Marilia de Dirceu

Gonzaga, Tomás António, 1744-1810？Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

4.0

Word count: 119K words
Chapters: 12

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.Marilia de Dirceo by Tomás António GonzagaAuthor: Gonzaga, Tomás António, 1744-1810?,Language: Portuguese, Class: PQ: Language and Literatures: Romance literatures: French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Release Date: Mar 30, 2006

Editor's review

Marilia de Dirceo is the representative love poetry collection by Tomás António Gonzaga, a poet of Brazil's colonial period. Written in pastoral style, it expresses his admiration for the young woman Marilia, weaving idyllic imagination with personal feeling. In the history of Portuguese-language literature it is often regarded as an important specimen of eighteenth-century Brazilian poetry: its language is metrically polished, its imagery fresh and clear, and it combines the elegance of classical pastoral with the atmosphere of colonial social life. The Portuguese-language public-domain electronic edition provided by Project Gutenberg offers the original text to readers studying Portuguese-language literature and the literature of colonial Latin America. Note that the language is eighteenth-century Portuguese, differing from modern Portuguese in spelling and vocabulary, so the reading threshold for non-native readers is relatively high. It is better suited as a text for literary-historical and comparative-literary study than as light leisure reading.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Intermediate and advanced learners of Portuguese who wish to encounter primary texts of Portuguese-language literature
Scholars and students studying Brazilian colonial literature and the pastoral tradition
Readers interested in the roots of Latin American literature and in comparative literature
Literary researchers who wish to use a public-domain electronic text for textual analysis

Not a good fit for

General readers with no Portuguese who expect a Chinese translation
Readers who prefer modern fictional narrative and have little tolerance for poetic form
Beginners who need extensive annotation and introduction to understand classical works

Reading tips

Learn the basic features of pastoral poetry first, then enter the text; this makes its rhetoric and structure easier to grasp
Read alongside a modern Portuguese translation or annotated edition to reduce obstacles from eighteenth-century spelling and vocabulary
Read through the poems in order, then select recurring natural images for thematic analysis to understand how feeling is expressed
Combine with historical background on colonial Brazil to understand the love writing in its period context

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 there a Chinese translation of this book?

According to available information, the book is published by Project Gutenberg in the original Portuguese and no Chinese translation is indicated. Chinese readers who wish to read it need Portuguese proficiency or must look for translations through other publishing channels.

How much Portuguese is needed to read this book?

The book uses eighteenth-century Portuguese, with spelling and syntax that differ from contemporary Portuguese. Intermediate to advanced Portuguese reading ability is recommended, or at least the ability to understand the verses with annotations and a dictionary; otherwise readers may remain at the literal level and find it hard to appreciate the meter.

What is the poetry collection mainly about?

The work is written in pastoral form and concerns the poet's love for the young woman Marilia, expressing admiration and longing through idyllic natural imagery while also bearing traces of eighteenth-century Brazilian social life. It is regarded as one of the representative texts of love poetry from Brazil's colonial period.

Why do the author's birth and death years carry question marks?

The question marks on the author's birth and death years in the bibliographic information indicate uncertainty in the documentary record regarding the year of birth or death. This is common in literary-historical cataloging; readers citing it should note the uncertainty and should not treat it as a definitive conclusion.

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About the author

Gonzaga, Tomás António, 1744-1810？ Author · Brazilian · 1744–1810

Tomás António Gonzaga (1744–1810?), a Brazilian poet. Details of his life and the exact year of his death are limited in publicly available sources, and his death year remains uncertain. He wrote the Cartas Chilenas and was exiled for taking part in the Inconfidência Mineira, an experience intertwined with his literary work and important for understanding it. His representative work, Marilia de Dirceo, presents love and personal feeling in lyrical verse, with clear, graceful language and sincere emotion, and is regarded as one of the notable lyrical works of colonial Brazil. He is often associated with Arcadianism in Brazilian literature, and his work has had some influence on later Brazilian lyrical poetry.