brains

I cannot absolutely accept the slowness of my mind. I want joe wong's brain immediately. when I wake up I'll be speaking the language without going through martyrdom to have forgotten what I learned the day before. immediately. brain.
joe. iah.

not

hormones. not okay.

i said hormones not ramones.

* * *

Doors stop like fast girls.
Sidewalks grow!
Sidewalks work!
Ah, faith!

&

 

a language journey

Coincidentally I was thinking about the song “Língua” by Caetano Veloso, specifically the phrase "My fatherland is my language" to talk about some characteristics of the Brazilian Portuguese and, consequently, the Brazilians. And I found this wonderful text written by Luiz Antonio Ribeiro, posted recently, where he dissects Caetano’s song on a journey through the history of our language and Brazilian culture.
I make additional comments and post extra videos in order to present an overview of the cultural aspects cited in the music and in the Ribeiro’s text.

My poor English almost don't was enough and I had to laugh at the dubious help of google translator, which deserves a post apart. It’s a very long post, sorry.

* * *

The song "Língua" by Caetano Veloso - a detailed treatise of the Portuguese Language

Discussions about our Portuguese language always raised many issues, most of the time, could not be answered accurately and without regard to personal idiosyncrasies and a historic moment. It turns out that any discussion of language is a meta-discussion which embraces the impossibilities of its own. Anyway, always interested me the relationship we have between grammar, common usage and differences with the Portuguese of Portugal. The linguist Marcos Bagno, in the book Portuguese  or Brazilian?,  questions whether we even speak Portuguese or we can say that we are living and speakers of a "Brazilian" language. Theoretical issues aside, what can be said is that language is always alive and should be celebrated for what it expresses: culture, music, art, thought, and finally, subjectivities.

For this, I decided to analyze step by step the song “Língua” by Caetano Veloso, to scrutinize various questions about our mother language exposed in it. The methodology will follow the matter thus: I quote the lyrics of Caetano and I do a brief analysis below for the excerpt.

Before you read the article, it would be interesting to confer the song. Listen here:

I like to feel my tongue brushing the tongue of Luís de Camões

The song begins, not coincidentally, with the word "gosto" (like), which can also refer to like in the ordinary sense, to have a preference for something, but also the sense of taste -tongue as part of the body and not just as language, object speech, which is created on the horizon of expectation created by Caetano.

To like brushing the tongue of Luís de Camões is almost a sexual celebration about the encounter of the both ends of our language : the spoken by Portuguese poet writer of Os Lusíadas, main formatter of what we know as Portuguese Language, with what we have more contemporary: popular music and rap language.

I like ser and estar

To like "ser" and "estar" is to see oneself different, perhaps better, than the English language where the verb "to be" concentrate two meanings in one. While "ser" refer to a permanence, an essence’s possibility, "estar" is a transitory position, a state, things that cannot be expressed, at least with our precision, in the anglo-saxon language.

and I want to dedicate myself to create prosody’s confusion and a plethora of parodies
which shorten the pains
and steal colors as chameleons

Here the function of the poet: confused prosodies, ie, types of speech, accents, rhythms, stresses, mixing everything in a poetic amalgam. “To plethore” parodies, also use of the poet, is linked to the fact that Caetano, among other things, using rap to tell his story of language.

Parody is a Greek term that comes from “para” - next to (parallel) and “odes” (chant), then a parody is a form of singing alongside, which refers to the original, but transforms it and often mocks him. In the case of “Língua”, Caetano sings alongside a fixed style - rap - his celebration rap, whose function would be, as he said, to short the pain and to steal the colors (who does not remember those iridescent rulers we used in childhood?), like a chameleon.

I like Pessoa in the pessoa
the rosa on Rosa
 
Here we have the dual use of nouns: Pessoa (person) - Fernando Pessoa, and Rosa (rose) - Guimarães Rosa, both being at the same time persons and roses.

Fernando Pessoa is one of the most important portuguese poet (imo). very sensitive, use to have several heteronyms. brazilians love his work.

Guimarães Rosa is one of the most impostant brazilian writer. He wrote like people use to talk in brazilian “sertão” and created amazing characters.

and I know what poetry is to prose
just as love is for friendship
and who will deny that this is superior to that?

The relationship between love and friendship has been much exploited in the course of our history. According to Aristotle, friendship is superior to love because from it (friendship) one can extracts a moral relation, ie, there is in it unconditional kindness, unlike the pathos of love which generates a kind of blindness and deception in amateur. That's why Caetano says, at this point, poetry is to prose as well as love is for friendship: the prose is controlled, moral, useful, while poetry is the overflow of feeling, even if it means an “immoral” fact.

a good exemple of the use of este, esse, aquele, esta, essa, aquela.

And let the Portugais die by withering

“My Fatherland is my language”

Speak, Mangueira! Speak!

"My Fatherland is my language" is a phrase from the poem The Book of Disquiet by Bernardo Soares, Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym, in which he says that his attachment is not connected to the nation, the country as a territory, a land, that all of it may be withdrawn, but his language is his great reference of national feeling, of belonging. Therefore, in language, "My Fatherland is my language" is summarized in "Speak, Mangueira”, to give voice to our voice.

Homeland, fatherland, motherland, in portuguese is pátria. 
come from father but is a feminine word. 


and what is mangueira?

this video is not in the original text.

Flower of Latium Sambódromo
Lusamerica, Latin in powder
What want
What can this language?

“Last flower of Latium” is as became known our Portuguese. The Romance (neolatin) languages ​​are all the languages ​​known as "Lazio", European region. The term comes to us by Olavo Bilac’s poem, reminding the Portuguese is called “uneducated” just because it evolve from the Vulgar Latin:

"Last flower of Latium, uncultured and beautiful
You're at a time, splendor and grave "

“Sambódromo” is one of the newest Portuguese words, creation typically Brazilian which mix “samba”  - of African origin - and the suffix “dromos” - Greek, meaning where something runs (race track, kart track).

"Flower of Latium Sambadrome" is telling the story of our language in a line.

Flor do Lácio à Sambódromo (the first and the last ones). It is the place where Escolas de Samba usually parades.

Let's pay attention at the syntax of the Paulistas
And the relaxed fake English of the surfers
Let’s be imperialists! Where? Let’s be imperialists!

The syntax of São Paulo’s folk is well known by large part of our population, so I will give just one example: that part italianish, mainly from Mooca, that uses phrases like: “But you watch don’t ME catches the flu! But you see if don’t ME stay in the rain! This "me" without syntactic function, only emphatic stamp, represents well what Caetano tried to say.

The relaxed fake English of the surfers is: "pô ... Brother, Coé (qual é?/which is?) ... , mo(re) vibe ...". Need I to say more?

Let’ go with the diction velô(city) choo-choo of Carmen Miranda
And that Chico Buarque de Holanda rescue us
And - checkmate – explain to us,  Luanda
Listen carefully to “deles” and “delas” from TV Globo

Who does not know, should know the Carmen Miranda’s diction highlighted by Caetano. She has a unique way of singing, hasty, syllabic, rhythmic, percussive, just some of the reasons that made Americans fall in love by his singing.

The point is that, somehow, we became "mirandados", ie, even if Carmen deny, we turn out "Americanized" and it took a Chico Buarque to bring us back to Africa – and he did - with the song “Morena de Angola” we reconnected definitely with Luanda, although what asserts the  television trying to induce us to the opposite.

Let us be the Wolf to wolf to Man

Wolf to Wolf to Wolf to man

Thomas Hobbes said that "man is a wolf to man" to say that we are our own torturers and agents of our own destruction, and, in a way, we are served as food for ourselves. The Brazilian cannibalistic movement from the manifest of Oswald de Andrade, uses the concept that Caetano reframe on the song: to be the wolf to wolf to wolf to wolf to man ...

It is a spiral and endless movement, feeding of all cultures, expressions, styles and cultural propositions, incorporate them and turn them to our context. If man is a wolf to man must then eat the wolf and eat man.

I love names
names in ã
things like frog and magnet
Ímã ímã ímã ímã ímã ímã ímã

To love the nouns have to do with the fact that the tilde, the nasal sound in the vowel à making a Ã-AN as structural difference is a major feature of the Portuguese. Worshipping our language is ultimately love our “til”.

names of names
as Scarlet Moon de Chevalier, Glauco Mattoso and Arrigo Barnabé
and Maria da Fé

Who does not know someone who has his name based on another person’s name? Scarlet Moon de Chevalier. Scarlet Moon is a Brazilian woman - Chevalier - Lulu Santos’ wife,  deceased recently. Glauco Mattoso is the concrete poet who has this name because he had a glaucoma that could kill him. Maria da Fé - is our eternal Marias with names derived from the name of the mother of Jesus! Here the formation of Brazilian names with their Allain Dellon da Silva,the twins Grace and Kelly, among others.

If you have an amazing idea better to do a song
It is proven that it is only possible to philosophize in German

As traditional philosophy, in general, is German, creates a notion that does not philosophy here. I believe it does, but a philosophy even more intense as this song that now I analyze. I agree with Caetano: if you have an amazing idea - make a song and let the philosophies to Germany, after all, some violences came just from those philosophies.

blitz mean Corisco
Hollywood mean Azevedo 
and the Reconcavo, and Reconcavo, and Reconcavo, my fear
 

Currently these terms like Blitz or Hollywood has been embedded in our language, but it is possible, in some old dictionaries, actually see that the city of American movies is a word that was translated here as "Azevedo". I could not find the reason, there are no records, but mention it in a song is already a record, or not?

Reconcavo, my fear : political issue, I think. He fears the evil influences coming from that place, the Recôncavo Baiano, in Bahia state. I can be wrong.

the language is my Fatherland
and I have no Fatherland, I have Motherland
and I want Sisterland
 

The term Fatherland comes from that which is our father. Thus, the language, the representative of the nation would be a kind of father. However, the Portuguese is known as "Mother tongue" and even our mother country is even in our hymn: "the sons of this soil, you is gentle Mother, beloved Motherland, Brazil."

However, both the image of father and mother, from the Freudian issues to the Foucault issues, are stage for traumas and powers. Caetano then proposes that language is Fátria - sister - who is by the side, not over the top, in a hierarchy.

Concrete poetry, chaotic prose
future Optics
Samba-rap, chic-left with banana
(- Is he in Sugarloaf?
-  Is craude bro!
- Você and Tu
- Lhe amo
- Qué queu do you, nigga?
- Put it quickly!
- Arigato, arigato!)

Caetano here points out our uses and our futures: on the one hand, a concrete poetry and chaotic prose, next to a samba-rap, rhythm of this song he made, and other various uses of our language by our people on the most diverse ways, mixing English, verbal voices, including changing the use of pronouns.

we sing-speak as who envy blacks
who suffer horrors on Ghetto Harlem
books, records, videos by handfuls
and let them say, think, speak.

And finally, our envious of the languages ​​there, wanting to imitate the Americans and their mediocre and almost tribal way of speaking (a language with only juxtapositions with nothing like arche-iris but rain arches [rainbow]). Anyway, jealousy for what?

Thus, let our song speaks, let Jair Rodrigues speak: let them say, to think, to speak.


Jair Rodrigues performance at Music Festival in 1966.
(video 1)
He used to sing a song called "Deixa Isso Pra La", 
quoted by Author. (video 2)

this video is not at original text. 


this video is not at original text.
 
* * * * * *

About the Author : Luiz Antonio Ribeiro 28 years, playwright, lyricist, critic, poet and Flamengo fan. Bachelor's degree in Theatre Theory on Unirio, where he is currently majoring Bachelor degree in Languages/Literatures. He is adept to reading, research, film, beer and creative leisure. Since 2011 is member of Unidentified Flying Theatre.

Facebook: www.facebook.com/ziul.ribeiro. Twitter: www.twitter.com/ziul.

* * *

Where is the original text: http://literatortura.com/2013/09/cancao-lingua-caetano-veloso-minucioso-tratado-lingua-portuguesa/

* * *

Disseram Que Eu Voltei Americanizada - Carmem Miranda (Lyrics)

Me disseram que eu voltei americanizada
Com o burro do dinheiro
Que estou muito rica
Que não suporto mais o breque do pandeiro
E fico arrepiada ouvindo uma cuíca

Disseram que com as mãos
Estou preocupada
E corre por aí
Que eu sei certo zum zum
Que já não tenho molho, ritmo, nem nada
E dos balangandans já "nem" existe mais nenhum

Mas pra cima de mim, pra que tanto veneno
Eu posso lá ficar americanizada
Eu que nasci com o samba e vivo no sereno
Topando a noite inteira a velha batucada

Nas rodas de malandro minhas preferidas
Eu digo mesmo eu te amo, e nunca "I love you"
Enquanto houver Brasil
Na hora da comidas
Eu sou do camarão ensopadinho com chuchu


*it was Carmem Miranda's favorite food.

* * *