A glance at the portrait of Portuguese people and "others" in Fernão Mendes Pinto’s work "Peregrinação"

• Autor(a) principal: Luís, Carla Sofia Gomes Xavier
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Outros Autores: Luís, Alexandre António da Costa
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• DOI: 10.58155/revistadeletras.v1i6.421
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.58155/revistadeletras.v1i6.421

The profile of the Portuguese as travelers, emigrants, adventurers, among other aspects, usually seeking fortune, is widely mentioned by various sources. Among the panoply of travel writings written by Portuguese authors in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, as a result of wanderings through various places around the world, it is imperative to highlight the Peregrinação by Fernão Mendes Pinto (who was a soldier of fortune, pirate, merchant, agent and diplomat for 21 years in Ethiopia, Persia, Malaya, India, Burma, Siam, Cochinchina, China and Japan), printed in Lisbon, in 1614, 31 years after the death of its writer. This work, which was unquestionably a “bestseller” in the 17th century and which has proved to be an attractive source of intertextual dialogue, has several editions, global or partial reprints, translations and brings together numerous works of critical analysis about it, becoming the object of readings, rereadings and even some rectifications, especially in what concerns the topics of credibility and historicity. Focusing our attention on such a monument of Portuguese and universal travel literature, we seek, with this article, to X-ray some of the features that build the portrait with which the Portuguese are displayed, reproducing the same exercise in relation to the several Asian cultures and civilizations exposed in the account of the “adventurer-penitent” that was Fernão Mendes Pinto, who, undoubtedly, when in contact with different realities, collected incredible experiences and life lessons, performed countless tasks and missions and extracted a universalism that runs through the Peregrinação.