In The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon (University of Chicago Press, $15 trade paper, 9780226305158/0226305155, November 15, 2009), Philip Graham has written a lyrical and seductive memoir about one of the most wonderful places in the world. He and his family lived in Lisbon for a year, in a city that fits in his own emotional baggage. He says that it's a genetic thing that beckons him, even though he seems to be of Scottish stock. Entranced with things Portuguese, he explores soccer, cuisine, fado music, literature and, of course, the language:
"The Portuguese swallow their syllables.
"It's almost a national pastime. They can take a perfectly fine sentence and, when they speak, reduce it to a half or a third of its original length. When it comes to spoken Portuguese, what you don't hear is as important as what you do. Estas certo!--You're right!--becomes Sta Cert! A 50 percent linguistic reduction is impressive, but when Eu estou--I am--can be snipped to something that sounds like tou, we're talking a 75 percent drop in syllabic reality. I imagine that if the Portuguese dictionary were written as the language is truly spoken, the book would be the size of a pamphlet listing the late-blooming flowers of North African mountaintops....
"I sit under this tree in a well-manicured corner of the park and work myself up into a particularly despairing and mean-spirited mood about my linguistic progress, so when I hear the keening of a distant ambulance, I imagine that paramedics are rushing to the hospital some poor gasping Portuguese soul who swallowed too many syllables at one time. There must be, after all, a magic cutoff point where, if you go too far, you choke on one final indigestible syllable."--Marilyn Dahl