PORTUGUESE POETRY

PORTUGUESE POETRY

GET PORTUGUESE TRANSLATORS AND INTERPRETERS, CALL 080-3753-1249, 081-1445-6164
E-mail: hello@novatiatranslations.com.ng

The beginnings of Portuguese poetry go back to the early 12th century, around the time when the County of Portugal separated from the medieval Kingdom of Galicia in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula. It was in this region that the ancestral language of both modern Portuguese and modern Galician, known today as Galician-Portuguese, was the common language of the people.

Like the troubadour culture in the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe, Galician-Portuguese poets sang the love for a woman, which often turned into personal insults, as she had hurt her lover’s pride. However, this region produced a specific type of song, known as cantigas de amigo (songs of a friend). In these, the lyrical subject is always a woman (though the singer was male) talking about her friend (lover) from whom she has been separated – by war or other activities – as shown in the Reconquista. They discuss the loneliness that the woman feels. But some poems also project eroticism, or confess the lover’s meeting in a secret place, often through a dialogue she has with her mother or with natural elements (such could be considered a custom adapted from the pagan peoples in the region). Epic poetry was also produced, as was common in Romantic medieval regions (Gesta de D. Afonso Henriques, of unknown authorship). With the Portuguese expansion south, poetry preserved some of these main characteristics – cantigas de amigo were written even by kings, like Denis of Portugal.

GET PORTUGUESE TRANSLATORS AND INTERPRETERS, CALL 080-3753-1249, 081-1445-6164