Madhya Pradesh, then in Calcutta then in Bombay.

According to his son Philip Furtado, he published his first book The Poems of Joseph Furtado in Jubbulpore, which was only reviewed in the local Jubbulpore Times (1983: 68). His second effort, Poems, was published in 1901 when the poet lived in Calcutta. The book “was damned with faint praise by two Goan weeklies of Bombay but received more sympathetic or appreciative notice in the press of other communities” (Furtado 1983: 68). In 1910, by which time he had moved to Bombay, he launched this third book, Lays of Goa and Other Verses on Goan Themes, which seems to have received more attention both in the Bombay and the Goan press. In 1922 he published Lays of Goa and Lyrics of a Goan – a Souvenir of the Exposition of St Francis Xavier, which appears to have met with a certain acclaim not just in India, but also in Britain and the United States. That same year he published A Guide to the Convents and Churches in Old Goa, about which Phillip Furtado notes that “this proved to be the only literary venture on which he did not suffer a pecuniary loss” (1983: 69), which reveals that the market for poetry in India was not promising, even for poets with some experience. In 1925, now retired and back home in Goa, he launched a limited edition of The Goan Fiddler, which was also published in Britain in 1927, with a preface by the famous contemporary English critic Edmund Gosse. The next year he published the aforementioned Os Principais Poetas Goanos, which included an annexe featuring his Primeiros Versos, nine poems in Portuguese he wrote himself.

In January of 1929, he was able to publish his book The Desterrado in Britain, which “was praised very highly by the Times Literary Supplement and the Tablet and less so by The Catholic Times – all of London” (Furtado 1983: 69). In 1938 he released Songs of Exile, dedicated to the memory of his son Francis who passed away in the March of 1937. Half of the book is made up of previously unpublished verse and the other half of revised poems. It was reviewed by around fifteen Indian publications, between newspapers and other periodicals. In 1938 the novel Golden Goa was reviewed by around 17 Indian papers. Philip Furtado does not give a place of publication, but it is likely that these last two books were published in Bombay, where the poet resided. His last publication dates from 1942, when he released his Selected Poems, which despite the title included ten new poems. Its print run was limited to 100 copies and intended to be distributed privately and through a few select bookshops. No copies were sent to the press. In 1967 a new edition of Selected Poems was released, edited by Philip Furtado, which was very well received by critics. Reviews appears in the Illustrated Weekly, Times of India, Sunday Navhind Times, as well as another seventeen newspapers and periodicals in various parts of India.

Augusto Pinto has pointed out that, in the book Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets (1994), edited by R Parthasarathy, the critic Kiki N. Daruwalla considered Furtado to be the first poet to explore the potential of Indian English in his verse (2016: n.p). Known as a poet of exile, Furtado spent almost his whole life outside Goa and his poetry is marked by a clearly nostalgic tone in relation to his home soil. It is therefore thought-provoking to note that, unlike the Portuguese-language poets of his generation (such as Mariano Gracias, discussed in the present issue of Muse India by Joana Passos), Furtado does not indulge in what is normally called “Goan Indianism,” that is, the recurrent use by Goan Catholic poets of that time of Hindu themes. Writing longingly about Goa from the outside (rather than, like the Portuguese-language Catholics, writing about Indian tradition with mix of psychological distance and yearning) Furtado departs from the poetic practice current in the Goa of his time.

As we can see from this swift overview of Joseph Furtado’s publications, his work quite likely circulated far more outside Goa where it was published than inside the territory, even if, due to the prestige of its author, the Goan public certainly had knowledge of his career.

Furtado’s poetry, whether in English or in Portuguese, is characterised by its focus on fleeting moments associated with thoughts or emotions, and is very adept at portraying scenes or telling little stories. It is a poetry dedicated to the sensorial, emotional or intellectual perception of the world, as, for example, in this poem:

‘The Hymn’

As we three left the village
We heard some children sing
A hymn to Virgin Mary
And the small church bell ring.
“For pity stay a while,”
My heart said with a smile;
But Fate she would not stay,
And dragged us both away.
 
Praise be to Virgin Mary!
Across the hills and seas
The hymn it followed us;
And now, on every breeze,
My heart and I can hear
Its cadence just as clear
We turn to Fate and say,
“Come drag the hymn away!”
 
(Selected poems, p.7)
 

The poem talks of a moment in which the poetic subject, departing a certain locality, overhears children singing a hymn to the Virgin Mary. The poetic subject wants to stop and listen, but Fate does not allow him to. The poem recounts the process of perceiving the outside world, which produces an intensely bittersweet pleasure. What leaps out is the lyricism of that childish song, which functions like a sort of magic flute to the ears of the poetic subject and the reader.   

The basis of this feeling is Christian. The poem evokes a religious atmosphere, made possible by the purity and ingenuousness associated with children, which Fate intends to leave behind, as it were a memory of the poetic subject, who recognises himself in that infantile, child’s chorus. The insistence of the subject in holding on to the children’s voices – “For pity stay a while” – reflects his desire not to abandon this purity and, ultimately, to remain in this world, connoted with his very religion, which appears absent from the path he later follows. The close of the poem, the poet’s plea for fate to “drag” the recollection of the hymn away, shows the pained memory of yesteryear that haunts the poetic subject now the reality has gone forever.

A similar process of perceiving the world, accompanied this time by a reflection on it, occurs in one of Furtado’s Portuguese poems:

‘Paraíso Perdido’

À luz dum brando luar
Com gestos inocentes,
Risonhas e contentes,
Meninas a brincar!
E eu com dôres pungentes
A ver e contemplar
As virgens inocentes –
Bem longe de serpentes –
Felizes a brincar!
Aí, com peito ferido
A ver e lamentar
Meu paraíso perdido!

(Selected Poems, p.131)
                            
‘Lost Paradise’In the light of a soft moon
With innocent gestures
Beaming with happiness
Are girls playing!
And I with bitter pain
Watching and contemplating
Those innocent virgins
Far from serpents
  Playing happily
  Oh, my injured breast,
Watching and lamenting
My paradise lost!

The scene of girls playing in the moonlight evokes a dream-like world. It is a night scene, bathed in ‘soft’ moonlight, that is to say, a natural, evanescent light, which doesn’t strike the children harshly. The scene is observed by a lyrical subject who feels ‘bitter pain’ whose cause is unspoken, but whose results are made clear: the loss of a paradisiacal state.

The passage from the oneiric situation of the children to the miserable condition of the poetic ‘I’ is present in the image of the serpent, which is far from the children but has certainly injured the breast of the poet. The serpent, in the Christian tradition, is associated with the myth of Adam and Eve, the first humans created by God, who lived in Paradise and were persuaded by the serpent to flout the laws of God and, for that reason, expelled from the Garden of Eden. In this myth of Christian origin, the serpent is associated with the loss of innocence and the discovery of sexuality, understood as sinful. The moonlit scene of the girls playing leads the lyrical subject to reflect on the loss of his own innocence and perhaps other greater forfeitures that life has inflicted upon him, and which produces a “bitter pain” that suggests a similar future awaits the girls.

Although written in different languages, it is easy to observe that the poetic style in both texts is rather similar, with short verses, colloquial diction and couplets or cross rhymes. The poems are also quite similar thematically, given that both concern the presence of the past in the present, as something that the poetic ‘I’ attempts to preserve or as a cause for his lament. 

With this comparative reading I have sought to demonstrate that Furtado’s poems in Portuguese do not represent any new poetics or thematic renovation in his work. Of the five poems in Portuguese published in Selected Poems, three concern losses: the loss of innocence, as we have seen, in ‘Paraíso Perdido’; the loss of the social cachet of the past in ‘O balcão’ [The balcão, or Goan porch]; the loss of respect for family, society and homeland in ‘Triste!’ [Sad!]. The other two poems are idealizations of the work of the mundkars, the landless peasants who worked on the property of the bhatkars, or landords, in ‘O Rendeiro’ [The Coconut Plucker] and of the Goan homeland in ‘Abolém’ [a flower of Goa]. In any case, these two final poems refer to Goan life and, in the wider context of Furtado’s work, can also be read as poems that recall memories of a lost past.

Let us consider, for example, the case of the following poem:

‘Abolém’:

Nenhuma flôr no meu jardim
É tão querida para mim
Como a flôr abôlém:
Seja mais lindo o teu jasmim,
Ou mais cheiroso o mogarim –
Que a tratam com desdém –
Nenhuma flôr no meu jardim
É tão querida para mim
Como a minha abôlém –
É a única no meu jardim
Da minha pátria vém.

‘Abolém’

No flower in my Garden
Is as dear to me
As the Abolém flower
Your jasmin might be prettier
Mogarim more fragrant
That they treat you with disdain
No flower in my Garden
Is as dear to me
As my abolém
It is the only one in my garden
That comes from my homeland

(in Selected Poems, p.132)

This poem is made up of octosyllables, intercalated with hexasyllables, which is a somewhat uncommon meter in Portuguese-language poetry. The paired and intercalated rhymes, while not deviating significantly from a pattern that stretches back to romanticism, show some originality in that, within the eight verses of lines he uses the word ‘jardim’ [garden] four times, ‘mim’ [me] twice and ‘abolém’ twice. The is evidently intent in this intense repetition, which produces the incantatory effect of a litany, a mantra or religious chant.

The abolém (which is found today in Portuguese dictionaries as ‘abolim’) is native to Goa, where it is often used in garlands. The poet puts the flower to metonymic use to praise the simplicity of Goa but also to suggest its lack of symbolic capital in the colonial world. Compared to jasmine or mogarim (which is also a type of jasmine), which possess a fine perfume as well as beauty, the abolém may be a simple, ordinary flower, treated with disrespect, just as Goa, colonized by the Portuguese, was viewed from the viewpoint of British imperialism as a second-rate colony.

Bearing in mind that the poet had a restricted set of interlocutors in Portuguese, he seems to have had the clear intention of evoking a sense of loss in his Portuguese-speaking readers. The Goans who were linked to the colonial elite, as was the case of Furtado, saw their world as under threat, whether it be by the political instability of the Portuguese First Republic, whether, afterwards, by the rise of dictator António de Oliveira Salazar (who would rule Goa until 1961 and whose regime lasted until 1974 in Portugal), political contexts in which the Goan colonial elite found itself renegotiating their status with the Portuguese from the metropole to a disadvantage.

Joseph Furtado’s poetry in Portuguese gave artistic form to the sense of loss that characterised the first half of the twentieth century in Goa. On the other hand, the saudosista, or nostalgic, tone of his verse, which idealises Goa without thematising the suffering and exploitation that accompanied Portuguese colonialism, has the merit of giving literary representation to certain social figures which, if it were not for Furtado’s empathy with everything that symbolized Goa, would have gone without poetic depiction, as in the poem with which I bring this article to a close:

‘O Rendeiro’

Nunca viste o rendeiro,
Sem calça nem casaco,
Ao subir o coqueiro
Ágil como um macaco?
Que canta madrigaes
(Feliz cantôr!)
E faz dos palmeiraes
Jardins de amôr?

Pudesse eu subir,
Nos palmeiraes vivia,
Cantando todo dia
Do meu amor.

  (in Selected Poems, p132)

‘The Coconut Plucker’

 Have you ever seen the plucker
 Without trousers or shirt
 Shin up a coconut tree
 Agile as the monkey?
 Who sings madrigals
 (oh, happy singer!)
 And makes the palm groves
 Gardens of love?

 Oh that I might climb
 In the palm groves to live
 To sing all day
 Of my sweetheart.

(Translated by Paul Melo e Castro)

Bibliography:

• Furtado, Philip. 1983, ‘Poet Joseph Furtado’, in Journal of South Asian Literature’, 18.1, p.68-70.
• Furtado, Joseph. 1942, Selected poems, Bombay: Dom Bosco Press.
• Pinto, Augusto. 2016, ‘The Goan Fiddler’, in Himal Southasian,
• http://old.himalmag.com/component/content/article/533-the-goan-fiddler.html - access 10/04/2016.

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