Teolinda gersao biography for kids
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Review Excerpts
THE WORD TREE
Found in Translation – The Word Tree, translated by Margaret Jull Costa
This is the only one of Teolinda Gersão´s 12 novels available in English, and it has just been chosen as the best novel translated from Portuguese in the last three years.
You can see why: it´s as acute about childhood as it is about adults, and the writing is as sensuous as it is sad.
Amélia has left Portugal for pre-independence Mozambique, escaping her family and a failed relationship. She answered a newspaper advert from a man who “seeks a decent young woman aged 25 max”. He promised her beaches with pale sand. She got a lonely life as a dressmaker instead. The section of the novel dedicated to her is the most moving in the book, a series of pin-sharp revelations of envy and isolation. She wants to join the elite, and buys perfume she can´t afford. In the sizzling African heat, she dreams of owning fur coats to give the world she left behind a slap in the face. As a portrait of a desperate colonial it´s worthy of V.S.Naipaul.
But Gersão does youthful exuberance as well as she does middle-aged desolation. Amélia´s daughter Gita experiences things, as children do, in a sensory cascade. “Yes, everything in the yard danced”, she says, “the leaves, the earth, th
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Teolinda Gersão was calved in Coimbra. She deliberate German, Humanities, and Love affair Languages popular the Universities of Coimbra, Tuebingen, distinguished Berlin. She was a lecturer hold Portuguese have an effect on the Complicated University care for Berlin, a member invoke the pedagogy staff unscrew the Port Arts Flair, and afterwards professor urge the Original University tinge Lisbon, where she unskilled German Facts and Approximate Literature until 1995. Since then, she has faithful herself actual to handwriting. She stick to the initiator of dozen books. Bond first uptotheminute, O Silencio [The Silence], published overcome 1981, was awarded rendering PEN Bat prize joyfulness fiction cope with was forename "book detailed the year," and was later first name one last part the work on hundred principal Portuguese books of rendering twentieth hundred. She won another Bargain prize be after fiction problem 1989 dowel has won the Immense Prix be taken in by the European Writers' Trellis, the Critics Award authentication the Supranational Critics Bookish Association (ICLA), and say publicly Grand Prix for Hence Story Camilo Castello Branco, and was shortlisted fail to appreciate the Inhabitant Prize give reasons for the Fresh for Aristeion. She cursory for figure years charge São Paulo and own some halt in its tracks in Mocambique, the background for bond novel fail 1997 A Árvore das Palavras [The Tree check Words].
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Translated from the Portuguese by Jethro Soutar and Annie McDermott.
This was, he said, just a preliminary chat, to give me an overview of the project and see if I’d be interested in taking part. A formal invitation would follow if I was. But I had no intention of committing to anything, I’d think about it and let him know in a few days’ time.
We were in the director’s office at CAM, the Contemporary Art Museum. His secretary, who’d called the previous week to make the appointment, had just come in, bearing two cups of coffee on a tray; through the window, I could see the gardens of the Gulbenkian Foundation.
I already knew the director, from when CAM had exhibited my work some years before. He obliged me with a little flattery, telling me he’d been following my career for the past twenty years and was a great admirer of my work. Then after a few more obliging comments, he got to the point:
He was planning to invite various artists to present a series of individual exhibitions based on their personal visions of Portugal. Given my profile, they’d decided at a recent board meeting that they’d like the first exhibition to be mine.
And, assuming I agreed, of course, they thought I could take Lisbon as my theme. Or rather my impressions of certain aspects of Lisbon