Poesias

Alexandre Herculano de Carvalho e AraújoProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

3.4

Word count: 188K words
Chapters: 19

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Poesias by Alexandre HerculanoAuthor: Herculano, Alexandre, 1810-1877,Language: Portuguese, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: Jun 28, 2008

Editor's review

This electronic edition of Poesias is a free release by Project Gutenberg of poems by Alexandre Herculano, a leading figure of Portuguese Romanticism. A poet as well as a historian, Herculano often imbues his verse with national memory and historical reflection, setting it apart from purely lyrical Romantic poetry. This edition presents the original Portuguese text and is one of the public-domain works released early by Project Gutenberg, formatted mainly as plain text and suited both to scholarly citation and to continuous reading. Its value lies not in textual collation but in offering direct, low-cost access to a primary text of nineteenth-century Portuguese Romantic poetry. It works well as material for foreign-language poetry reading practice, and for readers interested in Portuguese literature and Iberian Romanticism who wish to read by theme. As an electronic transcription, it offers limited notes and introduction, so pairing it with literary-historical background material is recommended.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Intermediate and advanced learners of Portuguese who wish to train their sense of the language through original poetry
University teachers, students, and researchers working on nineteenth-century Portuguese Romantic literature
General readers interested in the history and culture of the Iberian Peninsula who are willing to read the original
Teachers seeking free public-domain poetry texts for course selection or quotation

Not a good fit for

Beginners with no Portuguese who cannot find a parallel translation
Scholarly readers expecting detailed notes, an introduction, and textual collation
Casual readers who want Chinese translations only and prefer not to engage with the original

Reading tips

Begin by reading through the table of contents and selecting poems whose titles concern history and national themes as an entry point into the author's style.
Read one or two poems closely each day; when encountering unfamiliar words, first infer meaning from context, then verify them together, preserving your reading rhythm.
Read alongside the Romanticism chapter of a Portuguese literary history to understand the poems in their historical context.
Keep a bilingual notebook: excerpt representative lines and attempt translations to test your understanding of the original's rhythm and word meaning.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Is this book a Chinese translation or the original Portuguese text?

This is the original Portuguese electronic edition released by Project Gutenberg, not a Chinese translation. It contains no translator's preface or parallel translation, so readers need some ability to read Portuguese or should use a dictionary or other translations for support.

How are the formatting and notes in this electronic edition?

This edition is an early Project Gutenberg public-domain text, consisting mainly of plain-text transcription with limited notes, introduction, and textual apparatus. It suits continuous reading and quotation, but not close study that requires detailed annotation.

Can I read these poems without knowing Portuguese history?

You can, but your depth of understanding will suffer. Herculano's poems often touch on national history and collective memory, so it is advisable first to skim a brief outline of Portuguese history from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, then read the relevant poems; this makes their emotional orientation easier to grasp.

Comments

Find this book

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Alexandre Herculano de Carvalho e Araújo Author · Portuguese · 1810–1877

Alexandre Herculano (1810–1877) was a Portuguese historian, novelist and poet, regarded as the founder of Portuguese Romanticism. Because of his liberal convictions he went into exile in England and France, and later served as a librarian at the Royal Library and was elected a member of parliament. His four-volume History of Portugal verifies facts against original documents, reflecting a rigorous historical method. In literature he wrote the historical novels Eurico, o presbítero and O Monge de Cister, as well as Lendas e Narrativas, and left poems such as A Harpa do Crente and Poesias. The collection holds fourteen of his works, including Lendas e Narrativas and several volumes of Opúsculos, covering both historical essays and literary narrative.