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Landeg White Nasceu em 1940 no sul do País de Gales e foi professor universitário em Trinidad, no Malawi, na Serra Leoa, na Zâmbia e na Universidade de York. Agora, vive em Carapinheira, e trabalha na Universidade Aberta. Sua esposa, Alice, é de origem Moçambicana e têm dois filhos. Os seus livros incluem V.S Naipaul: a Critical Introduction (1975), Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique (1980), Magomero: Portrait of an African Village (1987), Power and the Praise Poem (1992) e Bridging the Zambesi (1993). É também autor de cinco obras de poesia e da tradução de Os Lusíadas (Oxford University Press) que recebeu o prémio Teixeira Gomes em 1998, em Londres. Landeg White lecciona o Seminário de História de Inglaterra. |
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The
Most Deceiving
Fernão
Mendes Pinto. Viva! memorialised
in the famed Thesaurus as conjurer,
deceiver, liar, trickster,
humbug,
a massed chorus of
Pharisee, Rosicrucian, Jesuit, actor,
jobber, dissembler, charlatan, all
because you refused to credit the
Portuguese could civilise Japan! In
your book, the pious Catholic pirate,
ruthless as any infidel, bound
by his imperial ethic rapes,
despoils, betrays, kills. You
mock yourself as God’s missionary lampooned
for eating with your hands. How
could you not go down in history but
as by-word for the soi-disant? Medicaster,
saltimbanco, I
hope in Dante’s whichever hell jockey,
perjurer, Cagliostro Roget’s
doing time for libel. My
question’s this: as you ploughed old
memories into your jeremiad blockbuster
Perigrinação, did you know of C. and his Lusíads?
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While
the picaresque and satiric danced
from your goosequill in Almada, the
sublime and truly epic went
begging in Alcântara, the
briefest of river trips apart, within
hailing distance as it were. Did
you never share a heart-to-heart with
that other Eastern warrior? Your
buccaneers were his barões. He
saw God’s designs turning on
the deeds of mariners you disowned and
reckoned fit for burning. Two
masterpieces, alternate visions, divided
by an estuary which
drifts into the setting sun, that
uncompromising referee. You
won your case, you lost your cause, for
history’s unkind to truth, bestowing
all her best applause on
those capable of myth. It’s
no unflattering epitaph to
be yoked with the most deceiving, Luís de Camões’ apocryph, and an author to believe in. |
