An Island Carried Across the Atlantic
Translating the Memory of Santa Maria for New Generations
By Giuseppe Formato, PhD
What does Santa Maria become when so many of its people leave it? For generations of families from the island who established new lives in Canada and the United States, Santa Maria continued to exist far beyond its shores. It traveled in ways of speaking, family expressions, food, religious and communal practices, memories of particular parishes, and stories about work, hardship, and departure. Yet much of what emigrants carried with them was never formally recorded, and even less of it became available in English to their children and grandchildren.
This question lies at the heart of my English translation of Arsénio Chaves Puim’s O Povo de Santa Maria: Seu Falar e Suas Vivências, published as Echoes of Azorean Life: A Cultural and Linguistic Portrait of the Island of Santa Maria. Santa Maria is the southernmost and easternmost island of the Azores and the first to have been settled in the fifteenth century. Its agrarian history, long periods of relative isolation, exposure to corsair attacks, mid-twentieth-century transformation through its international airport, and later cycles of emigration all shaped a culture with a character of its own.
Puim’s book records that culture from within. Although the original work is sometimes described as a glossary, it is not a simple list of regional words and definitions. A word becomes an entry into a larger world. Its meaning unfolds through remembered scenes, stories, customs, forms of labor, religious observances, social relationships, and firsthand observations gathered over a lifetime. Puim writes as a community historian, a careful observer of linguistic variation, and a participant in the way of life he describes.
The result is an intimate portrait of how people on Santa Maria inhabited their island. Language is connected to farming and herding, bread baking and viticulture, domestic life and disappearing trades, hunger and scarcity, celebrations and the Cult of the Holy Spirit. The book documents tools, practices, beliefs, humor, songs, and forms of collective memory. It does not romanticize rural life; alongside solidarity and festivity, Puim records inequality, limited opportunities, and the difficult material conditions that encouraged so many islanders to emigrate.
This breadth makes Echoes of Azorean Life relevant well beyond the study of vocabulary. Readers in linguistics and ethnolinguistics will encounter a historically grounded variety of Portuguese shaped by local conditions and oral transmission. Historians, anthropologists, folklorists, sociologists, migration scholars, and those interested in material culture, religious studies, oral tradition, and island studies will find evidence of how one small community understood work, faith, nature, belonging, and change. The book offers a rare micro-level study of the relationship between words and world.
The English edition appears through Letras Lavadas in the Coleção Insulana of the Instituto Cultural de Ponta Delgada, a fitting home for a work devoted so closely to the cultural life of an Azorean island. It also includes a foreword by Onésimo T. Almeida, whose scholarship and writing have long connected the Azores with their diasporas. Almeida situates Santa Maria within a wider Atlantic history and emphasizes the exceptional authority of Puim’s perspective: not that of a visitor conducting brief fieldwork, but of someone formed by the community he records.
For communities of Santa Maria descent in Canada, the book offers something especially personal. Descendants who know the island through their parents or grandparents may recognize customs, expressions, occupations, or ways of interpreting the world that survived after migration. Others may finally gain context for fragments of family history: the name of a parish, a photograph of an unfamiliar landscape, an object once used on a farm, or an expression remembered but never fully explained. English makes this cultural record accessible to readers who inherited a connection to Santa Maria without inheriting full access to Portuguese.
The book nevertheless reaches beyond families from Santa Maria. Descendants of immigrants from São Miguel, Terceira, Pico, Faial, Flores, or the other Azorean islands may recognize common patterns of rural life, devotion, oral tradition, and migration. At the same time, they will encounter the differences that make Santa Maria more than a miniature version of the Azores as a whole. The archipelago shares a regional identity, but each island developed its own vocabulary, practices, historical experiences, and
sense of place. Attending seriously to one island helps us understand the richness within Azorean identity rather than treating it as uniform.
Translating such a work required more than finding English equivalents for Portuguese words. Many terms carry associations that cannot be transferred without explanation, while other passages assume knowledge of Azorean history, religious practice, geography, or material life. I preserved culturally significant Portuguese terms when English could not convey their full meaning and added annotations for readers unfamiliar with the world Puim describes. The aim was to make the book accessible without flattening Santa Maria’s specificity.
My connection to the project is both scholarly and personal. My mother is from Santa Maria, and my research has long examined Portuguese migration, language, and identity. Translating Puim’s work brought those parts of my life together. It also made me consider how many descendants in North America know their ancestral places through partial stories. A book cannot recover every missing memory, but it can create a landscape in which scattered family fragments begin to make sense.
The publication of Echoes of Azorean Life also raises a larger question about which communities enter the written record. Small islands and rural populations have often remained at the margins of national and migration histories, even though their people helped build Portuguese communities throughout Canada and the United States. Preserving Santa Maria’s linguistic and cultural heritage is therefore not simply an exercise in nostalgia. It affirms that local knowledge and everyday lives are essential parts of Portuguese and North American diasporic history.
The title Echoes of Azorean Life reflects this continuing movement. An echo is not the original voice, yet it carries that voice forward, altered by distance but still recognizable. The world preserved by Puim has traveled from Santa Maria into communities abroad and now, through translation, into English. I hope readers from Santa Maria will find part of their own history in these pages, that other Azorean descendants will recognize both kinship and difference, and that scholars from many fields will discover an unusually rich record of language embedded in life.
An island’s history does not end at its shoreline. It continues wherever its people and their descendants have made a home, and wherever someone pauses to listen carefully to what their words still carry.
Follow the link to purchase Echoes of Azorean Life
Learn more about Giuseppe Formato