Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Soldiers' writings, Portuguese »

For scholars of southeastern Africa interested in the early history of the region, the pen of the Portuguese was indeed mightier than the sword. Although most of the first Portuguese arrivals carried either the sword or the cross, they put these down to wield the pen and leave a written record of their triumphs and travails. The documents left by Portuguese soldiers, religious men, and others in the service of the crown provide details that are relative not only to the Portuguese experience but also to African life. This paper focuses on Portuguese writings that describe the area around the port of Sofala and its hinterland, home to the Shona who live south of the Zambezi river on the central Mozambican coastal plain and the Zimbabwe plateau. Both around Sofala and further west in the interior the inhabitants speak Ndau, a dialect of the Shona language. The wealth of evidence left by the Portuguese since the sixteenth century sheds light on changes and continuities in Ndau history.The materials that have survived are amazingly detailed and informative despite their inherent biases. Historians have long recognized the prejudices of the colonizer either creeping into the documents or jumping off the page in a more blatant manner. The examples provided here are no different. The Portuguese, like other Europeans, had certain notions stemming from a Eurocentric mentality that was an integral part of their worldview. In these records, we see how the quest for gold and a ‘civilizing’ mission coalesced into systematic exploitation.

"“I am writing this letter only for you to know”: Social Deixis in Romanian and Portuguese Letters from the Great War. This paper analyses the use of address forms in letters from World War I written by Romanian and Portuguese soldiers, with the objective of comparing the discursive configuration of the interlocutive distance (Carreira 1997) in the two languages. The analysis, based on online and printed corpus reveals systematic similarities between the two languages concerning nominal address forms: the frequent use of intensity markers (possessives, qualificative adjectives, vocatives, diminutives) to express affection towards the recipients. There are differences concerning the use of pronominal address forms. Parent-son relationships are asymmetrically constructed in both cultures, which is reflected by the use of intermediary pronouns você and dumneata, but in husband-wife correspondence only the pronoun tu is used in Portuguese, while in Romanian letters both tu and dumneata appear. In the correspondence between friends and colleagues there are some differences: the pronoun tu is used exclusively in Portuguese, while in Romanian there is an alternation between tu and dumneata. Overall, this study shows that interlocutive distance was higher in Romanian than in Portuguese at the beginning of the 20th century. Keywords: Portuguese Address Forms; Romanian Address Forms; Epistolary Writing; War Letters; World War I "

ABSTRACTIn their published memoirs of the Peninsular War, a surprising number of British officers mentioned visits to Portuguese convents and openly confessed to having flirted with the sisters – occasionally to the point of outright seduction – and abandoned them when the regiment moved on. This seems like a very negative self-fashioning to modern readers, but can best be understood in the context of the political and cultural climate in which these memoirs were produced. This article argues that officers' descriptions of convent visiting and their professions of sympathy for cloistered women revealed the influence of gothic, erotic, romantic, and travel literature on military life writing. Their depiction of nuns differed from nuns’ portrayal by common soldiers due to its infusion with masculine ideals of chivalry and sensibility. Elite memoirists saw no need to justify their abandonment of nuns because they viewed it in light of other literary accounts of soldiers who broke nuns’ hearts. At the same time, they contrasted themselves with the barbarism of the French, believing themselves to be far more compassionate and tolerant of Catholic strictures. Officers’ portrayals of Portuguese sisters can thus also be seen as an expression of Britons’ sense of their relationship with Portugal in the war.

Dead Men Telling Tales is an account of the lasting cultural impact made by the autobiographies of Napoleonic soldiers over the course of the nineteenth century. Focussing on the nearly three hundred military memoirs published by British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese veterans of the Peninsular War (1808–1814), it charts the histories of these books over the course of a hundred years, around Europe and the Atlantic, and from writing to publication to afterlife. Drawing on extensive archival research in multiple languages, the book challenges assumptions made by historians about the reliability of these soldiers’ direct eyewitness accounts, revealing the personal and political motives of the authors and uncovering the large cast of characters, from family members to publishers, editors, and translators, involved in production behind the scenes. By including literature from Spain and Portugal, it also provides a missing link in current studies of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, showing how the genre of military memoirs developed differently in south-western Europe and led to starkly opposing national narratives of the same war. The book’s findings tell the history of a publishing phenomenon which gripped readers of all ages across the world in the nineteenth century, made significant profits for those involved, and was fundamental in defining the modern ‘soldier’s tale’.