I am one hell of a good translator (tooting my own horn like a mofo!). No other land manages to have for us, not even those to which we have so singularly acclimated, as in America, the charm of this fragment of soil where we have shed the first tear, under this piece of heaven where we drank the first light. It seems, in the words of the poet, that its atoms extend themselves over our bones, that its same sap flows through our veins, that its heat sustains our life; it seems that from its entrails erupts our existence, there in her breast swims the root of our being. The fatherland, however, is not only the birthplace, the beloved resort where we were born and raised; it is not only the home and the town, the garden and the tree, the field and the hill, the beam and the lake, the river and the sea, “where our innocence slipped away and where our childhoods blossomed.” The Portuguese homeland is not only the blue of all this rutilant sky with stars and the hue of all of this soil, inebriant with aromas; it is not only the aggregate of our municipalities and the constellation of our cities, the multitude of our provinces and the necklace of our colonies: the Portuguese fatherland is this concrete entity, this collectivity which has the name of a nation, engendered by the mechanics of history and by social chemistry, sporting through space and time the same respect and the same spirit. It has been said over and over again that it is easier to extinguish the heat at the center of the planet and end the rotation of the planets in the heavens than the love of the fatherland in the Portuguese hearts. Talk to the Portuguese about the possibility of losing their national independence and there you will see how the magnetic current of patriotism shakes all their brains, turns their spirits, invigorates their tepidness. You will see then how their chests become breastplates; their arms become levers; their teeth, daggers; their fingernails, razors; their bodies, bulwarks; and their cadavers, trenches!
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 01:58:04 +0000
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