Poetry: The art to connect languages with their cultures

                      My history with poetry started eleven years ago. My Portuguese literature professor aimed students to learn and tried to write their own papers. The topic was “dreams, difficulties and passion”, in a free translation from Portuguese. I took the third place and since then I never stopped to write. During my high school exchange program to United Stated I wrote my first poetry in English, it was an epitaph, and I got the first place on that contest. Back then I was already fifteen years old and I had more than one hundred pages written.

                      Stories of love, sadness, loneliness and so on. Poetry is the most simple and beautiful way that human beings can share their thoughts, histories and feelings. Since Camões, first world well-known Portuguese writer, and Shakespeare, and even before with Homer and his Iliad and Odyssey, we use the beauty of words to share with the eternity what we believe it is valuable for everyone. It is impossible to live in a world without poetry because it would led us to no real expression of own believes and mitigate how we understand each human being behavior. Also, the influence and correlation that poetry and music shows merge them to a unique way to transform written words into powerful songs and melodies.

                      Latin languages, such as Spanish, Italian, French and Portuguese, have an extra feeling when they are expressed. This difference to English is possible to see in several poetries and papers. Even though, some poems written in English language are delightful and brilliant, they express more a cold and less intensive way to share feelings that are in the roots of their culture. However, Latin culture has its passion express not only in words, but in their body language, ways to demonstrate feelings and how they aim to live their lives. This passion is even clearer in some cities that have poetry in their streets and building, such as Paris, Barcelona, Rome, Lisbon and many others.

                      I would like to terminate this post with a short line from a poem I wrote few years ago. It is written in English, but I believe is possible to feel my brazilian passion. I hope to share more poems in the near future. Enjoy it!

“Always leave an open door for life,

It has for you more than you can dream,

Time do not bring you answers or solutions,

It only shows the truth that was there since the first moment,

You cannot be blind because with time tears will be stronger and more painful,

Well, you need to learn how to love yourself as fast as possible…”

Text by Jose Mendez, a student of Independent Study in English course