A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

by Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith (Translator)

The largest and richest English-language volume of poetry from “the greatest twentieth-century writer you have never heard of” ( Los Angeles Times )
 
Edited, Translated, and with an Introduction by Richard Zenith, the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Pessoa: A Biography

A Penguin Classic

Writing obsessively in French, English, and Portuguese, poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) left a prodigious body of work, much of it credited to three “heteronyms”―Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Alvaro de Campos―alter egos with startlingly different styles, points of view, and biographies. Offering a unique sampling of his most famous voices, this collection features Pessoa’s major, best-known works and several stunning poems that have come to light only in this century, including his long, highly autobiographical swan song. Featuring a rich body of work that has never before been translated into English, this is the finest introduction available to the stunning breadth of Pessoa’s genius.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Portuguese Literature, Portugal, Fiction, 20th Century, Literature

436 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was a poet and writer.

It is sometimes said that the four greatest Portuguese poets of modern times are Fernando Pessoa. The statement is possible since Pessoa, whose name means ‘person’ in Portuguese, had three alter egos who wrote in styles completely different from his own. In fact Pessoa wrote under dozens of names, but Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos were – their creator claimed – full-fledged individuals who wrote things that he himself would never or could never write. He dubbed them ‘heteronyms’ rather than pseudonyms, since they were not false names but “other names”, belonging to distinct literary personalities. Not only were their styles different; they thought differently, they had different religious and political views, different aesthetic sensibilities, different social temperaments. And each produced a large body of poetry. Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis also signed dozens of pages of prose.

The critic Harold Bloom referred to him in the book The Western Canon as the most representative poet of the twentieth century, along with Pablo Neruda.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [mental health hiatus] · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘What’s the writing of poetry but a confession that life isn’t enough?
What’s art but a way to forget that life is just this?’
-Álvaro De Campos

Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was a living literary masterpiece. Writing in Portuguese, French, and English, Pessoa turned out a staggering, and seemingly endless collection of poetry, translations, literary criticisms and numerous essays on politics, religion and philosophy, as well as the highly praised and highly ponderous The Book of Disquiet, all under a vast collection of heteronyms. Coined by Pessoa, Heteronyms are a literary device somewhat like an extension to the concept of a pseudonyms, being fully fleshed-out character, each with their own unique styles, beliefs, and themes as well as a complete biography through which Pessoa wrote as opposed to simply being a false name ¹ Through 81 confirmed heteronyms (the complete list is contained below), Pessoa rocked the literary climate of his native Portugal, being credited as the genius behind the three greatest Portuguese poets of his time: Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis.

Richard Zenith’s introduction to this collection offers an interesting, in-depth look into the life of Pessoa, from his political activism to philosophical musings, and the ideas and inspirations behind the creation of his most famous heteronyms. Pessoa evinced literary greatness very early on in life. writing his first poem at age 7 to his mother:

Here I am in Portugal
In the lands where I was born.
However much I love them
I love you even more

spending his early childhood creating fake newspapers for his own enjoyment (written by a fake group of journalists whom he wrote biographies for), and publishing short stories and poems through the heteronym, Charles Robert Anon, at age 16. As Pessoa grew as a writer, he began to create more and more identities to suit his needs. ‘Each of my dreams,’ writes Pessoa as Bernardo Soares in The Book of Disquiet, as soon as I start dreaming it, is immediately incarnated in another person, who is then the one dreaming it, and not I To create, I’ve destroyed myself…. I’m the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.’ Much like a character actor, Pessoa was able to take on the personality of endless characters, leaving so little trace of himself that people often questioned if it was possible for someone to be able to express one set of opinions and style, yet concurrently write such opposing ideas from another heteronym (although many of the critics debating this or publishing analytical essays on the poets turned out to actually be Pessoa again). Pessoa often experimented with automatic writing to ‘find’ new heteronyms, and after studying heavily into astrology, he began to assign astrological signs to his heteronyms to build their personalities. Zenith collects the ‘best of’ from each of Pessoa’s major poets in this collection to exemplify the diversity and sheer genius of Pessoa.

Alberto Caeiro

If they want me to have mysticism, okay, I’ve got it.
I’m a mystic, but only in my body,
My soul is simple and doesn’t think.

My mysticism is not wanting to know.
It’s living and not thinking about it.

I don’t know what Nature is: I sing her.
I live on top of a knoll
In a lonely whitewashed house,
And that’s my definition.

Caeiro, an Aries, was written to be a simple country dweller with no education and a desire to perceive life simply as it is without any thought getting in the way to taint it: ‘to know how to see without thinking, to know how to see when seeing and not think when seeing nor see when thinking’. Born in 1889 and dying in 1915, Caeiro is said by Pessoa to have come to him ‘in a kind of ecstasy’ that allowed him to write the majority of Caeiro’s body of work within a 2 week period.

O ship setting out on a distant voyage,
Why don't I miss you the way other people do
After you've vanished from sight?
Because, when I don't see you, you cease to exist.
And if I feel nostalgia for what doesn't exist,
The feeling is in relationship to nothing.
It's not the ship but our own selves that we miss.

Ricardo Reis

I want the flower you are, not the one you give.
Why refuse me what I don't ask of you?
      You'll have time to refuse
      After you've given.
Flower, be a flower to me! If, ungenerous, you're plucked
By the hand of the ill-omened sphinx, you'll wander forever
      As an absurd shadow,
      Seeking what you never gave.

Reis, born in 1887 ², was a physician and immersed in the Greek classics, writing epic, metered odes and sonnets about fate. Reis questions religion (often preferring to believe in the Greek gods than his own Christian faith) mocks man, and seeks only for truth.

Whatever ceases is death, and the death
Is ours if it ceases for us. A bush
      Withers, and with it
      Goes part of my life.
In all I’ve observed, part of me remained.
Whatever I’ve seen, when it passes I passed,
      Memory not distinguishing
      What I’ve seen from what I’ve been.

---

Let my fate deny me everything except
      to see it, for I, an unstrict
Stoic, wish to delight in every letter
      of the sentence engraved by Destiny

Álvaro de Campos

I got off the train
And said good-bye to the man I’d met.
We’d been together for eighteen hours
And had a pleasant conversation,
Fellowship in the journey,
And I was sorry to get off, sorry to leave
This chance friend whose name I never learned.
I felt my eyes water with tears…
Every farewell is a death.
Yes, every farewell is a death
In the train that we call life
We are all chance events in one another’s lives,
And we all feel sorry when it’s time to get off.

All that is human moves me, because I am a man.
All that is human moves me not because I have an affinity
With human ideas or human doctrines
But because of my infinite fellowship with humanity itself.

The main who hated to go,
Crying with nostalgia
For the house where she’d been mistreated….

All of this, inside my heart, is death and the world’s sadness.
All of this lives, because it dies, inside my heart.

And my heart is a little larger than the entire universe.

How amazing is that!?
De Campos is my favorite of the heteronyms collected in this book. Born in 1890, De Campos was created to be the antithesis of Pessoa’s true self. Known for writing scathing criticisms, long poems (which later became very short poems in which he expresses sadness for not being able to create the long poems of his youth) and political activism, De Campos has the most personality and public life of the heteronyms. Often Pessoa would show up in character as De Campos to readings or lectures where Pessoa Himself had been scheduled and proceed to bad mouth the Pessoa Himself, which Zenith points out, didn’t always sit well with the public.
I’m gonna throw a bomb into destiny.

I’m nothing.
I’ll never be anything.
I can’t wish to be anything.
Even so, I have in me all the dreams of the world.

Pessoa Himself

The poet is a faker
Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.

And those who read his words
Will feel in what he wrote
Neither of the pains he has
But just the one they don’t.

And so around its track
This thing called the heart winds,
A little clockwork train
To entertain our minds.

Interestingly enough, Pessoa as himself was the least famous of his major poets. Much of his self poetry is spent discussing the ideas of the ‘self’ and consciousness. He wrote several poems in English, which were only marginally received. As he had taught himself English at a young age by reading his favorite writers, Poe, Shakespeare, Keats, Milton, Arthur Conan Doyle and Dickens among others, his English built itself to have a slightly outdated, stuffy academic feel to it that was noted in many of his English poem reviews. However, it was also mentioned that his Elizabethan style felt extremely authentic.

All beauty is a dream, even if it exists
for beauty is always more than it is
the beauty I see in you
isn’t here, next to me.

What I see in you lives where I dream,
Far away from here. If you exist,
I only know it
Because I just dreamed it.

Beauty is a music which, heard
In dreams, overflowed into life.
But it’s not exactly life:
It’s the life that dreamed.

5/5


¹ While most instances of his are simply considered pseudonyms, Søren Kierkegaard had several heteronyms which he used to distance the opinions in certain books or essays of his from the major body of work.
² The idea that Reis continued living after the death of Pessoa is explored in Saramago’s novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, in which Lydia, a woman frequently mentioned in Reis poetry, is a significant character.

THE LIST OF PESSOA’S HETERONYMS:
1. Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa - Himself - Commercial correspondent in Lisbon
2. Fernando Pessoa - Orthonym - Poet and prose writer
3. Fernando Pessoa - Autonym - Poet and prose writer
4. Fernando Pessoa - Heteronym - Poet; a pupil of Alberto Caeiro
5. Alberto Caeiro - Heteronym - Poet; author of O guardador de Rebanhos, O Pastor Amoroso and Poemas inconjuntos; master of heteronyms Fernando Pessoa, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and António Mora.
6. Ricardo Reis - Heteronym - Poet and prose writer, author of Odes and texts on the work of Alberto Caeiro
7. Federico Reis - Heteronym / Para-heteronym - Essayist; brother of Ricardo Reis, upon whom he writes
8. Álvaro de Campos - Heteronym - Poet and prose writer; a pupil of Alberto Caeiro
9. António Mora - Heteronym - Philosopher and sociologist; theorist of Neopaganism; a pupil of Alberto Caeiro
10. Claude Pasteur - Heteronym / Semi-heteronym - French translator of Cadernos de reconstrução pagã conducted by António Mora
11. Bernardo Soares - Heteronym / Semi-heteronym - Poet and prose writer; author of The Book of Disquiet.
12. Vicente Guedes - Heteronym / Semi-heteronym - Translator, poet; director of Ibis Press; author of a paper
13. Gervasio Guedes - Heteronym / Semi-heteronym - Author of the text “A Coroação de Jorge Quinto”
14. Alexander Search - Heteronym - Poet and short story writer
15. Charles James Search - Heteronym / Para-heteronym - Translator and essayist; brother of Alexander Search
16. Jean-Méluret of Seoul - Heteronym / Proto-heteronym - French poet and essayist
17. Rafael Baldaya - Heteronym - Astrologer; author of Tratado da Negação and Princípios de Metaphysica Esotérica
18. Barão de Teive - Heteronym - Prose writer; author of Educação do Stoica and Daphnis e Chloe
19. Charles Robert Anon - Heteronym / Semi-heteronym - Poet, philosopher and story writer
20. A. A. Crosse - Pseudonym / Proto-heteronym - Author and puzzle-solver
21. Thomas Crosse - Heteronym / Proto-heteronym - English epic character/occultist, popularized in Portuguese culture
22. I. I. Crosse - Heteronym / Para-heteronym -
23. David Merrick - Heteronym / Semi-heteronym - Poet, storyteller and playwright
24. Lucas Merrick - Heteronym / Para-heteronym - Short story writer; perhaps brother David Merrick
25. Pêro Botelho - Heteronym / Pseudonym - Short story writer and author of letters
26. Abilio Quaresma - Heteronym / Character / Meta-heteronym - Character inspired by Pêro Botelho and author of short detective stories
27. Inspector Guedes - Character / Meta-heteronym(?) - Character inspired by Pêro Botelho and author of short detective stories
28. Uncle Pork - Pseudonym / Character - Character inspired by Pêro Botelho and author of short detective stories
29. Frederick Wyatt - Alias / Heteronym - English poet and prose writer
30. Rev. Walter Wyatt - Character - Possibly brother of Frederick Wyatt
31. Alfred Wyatt - Character - Another brother of Frederick Wyatt and resident of Paris
32. Maria José - Heteronym / Proto-heteronym - Wrote and signed “A Carta da Corcunda para o Serralheiro”
33. Chevalier de Pas - Pseudonym / Proto-heteronym - Author of poems and letters
34. Efbeedee Pasha - Heteronym / Proto-heteronym - Author of humoristic stories
35. Faustino Antunes / A. Moreira - Heteronym / Pseudonym - Psychologist and author of Ensaio sobre a Intuição
36. Carlos Otto - Heteronym / Proto-heteronym - Poet and author of Tratado de Lucta Livre
37. Michael Otto - Pseudonym / Para-heteronym - Probably brother of Carlos Otto who was entrusted with the translation into English of Tratado de Lucta Livre
38. Sebastian Knight - Proto-heteronym / Alias -
39. Horace James Faber - Heteronym / Semi-heteronym - English short story writer and essayist
40. Navas - Heteronym / Para-heteronym - Translated Horace James Faber in Portuguese
41. Pantaleão - Heteronym / Proto-heteronym - Poet and prose writer
42. Torquato Fonseca Mendes da Cunha Rey - Heteronym / Meta-heteronym - Deceased author of a text Pantaleão decided to publish
43. Joaquim Moura Costa - Proto-heteronym / Semi-heteronym - Satirical poet; Republican activist; member of O Phosphoro
44. Sher Henay - Proto-heteronym / Pseudonym - Compiler and author of the preface of a sensationalist anthology in English
45. Anthony Gomes - Semi-heteronym / Character - Philosopher; author of “Historia Cómica do Affonso Çapateiro”
46. Professor Trochee - Proto-heteronym / Pseudonym - Author of an essay with humorous advice for young poets
47. Willyam Links Esk - Character - Signed a letter written in English on April 13, 1905
48. António de Seabra - Pseudonym / Proto-heteronym - Literary critic
49. João Craveiro - Pseudonym / Proto-heteronym - Journalist; follower of Sidonio Pereira
50. Tagus - Pseudonym - Collaborator in Natal Mercury (Durban, South Africa)
51. Pipa Gomes - Draft heteronym - Collaborator in O Phosphoro
52. Ibis -Character / Pseudonym - Character from Pessoa’s childhood accompanying him until the end of his life; also signed poems
53. Dr. Gaudencio Turnips - Proto-heteronym / Pseudonym - English-Portuguese journalist and humorist; director of O Palrador
54. Pip - Proto-heteronym / Pseudonym - Poet and author of humorous anecdotes; predecessor of Dr. Pancrácio
55. Dr. Pancrácio - Proto-heteronym / Pseudonym - Storyteller, poet and creator of charades
56. Luís António Congo - Proto-heteronym / Pseudonym - Collaborator in O Palrador; columnist and presenter of Eduardo Lança
57. Eduardo Lança - Proto-heteronym / Pseudonym - Luso-Brazilian poet
58. A. Francisco de Paula Angard - Proto-heteronym / Pseudonym - Collaborator in O Palrador; author of “Textos scientificos”
59. Pedro da Silva Salles / Zé Pad - Proto-heteronym / Alias - Author and director of the section of anecdotes at O Palrador
60. José Rodrigues do Valle / Scicio - Proto-heteronym / Alias - Collaborator in O Palrador; author of charades; literary manager
61. Dr. Caloiro - Proto-heteronym / Pseudonym - Collaborator in O Palrador; reporter and author of A pesca das pérolas
62. Adolph Moscow - Proto-heteronym / Pseudonym - Collaborator in O Palrador; novelist and author of Os Rapazes de Barrowby
63. Marvell Kisch - Proto-heteronym / Pseudonym - Author of a novel announced in O Palrador, called A Riqueza de um Doido
64. Gabriel Keene - Proto-heteronym / Pseudonym - Author of a novel announced in O Palrador, called Em Dias de Perigo
65. Sableton-Kay - Proto-heteronym / Pseudonym - Author of a novel announced in O Palrador, called A Lucta Aérea
66. Morris & Theodor - Pseudonym - Collaborator in O Palrador; author of charades
67. Diabo Azul - Pseudonym - Collaborator in O Palrador; author of charades
68. Parry - Pseudonym - Collaborator in O Palrador; author of charades
69. Gallião Pequeno - Pseudonym - Collaborator in O Palrador; author of charades
70. Urban Accursio - Alias - Collaborator in O Palrador; author of charades
71. Cecília - Pseudonym - Collaborator in O Palrador; author of charades
72. José Rasteiro - Proto-heteronym / Pseudonym - Collaborator in O Palrador; author of charades
73. Nympha Negra - Pseudonym - Collaborator in O Palrador; author of charades
74. Diniz da Silva - Pseudonym / Proto-heteronym - Author of the poem “Loucura”; collaborator in Europe
75. Herr Prosit - Pseudonym - Translator of El estudiante de Salamanca by José Espronceda
76. Henry More - Proto-heteronym - Author and prose writer
77. Wardour - Character (?) - Poet
78. J. M. Hyslop - Poet
79. Vadooisf (?) - Poet
80. Nuno Reis - Psuedonym - Son of Ricardo Reis
81. João Caeiro - Character (?) - Son of Alberto Caeiro and Ana Taveir

[Flo · Rating 5 out of 5]

...I have in me all the dreams of the world.
Álvaro de Campos, “The Tobacco Shop”

Warning
This is going to be a long, tedious, intense review. If you don't feel like reading an endless bunch of nonsense, you may leave now. However, poetry lover, I seriously suggest you this: get this book. As soon as possible. You have not fully lived until you live through the eyes of Pessoa.
There. You have been fairly warned. It's not my responsibility anymore.

On June 13, 1888, a whole new world was born. It was created out of words, beauty and sorrow, and it was inhabited by numerous souls coexisting in one complex body. Light as air, fragile as bones. That body started doubting about his own existence. He, the one that distrusted thinking and preferred feeling above all things, could not stop thinking, like the rest of us simple mortals that wish to put our brains on hold to enjoy the sight of the world. Despite any doubt, we all know his presence was too real, too strong, bigger than a planet, a little larger than the entire universe.
That man was Fernando Pessoa, who was born under that last name as if he had already something to achieve, for Pessoa means “person”, and he have split himself into a multitude of heteronyms to convey the vastness that laid inside of him. A universe of literature and feelings was waiting to be awoken. The rich range of literature that the young Pessoa absorbed and the French symbolists he admired gave form to the brilliant writer we know today. Nonetheless, we should also thank Walt Whitman, since he embodied the most powerful force that made it possible for Pessoa to create four of the greatest poets of the 20th century: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos and Fernando Pessoa-himself.
Certainly, Pessoa created the four poets aforementioned, but he endowed them with a time and place of birth, diverse thoughts, passion, different views on the world; ultimately, with existence. So it is only fair to speak about them as if they were real writers. Pessoa's mind might have been a common source for them, however, they alienated themselves. They took their own place in the world by force. The force of their art and the willing to live.
Thus, we shall begin.

The first thing we find inside this book is Zenith's remarkable “Introduction: The Birth of a Nation”. There, he skillfully describes Pessoa's most relevant life events and the process of his creations. He did not write a cold biography that merely enumerates certain events in someone's life. With a rich vocabulary, a clear style and the mesmerizing excerpts he intertwines with his own words, he created a true work of art. Be sure to not skip it.




Alberto Caeiro or The Primacy of Reality
Caeiro, born on April 16, 1889, personified the poet of Nature. He, the creator of The Keeper of Sheep, always said he wanted to see things as they are, without the interference of his brain. Without preconceptions. Without prejudices. Only the appreciation for what it really was. He did not consider himself as a materialist nor a deist: just a man that one fine day discovered that Nature existed.
Caeiro, the collector of facts. Facts he embellished with the art of the words. He thought he could detachedly describe Nature.

XXVIII
...I know I understand Nature on the outside,
And I don't understand it on the inside,
Because Nature has no inside.
If it did, it wouldn't be Nature. (31)

That he could dissipate the cloud of sentiment and portray only what his eyes were willing to see. Apparently, he could and, ironically, he made poetry out of that.

II
I believe in the world as in a daisy,
Because I see it. But I don't think about it,
Because to think is to not understand.
The world wasn't made for us to think about it...
…
To love is eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not to think... (11)

By denying the possibility of thought, he released himself from the torture of expectations. Of anxiety. And doubts. He saw how the world was being handed to him and he accepted it (I accept because it's my nature to accept; 64), without questioning. This suppression of the mind might have led him to happiness.

XXXIV
...Seeing nothing but my thoughts...
I would grow sad and remain in the dark.
The way I am, without thinking, I have the Earth and the Sky. (36)

We will never know, of course. We have to rely on what he wrote... It does sound great in theory. Uncertainties are the rotten apple in someone's inner life. They are born in the mind and quickly reach the soul, creating a void that seems unstoppable.

IX
I'm a keeper of sheep.
The sheep are my thoughts
And each thought a sensation.
I think with my eyes and my ears
And with my hands and feet
And with my nose and mouth.
…
Then I feel my whole body lying down in reality,
I know the truth, and I'm happy. (23)

I have said it was only fair to treat these poets as real people. Since I am human and, therefore, a walking contradiction, I have to say this: Caeiro is a very complex creation by Pessoa. And as much as I enjoy his poetry, I do not believe most of it. Only an invention can live without thinking. Or a charlatan claiming he can.
Even so, I sure find his poetry mesmerizing.

XLIX
May this be my life, now and always:
The day bright with sunshine, or gentle with rain,
Or stormy as if the world were ending,
The evening gentle and my eyes attentive
To the people passing by my window,
With my last friendly gaze going to the peaceful trees,
And then, window shut and the lamp lit,
Without reading or sleeping and thinking of nothing,
To feel life flowing through me like a river between its banks,
And outside a great silence like a god who is sleeping. (46)

I can quote a million poems, even though I do not fully believe him. I believe De Campos, and quote Caeiro.
Coherent.

Anyway, like I said, I can only rely on what Caeiro wrote. I will never know the truth. He expressed that idea in the most beautiful way possible.

If, after I die, someone wants to write my biography,
There's nothing simpler.
It has just two dates—the day I was born and the day I died.
Between the two, all the days are mine. (61)

Ricardo Reis or The Serene Acceptance of Fate
Born in 1887, this physician and classicist continued Caeiro's vision on the world but in a more measured way. An incurable pagan, he accepted the world as it was and expressed that acceptance through the traditional style of his art. A quiet, modest and structured art.

16 June 1914
...The sun of the Parthenon and Acropolis
Which lit up the slow and weighty steps
of Aristotle speaking.
But Epicurus speaks more
To my heart with his caressing, earthly voice;
His attitude toward the gods is of a fellow god,
Serene and seeing life
At the distance where it lies. (86)

He did not want extremes. He had no desires but the absence of desires.

9 July 1930
...wanting little,
A man has everything. Wanting nothing,
He's free. Not having and not desiring,
He's equal, though man, to the Gods. (129)

He did not like conflict and he probably never had any since he serenely chose to accept fate. He accepted everything—and he encouraged us to do the same—even though he disliked changes, as he openly manifested in several poems. He seemed to actually enjoy the silent murderer that is the routine of life.

9 October 1916
...Anything whatsoever that changes
The smooth course of my existence,
Though it change it for something better,
Because it means change,
I hate and don't want. May the gods
Allow my life to be a continuous,
Perfectly flat plain, running
To where it ends.
Though I never taste glory and never
Receive love or due respect from others,
It will suffice that life be only life
And that I live it. (102)

It is so beautifully put and yet I struggled with the idea. Some of Reis' poems express simple ideas that my egocentrism could not understand. Who am I to judge if someone loves a dull and plain existence?

Reis' writing lacks the spirited style of Caeiro's poetry. However, it is remarkably evocative. There is so much beauty in his rationalization.
There is a poem called “The Chess Players”. Chess always serves as a marvelous parallelism between us and life itself (it immediately reminded me of Zweig's short story). The language that Reis was capable of creating is simply exquisite.

...Glory weighs like an overlarge burden
And fame like a fever,
Love wearies, for it ardently searches,
Science never finds,
And life grieves, for it knows it is passing...
The game of chess
Completely absorbs one's heart but weighs little
When lost, for it's nothing. (99)

Rhythm and structures. Forms and rules. Acceptance of life. Melancholy caused by change. That is Reis, the king of the conflicting verse.

2 March 1933
Each day you didn't enjoy wasn't yours:
You just got trhough it. Whatever you live
Without enjoying, you don't live.
You don't have to love or drink or smile.
The sun's reflection in a puddle of water
is enough, if it pleases you.
Happy those who, placing their delight
In slight things, are never deprived
Of each day's natural fortune. (134)

Alvaro de Campos or The Unstoppable Desire of Everything and Nothing
It's not with the eyes but with the soul that I see; it's not with the ears but with the soul that I hear; it's not with the skin but with the soul that I touch.
And if someone should ask me what the soul is, I'll answer that it's me. (146)

Born in 1890. Lover of machines. Enemy of progress. Pursuer of freedom. Admirer of solitude. Pessoa's playful, sometimes scathing critic.
De Campos was madness. He was intensity, ecstasy, imbalance. The love and hatred for modern civilization. He was the violent desire of breaking loose; the passionate longing for sensations. He was the furious imagination that craved for something new. New people, new places.
The frenetic
explosion
of self.
Everything can be clearly seen in his “Maritime Ode”:

Ah, to depart! By whatever means and to whatever place!
To set out across the waves, across unknown perils, across the sea! (173)

To take off...
My peaceful life,
My seated, static, orderly and repetitive life! (175)

Ah, pirates! Pirates!
The yearning for lawlessness coupled with brutality,
the yearning for absolutely cruel and abominable things,...
Beat and humiliate me!
…
Make me into something that's dragged
—O pleasure, O beloved pain!—
As if behind horses whipped by you...
But all this at sea, at se-e-e-ea, at SE-E-E-E-EA! (184)

I have seen what is inside of him. And some of what I have seen should never leave that dark nook of his soul.

As much as De Campos wanted to contain the world (Whitman's presence is unquestionable, there is even a poem called “Salutation to Walt Whitman”: I salute you, Walt, I salute you, my Universal brother/Forever modern and eternal, the singer of concrete absolutes...), we distinguish two different sides of him. After the part kept inside of him loudly asked to be freed, to see the world, the part he inevitably showed to the world—the part that mildly asked to be noticed while yearning for solitude—brought calm and a sense of relief. Relief for myself, since I know now that not everything is an hysterically desire of satisfying his instinctual self.
The same poem portrays it perfectly.

An inexplicable feeling of tenderness,
a tearful and heartfelt remorse...
Ah, how could I think or dream those things?
How far I am from what I was a few minutes ago! (187)

De Campos embodied desire, in all forms. He expected too much. He wanted too much. Having such a strong, almost stubborn desire of experiencing everything, can lead to nothing more than despair. And ultimately, uncertainty. A sense of loss. The lack of meaning that haunts every mortal.
The poet wanted to feel all the sensations of the world while being on the never-ending quest for identity. He did not know who he was; he did not know what he wanted.

Salutation to Walt Whitman
I'm exhausted from being so many things.
The latecomers are finally arriving,
And I suddenly get sick of waiting, of existing, of being.
...
It's good to feel, if for no other reason, so as to stop feeling. (215)

Delightful contradictions from the man that a couple of pages ago wanted to meet the whole world.

Lisbon Revisited (1923)
Don't grab me by the arm!
I don't like my arm being grabbed. I want to be alone,
I already told you that I can only be alone!
I'm sick of you wanting me to be sociable! (216)

He who does not know himself at all, has to settle with wanting everything. And most of the times, he achieves nothing.

Lisbon Revisited (1926)
Nothing holds me.
I want fifty things at the same time.
I long with meat-craving anxiety
For I don't know what—
Definitely something indefinite... (218)

Fernando Pessoa-himself or The Analyst of Being
Another side of the real Pessoa. The sum of different aspects of the three poets analyzed before.
However, this review has reached the longitude of The Great Wall of China without even noticing, so I will control my enthusiasm. (That was a lie; I cannot control anything.)

Melancholy, despair; elements that are often present in FP-himself's poetry. Just like the themes of dreams and creativity, which characterizes the real Pessoa's works.
Seeker of the truth. The analyst of humanity. The intellectual side of sentiments. Lord of disquiet.
We see a man expressing his feelings through a poetic melody that runs aimlessly all over the world. The one thing he had to channelize his emotions and purge himself from whatever was troubling him.
I wonder if he ever succeeded.

Some Ramdon Verses
...What matters is that nothing matter
Anymore... Whether Fate
Hangs over us or quietly and obscurely
Lurks in the distance
Is all the same... Here's the moment...
Let's be it... What good is thinking? (286)

Four poets deal with similar topics from their own perspectives. Each one of them has a unique personality and style. They do the best they can with the little they have.

The haunting past is usually trying to make its way into the life, approaching with firm steps. Calm but steady. Nostalgia is heavy. Ruthless. It can wear us out in a day. FP-himself cannot escape from that, either.

from Songbook
...You are to me like a dream—
In my soul your ringing is distant.

With every one of your clangs
Resounding across the sky,
I feel the past farther away,
I feel nostalgia close by. (274)

Nonetheless, the worst side of nostalgia is the one caused by something that have never existed. Only time can heal the frustrating wounds of missing what we never had.

There is an overwhelming sense of loss and sadness in FP-himself's verses. You inevitably feel empathy with his afflicted soul. I am well acquainted with the desire of breaking the patterns of loneliness while embracing the safe place that solitude provides.

Diary in the Shade
…
Don't you still sense in my sad and calm face
The sad child who always played far away from the others
And sometimes looked at them with sad eyes but without regret?
I know you're watching and don't understand what sadness is
That makes me look sad.
It isn't regret or nostalgia, disappointment or resentment.
No... It's the sadness...
The incurable sadness
Of one who realizes that everything's pointless, worthless,
That effort is an absurd waste,
And that life is a void,
Since disillusion always follows on the heels of illusion
And Death seems to be the meaning of Life... (288)

Beautiful verses, and that kind of life is intolerable.


So. Here we are.
Caeiro, Reis, De Campos, Himself. I have met them all. I am in the same place, inside the same body that cages the same restless soul that quietly longs for something different.
I am in the same place and yet, I feel like I lived a little more.

By meeting one person I have met the entire universe.
Fernando Pessoa or the intellectual dissection of the soul.








Notes
* Painting: Catarina Inácio
** Also on my blog.
*** Other reviews:
The Book of Disquiet
The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa
The Education of the Stoic
El Banquero Anarquista (written in Spanish)

[Mohammad · Rating 5 out of 5]

هر بار که پسوآ می‌خوانم از ترس اینکه چیزی از قلم افتاده باشد دوباره برمی‌گردم و می‌بینم که بله، چیزی نادیده گرفته شده. پسوآ را می‌شود دید اما نمی‌توان شناخت. پسوآ 74 نام مستعار و دست کم 3 منِ دیگر داشته. من‌های دیگر پسوآ تنها اسم خشک و خالی نبودند. شخصیت، زندگی نامه، سبک، دست‌خط و حتی سرگذشت مستقل خودشان را داشتند. اما این را چگونه باید دید؟ تغییر قیافه؟ بازی بالماسکه؟ گیج کردن دیگران؟ ماتروشکای پرتغالی؟!

شخصیت‌های مستعار پسوآی شاعر هر یک به نوعی دارای هویت شعری و زیبایی‌شناختی خاص هستند. هر یک از این شخصیت‌ها معرف یکی از عقاید اجتماعی و نظریه‌های ادبی پسوآ است. ولی جالب اینجاست که واقعیت هنری این افراد از شخصیت ادبی پسوا جداست، هرچند آن‌ها مخلوق قوه خیال او هستند. پسوا با هر یک از این شخصیت‌ها امکان کشف دوباره واقعیت وجودش را می‌دهد و او در هر یک از سفرهای شاعرانه‌ای که به درون خود می‌کند، یکی از هویت‌های خویش را زنده می‌کند. به عبارتی پسوآ در جستجوی اسامی و هویت‌های مستعار برای جان بخشیدن بیشتر به اشعار خود است و نه در پی آفرینش اشعاری برای زنده نگاهداشتن چهره‌هایی ناآشنا. از این جهت، پسوآ خود یکی از شخصیت‌های مستعار اثارش است و نام او در کنار نام‌های مستعار دیگرش قرار می‌گیرد. به این ترتیب پسوآ با آفریدن شخصیت‌های مستعاری برای شعر خود و با سفر از یک شخصیت به شخصیتی دیگر و از صورتکی به صورتکی دیگر، خود تبدیل به «هیچ‌کس» می‌شود. تا جایی که در کتاب دلواپسی از زبان برناردو سوارز می‌گوید:" من به سایه‌ی خویشتن خویش بدل شده ام." پسوآ در زبان پرتغالی به معنای هیچ‌کس است. اما هیچ‌کس بودن برای پسوآ به نوعی شاعرانه زندگی کردن است. انگار که از نظر پسوآ حقیقت شعر در غیاب شاعر تجلی می‌یابد و شعر از شاعر مهم‌تر است. مهم آفریدن است، نه پسوا بودن

مثلا یکی از این همزاد ها آلبرتو کائیرو نام دارد
بزرگ‌ترین آزردگی زندگی پسوآ این بوده که هیچگاه نمی‌توانسته از فکر کردن دست بکشد و همیشه احساس بر اندیشه سایه می‌انداخته. خلق آلبرتو کائیرو پاسخی بوده به این نقصی که آزارش می‌داده. پسوآ در این باره می‌گوید: یک روز رفتم سمت میز تحریری پایه بلند و کاغذی برداشتم، شروع کردم به نوشتن، آن هم سرپا، مثل همیشه البته هر وقت که بتوانم چیز بنویسم. سی و اندی شعر نوشتم، یک نفس، در یک جور جذبه و وجد که قادر به تصریح ماهیتش نیستم. این روز در زندگی‌ام روز پیروزمندی بود، روزی که دیگر هرگز تکرار نمی‌شود. زیر عنوان گوسفندبان شروع کردم، و نتیجه‌اش ظهور کسی بود در درون من، کسی که اسمش را ناگهان گذاشتم آلبرتو کائیرو. مرشدم در من ظهور کرده بود. در نتیجه کائیرو برای رهایی از فکر کردن خلق می‌شود. عنوان دفتر شعر کائیرو «گوسفندبان» است و گفتارش گفتار مرشدی‌ست به مریدان. کائیرو چوپان ساده‌ای است که بر بلندای دشت می‌ایستد و نمی‌اندیشد بلکه احساس می‌کند. و همینطور بقیه‌ی همزاد ها، هرکدام در عین شباهت‌ها به خود پسوآ و دیگر همزاد ها، تفاوت‌های بزرگی با هم دارند

این کتاب ترجمه‌ی گزیده ای از شعرهایِ پسوآ و تمام من‌های دیگر اوست. در این کتاب شعرهای هر یک از این چهار نفر- یعنی پسوآ و سه همزاد دیگرش- از هم تفکیک شده‌اند

من یک فراری‌ام
در خودم حبس شده بودم
به محض تولد
اما توانستم فرار کنم

اگر مردم خسته می‌شوند
از همیشه در یک‌جا بودن
پس چرا نباید خسته شوند
از همیشه یک«خود» را بودن؟

روح من در جستجوی من است
من اما همچنان گریزانم
و صمیمانه امیدوار
که هرگز پیدا نشوم

برای خودش زندانی‌ست «یک خود بودن»
و خودم بودن نبودن است
مثل یک فراری خواهم زیست
اما واقعاً و حقیقتاً خواهم زیست

. . .

روزی اگر کسی درِ خانه‌ات را زد
و گفت فرستاده‌ی من است
باور نکن، حتا اگر خودم باشم
چراکه در زدن در قاموسِ غرورم نیست
حتا بر درِ غیرواقعیِ آسمان

اما اگر، بی آنکه بشنوی که کسی در می‌زند
در را گشودی و، انجا کسی را ظاهراً یافتی در انتظار
برای پیدا کردنِ شهامتِ در زدن، آن‌وقت جدی بگیرش
آن شخص فرستاده‌ی من است، و من است
و انچه غرورِ بالاخره تک افتاده‌ی من
رضا خواهد داد به آن.
بر مردی در بگشا که بر در نکوفته است

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here I sit, in Fernando Pessoa's Lisbon, and the slant of the rhyme in his verse I see clearly; in his structurally incomplete, sometimes unrevised stanzas, I hear my heart speak incessantly, listening more intently to his heteronym, Alberto Caeiro's, perception of life, enjoying his avoidance of consciousness, and his bask in the subconscious. Most likely, Pessoa would not have published this collection in its state, his scholar infers, but like Camus's The First Man, I find refreshment in this great work of posthumous art.

From: XLVI

I try to say what I feel
Without thinking about what I feel.
I try to place words right next to my idea
So that I won't need a corridor
Of thought leading to words (9-13)

Do you think Pessoa used heteronyms as allusions to the person/persons he could have become, had his childhood not been snatched from him; is it possible he was exiled from the identity he tries to find through these different characters, I asked Richard Zenith, Pessoa's eminent scholar, after his seminar and reading of Pessoa's work at the Casa Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon. For years, scholars have tried to decipher the poet who exists under many veils, his invention a way of revealing variety of thought.

His identity crisis is what I see. He lived in Durban, South Africa, ages seven to seventeen, after, he spent his adult years in Lisbon, Portugal. Zenith agrees that Pessoa's "literary output was clearly the product of the meeting, or clash, of those two environments and their different languages, their different cultures."

I read and see a poet who views himself through place, plants, and people.

From: XXXVI

And I look at the flowers and smile…
I don't know if they understand me
Or if I understand them,
But I know the truth is in them and in me
And in our common divinity (12-16)

To think is not to understand, he often wrote. How can this be, you ask. But try not to think, only observe with your senses, and you'll understand the validity. Make yourself into a well-guarded double self and you view the world as if for the first time, the self inadvertently illuminated, and you start to feel yourself in the pace of others. See more than a garden of who you are and you'll touch the core of the you who has remained hidden.

I review this collection without concrete thoughts of line workings and stanza deductions, because to think is not to understand. So I read and re-read these poems for what they are, lines occurring relentlessly, unapologetically. Potent dream thoughts, these lines, and they speak to you from a place you wouldn't understand if you paused to consider. Let the words flow and you see people, ideas, philosophy, and life in its murky and confusing state.

From: Un Soir à Lima (one of my favorite poems)

I dream because I wallow
In the unreal river of that recollected music,
My soul is a ragged child
Sleeping in a dusky corner
All I have of my own
In true, waking reality
Are the tatters of my abandoned soul
And my head that's dreaming next to the wall.

[Bionic Jean · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some poems I will reread again and again, and they make me smile - or shudder - anew. Some pop into my mind regardless. Perhaps it is the beauty of their language which takes my breath away. Perhaps they have made me ponder on a different viewpoint, profound truth or interesting analogy. Perhaps it is just their structure or their form which seems so attractive; satisfying a desire for an elegant, almost mathematical perfection. Or sometimes I might just want to be entertained by a humorous verse. Nevertheless, I expect to feel some sort of reaction to the poems. Does A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems fulfil this?

Its author, Fernando Pessoa, was born in Lisbon, but spent most of his early years in Durban South Africa. His first poem had been prompted by the prospect of his mother moving there to be with her new husband, leaving him in Portugal with relatives. It was written at the age of seven:

“To My Dear Mother

Here I am in Portugal,
In the lands where I was born.
However much I love them,
I love you even more.”

He was a bookish child, receiving such high grades at school that he could have taken a degree at Oxford or Cambridge. But for various reasons including red tape, illness, and a student strike he studied elsewhere, and actually dropped out of university before taking his degree. However, he continued to write obsessively, in French, English and Portuguese, had many alter-egos, and published under numerous names. For each he created their own biography, poetics and politics. He did not call them pseudonyms stating that this did not capture their true independent intellectual lives. Instead, he invented a name for them: “heteronyms”. The three most famous incarnations, out of around seventy-five, like himself, all found their own true poetic voice in 1914, and all wrote in Portuguese. They are Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Alvaro de Campos, and are all expressions of what Pessoa called “sensationism” (another invented term).

“Caeiro has one discipline: things must be felt as they are. Ricardo Reis has another discipline: things must be felt, not only as they are, but also so as to fall in with a certain ideal of classic measure and rule. In Alvaro de Campos things must simply be felt.”

Fernanado Pessoa described Alberto Caeiro thus:

“He sees things with the eyes only, not with the mind. He does not let any thoughts arise when he looks at a flower … the only thing a stone tells him is that it has nothing at all to tell him … this way of looking at a stone may be described as the totally unpoetic way of looking at it. The stupendous fact about Caeiro is that out of this sentiment, or rather, absence of sentiment, he makes poetry.”

Alberto Caeiro had no formal education and lived in the country. He was, Pessoa claimed, “the only poet of Nature”, and yet in no way does he conform to what is classed as Nature poetry in the English tradition. The references to Nature here are minimal and spare. It is more of an ideal vision, whose appreciation is abstract.

“I sometimes stoop
To the stupidity of their senses …
Because I’ve only taken on this odious role, an interpreter of Nature,
Because there are men who don’t grasp its language,
Which is no language at all ... ”

“... I try to say what I feel
Without thinking about what I feel.
I try to place words right next to my idea
So that I won’t need a corridor
Of thought leading to words ...”

“... If you want me to have a mysticism, then fine, I have one.
I’m a mystic, but only with my body.
My soul is simple and doesn’t think ...”

“... I find it so natural not to think
That sometimes I start laughing, all by myself
About, I know not quite what, but it has to do
With there being people who think …”

The self-educated Alberto Caeiro, is described as a nature poet and a shepherd. “Carneiro” is Portuguese for sheep, and there are many allusions to being a shepherd in the poems. Two of the collections here are “The Keeper of Sheep” and “The Shepherd in Love”. He is a realist, but also given to flights of fantasy and idealism:

“And I look at the flowers and smile …
I don’t know if they understand me
Or if I understand them,
But I know the truth is in them and in me
And in our common divinity ...”

“... To think a flower is to see and smell it,
And to eat a fruit is to know its meaning”

Perhaps he is the most truly existential manifestation of Fernando Pessoa’s poetic spirit. I quite like this poem as an expression of that:

“All the opinions ever formed about Nature
Never made a flower bloom or a blade of grass grow
All the knowledge there is of things
Was never something I could seize, like a thing.
If science aspires to be true,
What truer science than that of things without science?
I close my eyes, and the reality of the hard earth I’m lying on
Is so real that even the bones in my back feel it.
Where I have shoulder blades I don’t need reason.

To read his poems is akin to reading a philosophical text:

To think about God is to disobey God,
Since God wanted us not to know him
Which is why he didn’t reveal himself to us …”

“... What matters is to know how to see,
To know how to see without thinking.
To know how to see when seeing
And not think when seeing
Nor see when thinking ...”

“... Even so, I’m somebody.
I’m the Discoverer of Nature.
I’m the Argonaut of true sensations.
I bring to the Universe a new Universe,
Because I bring to the Universe its own self.”

Ricardo Reis, a physician and classicist, described by Pessoa as “a Greek Horace writing in Portuguese” wrote metred non-rhyming odes. As a literary descendant of Horace, Ricardo Reis wants a world which matches his classical ideals.

“See life from a distance. Never question it. There’s nothing it can tell you.”

“Wise is the one who does not seek … the seeker will find in all things the abyss, and doubt in himself.”

The odes here are about the vanity of life, and the need to accept our fate:

“No one loves anyone else; he loves
What he finds of himself in the other ...

“... Each thing, in its time, has its time.
The trees do not blossom in winter,
Nor does the white cold
Cover the fields in Spring”

This idea that everything has its time, recalls to my mind the Biblical text in Ecclesiastes 3:1-8:

“To everything there is a season,
A time for every purpose under heaven“

His poetry also feels quite existential, but also full of self-doubt:

“Sleep is good because we wake up from it
And know that it’s good. If death is sleep,
We’ll wake up from it;
If it isn’t, and we won’t,
Then let’s reject it with all that we are
For as long as the jailer’s indefinite
Respite allows
Our condemned bodies …”

Having said that however, heteronym Ricardo Reis’s voice spoke one of the few poems in the collection I personally liked, from several points of view (I had read up to page 136 by now). Here it is, written, oddly on my birthday, but twenty years before:

“Each day you didn’t enjoy wasn’t yours:
You just got through it. Whatever you live
Without enjoying, you don’t live.
You don’t have to love or drink or smile.
The sun’s reflection in a puddle of water
Is enough, if it pleases you.
Happy those who, placing their delight
In slight things, are never deprived
Of each day’s natural fortune!”

Alvaro de Campos is Fernando’s incarnation as a poet of great feeling, whose poetry is always emotionally intense. It is full of hyperbole, savagery, extravagance and abundance. I personally found this the most difficult to relate to. Above all, he desires “to feel everything in every way … If only I could be all people and all places.”

Yet he repeatedly contradicts this feverish desire to be everything and everyone, with an impulse toward a state of isolation and a sense of nothingness. His poems are full of anguish and wrath.

“I’m nothing.
I’ll always be nothing.
I can’t want to be something.
I have in me all the dreams of the world nevertheless ...”

“If you want to kill yourself, why don’t you want to kill yourself?
Now’s your chance! I, who greatly love both death and life,
Would kill myself too, if I dared kill myself …
If you dare, then be daring! …”

… Kill yourself and maybe you’ll finally know it …
End it all, and maybe you’ll begin …
If you’re weary of existing, at least
Be noble in your weariness ...”

…“Other people’s grief? You’re worried
About them crying over you?
Don’t worry: they won’t cry for long …
The impulse to live gradually staunches tears
When they’re not for our own sake ...”

“... Ah! The anguish, the vile rage, the despair
Of not being able to express
With a shout, an extreme and bitter shout,
The bleeding of my heart.”

Here is Fernando Pessoa writing as himself, and he seems to describe his shape-shifting persona perfectly:

“To be myself is not to be.
I’ll live as a fugitive
But live really and truly.”

And here he is in a more poetic, less philosophical mood:

“Nothing

Ah, the soft, soft playing,
Like someone about to cry,
Of a song that’s woven
Out of artifice and moonlight…
Nothing to make us remember
Life.

A prelude of courtesies
Or a smile that faded…
A cold garden in the distance…
And in the soul that finds it,
Just the absurd echo of its empty
Flight.”

And this, from the long poem about his mother, “Un Soir à Lima:

“ ... I didn’t know then that I was happy.
I know it now, because I no longer am ...

... I dream because I wallow
In the unreal river of that recollected music,
My soul is a ragged child
Sleeping in a dusky corner
All I have of my own
In true, waking reality
Are the tatters of my abandoned soul
And my head that’s dreaming next to the wall ...

... Shatter, heart ...

I dream because I wallow
In the unreal river of that recollected music,
My soul is a ragged child
Sleeping in a dusky corner
All I have of my own
In true, waking reality
Are the tatters of my abandoned soul
And my head that’s dreaming next to the wall.”

Fernando Pessoa is celebrated as one of the major 20th century poets, and given the accolade of Portugal’s greatest modern poet. His reputation is undisputed. The selection here, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems, is more inclusive than any, and is in the Penguins Classics series (the ones with the black spines) so the editing and selection is of a very high quality. Specifically, the translation is by Richard Zenith, who has won prestigious awards for his translations. It is clearly organised, with an introduction and list of first lines for each of the four poets. Having already read a small selection of Fernando’s Pessoa’s early sonnets LINK HERE for my review, I had hoped to enjoy this substantial collection. And yet, in all honesty I find they do not move me.

He has many heteronyms, yet I feel that I hear the voice of Pessoa coming through them all. Who is speaking here? The poem begins:

“You say I’m something more
Than a stone or a plant?”

“... I know the stone is real and the plant exists
I know this because they exist.
I know because my senses show it to me.
I know I’m real as well.
I know this because my senses show it to me,
Though less clearly than they show me the stone and the plant,
That’s all I know.”

This is typical of Alberto Caeiro’s voice, and it is a neat philosophical premise. Some other poems are apparently puzzles or conundrums, although never very deep and often repeated. They remind me of thoughts any serious young person might have when grappling with the large questions in life, and be convinced that they are having original thoughts. Sure enough, looking into Alberto Caeiro’s “biography”, he died at twenty-six. I enjoyed these poems more than some others, but feel in the end that they are not merely accessible, but feel superficial. And they feel much more like reading a simple philosophical text, than reading poetry.

The other extreme of Fernando’s poetry is direct and powerful:

“Ah! The anguish, the vile rage, the despair
Of not being able to express
With a shout, an extreme and bitter shout,
The bleeding of my heart.”

I find the idea of all his different incarnations interesting, and Fernando Pessoa certainly left a huge body of work. I suspect he is revered more for the remarkable invention of so many alter-egos, rather than his writing.

Perhaps different heteronyms appeal to people at different stages of their lives. Certainly many of my Goodreads friends rate his poetry extremely highly, and I expected to enjoy him more. He is sometimes called a “genius”, yet a lot of these poems I find over-simplistic, even superficial. He’s not an author I shall gladly read again, as I prefer poetry to be less pedestrian.

I’m afraid his poetry is not for me. It is unremittingly self-absorbed, almost to the exclusion of all else, and full of self-doubt. But here is a poem by him about regret and nostalgia which I found quite potent:

“A piano on my street ...
Children playing outside ...
A Sunday, and the sun
Shining golden with joy ...

My sorrow that makes me
Love all that’s indefinite ...
Though I had little in life,
It pains me to have lost it.

But my life already
Runs deep in changes ...
A piano I miss hearing,
Those children I miss being!”

[Mariel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've no soul left for light to arouse or darkness to smother. I'm nothing but nausea, nothing but reverie, nothing but longing.

What I am essentially- behind the involuntary masks of poet, logical reasoner and so forth- is a dramatist. My spontaneous tendency to depersonalization, which I mentioned in my last letter to explain the existence of heteronyms, naturally leads to this definition. And so I do not evolve, I simply JOURNEY. (...) I continuously change personality, I keep enlarging (and here there is a kind of evolution) my capacity to create new characters, new forms of pretending that I understand the world or, more accurately, that the world can be understood.

My copy quotes from this Pessoa letter before the selected poems from "himself". I had been having that not-self feeling I get when "confronted" with someone else. Their world view is louder than my own. Something like talking to my mother about what do I have to live for. One of those worst conversations I've ever had in my life until I got self preservationist enough to disallow them. There's no answer you could give. If you can have the grace to float then you can be okay. If they think it's stupid to look forward to a fleeting story when you never have anything to show for anything what does it matter. I have to think about something better than me. There were times these voices reminded me of the worst times (there's one poem with reasons to not kill yourself that were not any I'm intimate with. It isn't a today or never thing. It's a reassurance that it won't always be like this. Sometimes you feel too raw to ask those kinds of questions. It has been edged so differently. I don't know, it wasn't academic to me. I felt the philosophic standpoint to this was something that happened outside of life. There were times some of these poems were like that. And other times it didn't matter they were the fictional words from inside a head of someone I didn't know. I wonder if Pessoa "let go" and if having the other people, the other voices made him feel more real. That's how it is for me. I had that feeling that I was reading philosophy a lot.

Alberto Caeiro says:
Only one who doesn't know what flowers and stones and rivers are
Can talk about their feelings.
Those who talk about the soul of stones, of flowers and of rivers
Are talking about themselves and their false notions.
Thank God that stones are just stones,
And rivers nothing but rivers,
And flowers merely flowers.

It gave me a funny feeling to read this. What makes my life worth living (or feel that way as long as it lasts). It's just a poem, he's wrong. (Sobs. Wrong!) What I really wanted to say about this (in my head when I was thinking about Pessoa at work. If I can think about something good when I'm at work, something to make the hours pass by as if I'm not only "me" doing drudgery) was I loved these poems the best for the mask slip up, the hint that it wasn't all true. Something to be pulled both ways. That really made it for me. (But damn if I haven't felt like in "Clouds" so much of my life. I'm going with them without the sun I feel, without the life I have, I'm going with them without ignorance.... This poem where other people don't feel and don't know. I this other person who does know that feeling. This knowing and this disbelief come up again like gophers.)

You know what really makes my life? If I can do it I will go off in my head about underwater spiders (I have many of these about all kinds of spiders, though). It isn't like I lose the chill about their prey helplessly spun into paralyzed cocoons. I think that's the best part that I don't forget about them, nor the camel spiders forced into battles they cannot win with the almighty scorpions (how could you forget about that?). But drifting off into their diving bells... Floating bubbles in corporeal spaces, twitching legs. They don't have to come up to the other world. I know this and I'll know it again that you don't make the fly less, deprive the true nature of the spider like a slow cocoon bloodletting with my hungry thoughts. It doesn't happen. What the hell does it matter if someone thought the rocks danced under the moonlight? I may be wrong (I'd be lost without it) but I feel the other people and you is like that when you're not forgetting about the dinner and you also think about those ballooning spiders. Maybe adult spiders who still balloon aren't thinking "I know I might die but I HAVE to fly". But maybe they are. Maybe the baby spiders who balloon just don't know better, or maybe there's a part of you that had and maybe there's an adult you that can still feel like you could take the leap, fly over huge distances on the strength of your gossamer strands. Maybe. Maybe you're not an asshole if you can hold within you the possibility that there's a possibility in someone else. You don't have to know everything but maybe everyone doesn't have to seem so fake all the time. I loved the knowing, the not knowing, the hope, the afraid to hope. It made the talking and the this how the world works and the bending and the will feel like a life to be a new life (something stronger than me).

Ricardo Reis:
No one loves anyone else; he loves
What he finds of himself in the other.
Don't fret if others don't love you. They feel
Who you are, and you're a stranger.
Be who you are, even if never loved.
Secure in yourself, you will suffer
Few sorrows.

I've read this one a few times trying to will some "self help" power into me. I did that when I read an old Harold Pinter quote in the same vein. I mouthed out the words to myself hoping it would take hold. I'm full of shit because I want this to work too.

All of this, inside my heart, is death and the world's sadness.
All of this lives, because it dies, inside my heart.
And my heart is a little larger than the entire universe.

There's something that De Campos says. I've never been well except when lying down in the universe. He is bent on lying down in his bed. His everyone knows is that you won't recover from a cold unless he lies down in a bed. I liked a lot the natural progression to his bed to the universe. If you could fold your head up into your arms on your desk and that dream becomes your arms and the desk take on the shape of what you're thinking about in that half state between.

I also wanted to say something about how I liked that the Ricardo Reis poems were so often addressed to a "Lydia". That was great, this little sign pointing to outside of him and what he says. I wondered what SHE had to say about what he said he, they, all should do...

What's passed leaves what's passing. Memory forgets.
Once dead, we keep dying.
Lydia, we exist for ourselves.

It's me, just me, and nothing I can do about it!
Damn.

I can't remember which poem said that about how you love and relate to what was just yourself. This would be one of those I can pick up and go on living if I don't think about that...

I think it is telling what you return to. Pessoa and me it is It's me, just me, and nothing I can do about it!. The other people who show up behind your eyes and peer out of you. What would they see if they were looking in the mirror. I hope not me.

The "involuntary, secret fraternity in the night" is two lights in perpendicular windows, converging in the insomniac night (god that is me). It kills me when the other light is the light from his childhood. I love Pessoa.

I took off the mask, and I put it back on.
It's better this way.
This way I'm the mask.

I go back to this. I go back to...

That's the advantage of knowing how to remove your mask.
You're still the child,
The past that lives on,
The child.

[Rowena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fernando Pessoa is brilliant! It's been a while since I've enjoyed a poetry collection as much as I did this one. He's my new favourite. I loved his snarkiness, his nonchalance, and how accessible his poems were.

Nothing- Fernando Pessoa

Ah, the soft, soft playing,
Like someone about to cry,
Of a song that’s woven
Out of artifice and moonlight…
Nothing to make us remember
Life.

A prelude of courtesies
Or a smile that faded…
A cold garden in the distance…
And in the soul that finds it,
Just the absurd echo of its empty
Flight.

[Sidharth Vardhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book I have read this year. Pessoa is the best poet in the world. The number of characters allowed for goodreads reviews are too few to share all the poems i want to, so here are just a couple:

"Better the flight of the bird that passes and leaves no trace
Than the passage of the animal, recorded in the ground.
The bird passes and is forgotten, which is how it should be.
The animal, no longer there and so of no further use,
Uselessly shows it was there.
Remembrance is a betrayal of Nature,
Because yesterday’s Nature isn’t Nature.
What was is nothing, and to remember is not to see.
Pass by, bird, pass, and teach me to pass!"

"A row of trees in the distance, toward the slope...
But what is a row of trees? There are just trees.
“Row” and the plural “trees” are names, not things.
Unhappy human beings, who put everything in order,
Draw lines from thing to thing,
Place labels with names on absolutely real trees,
And plot parallels of latitude and longitude
On the innocent earth itself, which is so much greener and full
of flowers!"


"In this way or that way,
As it may happen or not happen,
Sometimes succeeding in saying what
I think And at other times saying it badly and with things mixed in,
I keep writing my poems, inadvertently,
As if writing were not something requiring action,
As if writing were something that happens to me
In the same way that the sun reaches me from outside.
I try to say what I feel
Without thinking about what I feel.
I try to place words right next to my idea
So that I won’t need a corridor Of thought leading to words.
I don’t always manage to feel what I know I should feel.
Only very slowly does my thought swim across the river,
Weighed down as it is by the suit men forced it to wear.
I try to shed what I’ve learned, I try to forget the way I was taught to remember,
To scrape off the paint that was painted on my senses,
To uncrate my true emotions,
To step out of all my wrapping and be myself—not Alberto
Caeiro
But a human animal created by Nature."

[Vartika · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can never read much of your poetry at once...it's too full of feeling, said Alvaro de Campos in an ode to Walt Whitman:

I move through your verses as through a jostling crowd,
So that I finally don't know if I'm reading or living,
I don't know if my true place is in the world or in your poetry,
I don't know if I'm here, with both feet on the natural earth,
Or if I'm hanging upside down in some sort of emporium,
Dangling from the natural ceiling of your tumultuous inspiration
—From the middle of the ceiling of your unattainable intensity.

It is in these very words that choose me to describe how I feel about the poems of de Campos, and—behind the mask—Fernando Pessoa himself.

Between the covers of A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe lies the widest available selection of poems from the four greatest writers in Portuguese, all of who, as the saying goes, are—and aren't—Pessoa. From the materialism of Alberto Caeiro to the Horatian odes of Ricardo Reis, the prolific madness of Alvaro de Campos to the nostalgic melancholia of Himself; a bridge is drawn over the reticence and lucidity between which all poetry makes its waves. In giving birth to his various heteronymic poets and nourishing them with the silken grain of verse, Pessoa the man may have disappeared, but not without succeeding at playing god.

Of course, there is the necessity of translation to mourn, for Pessoa is, first and foremost, a poet of disquieting emotions. Richard Zenith's introduction to this volume is a balm, but his translations tend to get awkward and prosaic in places. However, that the genius of the poet manages to shine through regardless makes reading him in, even if only in translation, worthwhile. If nobody else, de Campos alone is worth going through this brilliant volume, the meat of which lies squarely in the middle as (forgive me this statement) in a good sandwich.

It doesn't hurt, either, that Aldous Everleigh's illustration, Pessoa Seeing Double adorns the cover, to be seen each time the book is picked up or set aside— a visual reminder of the complexity and brilliance and fractured selves captured within.

[Eadweard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I try to say what I feel
Without thinking about what I feel.
I try to place words right next to my idea
So that I won’t need a corridor
Of thought leading to words.
----



Love is a company.
I no longer know how to walk the roads alone
----




Hour by hour the ancient face of repeated
Beings changes, and hour by hour,
Thinking, we get older.
Everything passes, unknown, and the knower
Who remains knows he knows not.
But nothing, Aware or unaware, returns.
Equals, therefore, of what isn’t our equal,
Let us preserve, in the heat we remember,
The flame of the spent hour.
----




No one loves anyone else; he loves
What he finds of himself in the other.
Don’t fret if others don’t love you.
They feel Who you are, and you’re a stranger.
Be who you are, even if never loved
Secure in yourself, you will suffer
Few sorrows.
----




What scruples or fears influence the workings of life? What chemical scruples rule the driving impulse
Of sap, the blood’s circulation, and love?
What memory of others exists in the joyous rhythm of life? 

Ah, vanity of flesh and blood called man,
Can’t you see that you’re utterly unimportant?

You’re important to yourself, because you’re what you feel.
You’re everything to yourself, because for you you’re
the universe,
The real universe and other people
Being mere satellites of your objective subjectivity.
You matter to yourself, because you’re all that
matters to
you.
And if this is true for you, O myth, then won’t it be
true
for others?

Do you, like Hamlet, dread the unknown?
But what is known? What do you really know
Such that you can call anything “unknown”?
----




I smile in anticipation of the nothing I’ll be.
At least I smile: to smile is something.
----



I came to rest up,
But I forgot to leave myself at home.
I brought along the deep-seated thorn of consciousness, The vague nausea, the ill-defined affliction of self-awareness.
Always this anxiety chewed bit by bit,
Like dry dark bread that crumbles and falls.
Always this uneasiness swallowed in bitter sips,
Like the wine of a drunkard not even nausea can deter. Always, always, always
This poor circulation in my soul,
This blacking out of my sensations,
This . . .
----



If I exist, it’s wrong to know it.
If I Wake up, I feel I’m mistaken.
I just don’t know.
There’s nothing I want, have, or remember.
I have no being or law.

A moment of consciousness between illusions,
I’m bounded all around by phantoms.
Sleep on, oblivious to other people’s hearts,
O heart belonging to no one!
----



The illusion that kept me going
Was a queen only on stage:
Once undressed, her reign was over.
----



I’m already my future corpse.
Only a dream links me to myself—
The hazy and belated dream
Of what I should have been—a wall
Around my abandoned garden
----



Everything, except boredom, bores me.
I’d like, without being calm, to calm down,
To take life every day
Like a medicine—
One of those medicines everybody takes.

I aspired to so much, dreamed so much,
That so much so much made me into nothing.
My hands grew cold
From just waiting for the enchantment
Of the love that would warm them up at last.
----



There are anxieties from dreams that are more real
Than the ones life brings; there are sensations
Felt only by imagining them
That are more ours than our very own life.
There are countless things that exist
Without existing, that lastingly exist
And lastingly are ours, they’re us . . .
Over the muddy green of the wide river
The white circumflexes of the seagulls . . .
Over my soul the useless flutter
Of what never was nor could be, and it’s everything.

Give me more wine, because life is nothing.
----



Without madness what is man
But a healthy beast,
A postponed corpse that breeds?
----



You pick roses? Aren’t you just picking
Colorful motifs of death? But pick roses.
Why not pick them, since it pleases you
And everything is its own dissolution?

[Junta · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Little Review of Pessoa's Poems: Selected Blabberings

After The Book of Disquiet and his Selected Prose
My indecisive, autumnal fingers chose
To continue the journey into the next universe
Where the hatted man this time drew squiggles in verse.

Pessoa: Seeing Double was the cover picture title
A lovely prelude to the many-faceted recital.
Also before the poems were a zenith-like 50 pages
A personable introduction to the voices from past ages.

The first poet I encountered was Caeiro, The Master
Whose worldview was "Things must be felt as they are."
The Keeper of Sheep, and A Shepherd in Love
Simply to live the here and now, he strove.

Everything is everything, and that's how it should be.
Differences are differences, you need only to see
The universe is beautiful, and one need not judge it

I don't know what Nature is: I sing it.

The classicist, Reis, greeted me next
And unveiled all his words in metered text
"Things must be felt as they are, and fitting a certain ideal."
He spoke for gods, destiny, time and the real.

Fate ordains that we each become kings
Ruling our own world of immaterial things.

To be great, be whole: don't exaggerate
Or leave out any part of you.

The third man, de Campos, was an active volcano
DID I IMAGINE A HETERONYM WRITING LIKE THIS? NO.
"Things must simply be felt." Oh, the sensations!
One can picture his frenzied gesticulations!

Odes to machines and the maritime, ye all behold!

To feel everything in every way,
To live everything from all sides
To be the same thing in all ways possible at the same time...

I awaited the dramatist, Pessoa-Himself
Knowing his world would touch me the deepest.
Abdication, Nothing, There's no one who loves me ...
Even the poem's titles fill me with yearning.

Awakening the Fifth Empire through his thinking and dreaming
From a window of a dark room above the city, gazing
Outside and thus inside, into his own mind and heart
The soul's disquiet is neither the end nor the start.

Caeiro wisely shared to me the beauty of nature
Reis the tragedies of time in formal portraiture
de Campos' sensations and softer side shone bright
And Pessoa confirmed that darkness can also be light.

My first book of poetry thus finished
And my interest in the genre, far from diminished
I'll continue this journey traversing space and time
Flowing with beauty, but not always with rhyme.





May 28, 2016

P.S. See my reading progress for some poem excerpts.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

pessoa kept quite a crowd inside him, writing under various aliases with distinct biographies (a plainspoken farmer, a morphine-addicted sailor) along with markedly different poetic styles, ranging from constrained victorian verse to whitmanesque flights of fancy.

they even commented on each others' work in literary journals.

not surprisingly, what they all share with fernando pessoa (another name he wrote under, with inventions of its own) is a desire to break loose of the scaffolding that creates and limits existence: identity, time, and expression.

the poems construct elaborate prisons that, at the last moment, offer some reprieve; they show that what seemed a prison is merely a reflection on water, that life isn't what we think it is at all.

this relentless focus makes A LITTLE LARGER THAN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE, a rather large collection, tough to take at one swallow and a bit overwhelming; but it is also the book's great virtue.

i'm afraid none of this give you much of an idea of the writing itself, which is less bleak than what i describe.

indeed, what i don't think i've gotten through here is its dreamy beauty, this chorus of identities, this weaving of icy pessimism with an exuberance about the life that we don't know, the life that waits for us, the life that lives on some other side, or hides inside this one.

[Garima · Rating 5 out of 5]

O lying system of the universe,
Vacuous stars, unreal suns,
The whole of my exiled being hates you
With a physical and mind-boggling hatred!
I'm hell in person. I'm the black Christ
Nailed to the fiery cross of myself.
I'm the knowledge that doesn't know,
The insomnia of suffering and thinking
Hunched over the book of the world's horror.


Can there ever be enough words to properly compliment the genius of Pessoa? I fear not.
For what he writes are not words adorned with beauty and sensations, but the very feeling of beauty and sensations itself.
Language is a barrier that poses as an obstruction to what the soul wants to communicate, but Pessoa uses this very barrier to help ease the burden of the soul by giving words to its voiceless voice, a voice which is always there but hardly ever heard in the chaos of existence man has built. His poems are like music, a perfect classical prelude to the mayhem of the paradox of human existence.
Pessoa's collection of poem lends a voice to my voiceless soul as well and in that he helps me find a way out from the abundance of voices lost in the hearsay of this paradox, a prison man has built for himself.

[Stian · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me, reading poetry is usually something similar to staying up too late watching some documentary series on TV which is kind of interesting, but I know I'm not going to remember any of it once I wake up the next morning. This collection of poems by Fernando Pessoa was very different. Some of these poems I really loved. Others were, it's true, beyond me. That didn't stop me from liking this quite a lot, however.


'Each day you didn't enjoy wasn't yours:
You just got through it. Whatever you live
Without enjoying, you don't live.
You don't have to love or drink or smile.
The sun's reflection in a puddle of water
Is enough, if it pleases you.
Happy those who, placing their delight
In slight things, are never deprived
Of each day's natural fortune!'
- Richardo Reis, March 14 1933

'Since we do nothing in this confused world
That lasts or that, lasting, is of any worth,
And even what's useful for us we lose
So soon, with our own lives,
Let us prefer the pleasure of the moment
To an absurd concern with the future,
Whose only certainty is the harm we suffer now
To pay for its prosperity.
Tomorrow doesn't exist. This moment
Alone is mine, and I am only who
Exists in this instant, which might be the last
Of the self I pretend to be.'
- Ricardo Reis, March 16 1933

'Not just those who envy and hate us
Limit and oppress us; those who love us
Limit us no less.
May the Gods grant me, stripped of all
Affections, the cold freedom of the heights
Of Nothingness. Wanting little,
A man has everything. Wanting nothing,
He's free. Not having and not desiring,
He's equal, though man, to the Gods.'
- Ricardo Reis, November 1 1930


And for the chess players around, read this:

I've heard that once, during I don't know
What war of Persia,
When invaders rampaged through the City
And the women screamed,
Two chess players kept on playing
Their endless game.

In the shade of a leafy tree they stared
At the old chessboard,
And next to each player was a mug of wine,
Solemnly ready
To quench his thirst in the moments when,
Having made his move,
He could sit back and relax, waiting
On his opponent.

Houses were burning, walls were torn down
And coffers plundered;
Women were raped and propped against
The crumbling walls;
Children, pierced by spears, were so much
Blood in the streets...
But the two chess players stayed where they were,
Close to the city
And far from its clamor, and kept on playing
Their game of chess.

Even if, in the bleak wind's messages,
They heard the screams
And, upon reflection, knew in their hearts
That surely their women
And their tender daughters were being raped
In the nearby distance,
Even if, in the moment they thought this,
A fleeting shadow
Passed over their hazy, oblivious brows,
Soon their calm eyes
Returned with confident attention
To the old chessboard.

When the ivory king's in danger, who cares
About the flesh and blood
Of sisters and mothers and little children?
When the rook can't cover
The retreat of the white queen, what
Does pillaging matter?
And when with sure hand the opponent's king
Is placed in check,
It hardly concerns one's soul that children
Are dying in the distance.

Even if the infuriated face
Of an invading warrior
Should suddenly peer over the wall and cause
The solemn chess player
To fall right there in a bloody heap,
The moment before that
Was still devoted to the favorite game
Of the supremely indifferent.

Let cities fall and people suffer,
Let life and freedom
Perish, let secure, ancestral properties
Be burned and uprooted,
But when war interrupts the game, make sure
The king's not in check
And the most advanced of the ivory pawns
Is ready to redeem the rook.

My brothers in loving Epicurus
And in understanding him
More in accord with our view than with his,
Let's learn from the story
Of the impassive chess players how
To spend our lives.

Let serious things scarcely matter to us
And grave things weigh little,
And let the natural drive of instincts yield
To the futile pleasure
(In the peaceful shade of the trees)
Of playing a good game.

Whatever we take from this useless life,
Be it glory or fame,
Love, science, or life itself,
It's worth no more
Than the memory of a well-played game
And a match won
Against a better player.

[Sajid · Rating 5 out of 5]

What these Selected poems offer are Dream-like phantasmagoria,Bubble-like beautiful ecstasy And Drunk-meditative paradoxical consciousness.

Leave in a complex state of slumber
Your consciousness of science.
Look At your white face in the wine’s red mirror
And then drink the mirror ...and your consciousness.

Pessoa's The book of desquiet is one my favourite piece of literature and the fact is i only read it two months ago. But that's the effect of his weirdly beautiful words. Whatever he said,even simple to simpler words and that became poetic. His deep slumbering consciousness paves an abyss in front of us where we dreaming dizziness by being dizzy,where we are hovering around happiness by being happy,only to drink a cup of sadness. Were we able to ponder this universe in one single thought we still wouldn't have been able to ponder the nothingness we think about,only the idea of it,not reality of its reality.

In here as well with his poetry, Pessoa makes you drunk with his words and you wouldn’t be able to reason anything out logically, just to feel and to read and to dream words–you wouldn’t have to think consciously –thinking would occur to you like wind occur to the bird,like flying occur to the birdlike consciousness–that will make your thoughts float high above into realm of your dreams. Everything you read in this book will sink deep into,so much deeper,that it wouldn’t be you anymore, but an angel who will lift your thoughts up whenever you want,who will make your feelings warm whenever you want. Maybe you wouldn’t even want anything, that angel will do the work of wanting for you.

I want the good, I want the bad, and in the end I want
nothing.
I toss in bed, uncomfortable on my right side, on my left
side,
And on my consciousness of existing,
I'm universally uncomfortable, metaphysically
uncomfortable,
But what's even worse is my headache.
That's more serious than the meaning of the universe.

[withdrawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really do have to learn Portuguese

[عماد العتيلي · Rating 4 out of 5]

actual rating: 3.5

‎‫‏‬

My beloved poet and writer Fernando Pessoa!
You broke my heart twice!

First, because I fell in love with you when I read your amazing Book of Disquiet - and I thought of naming you 'My All-Time Favorite Writer' instead of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Second, because I got truly disappointed in you when I read this collection of your poems! I admit that I don't like poetry that much, but I expected to read an AMAZING collection of poems (MAYBE I COULD BLAME THE TRANSLATOR?). I loved the poems, don't get me wrong, they were really really good. But, forgive me, I was looking for Amazing (not really really good!).

I didn't imagine I would ever get bored reading you, Possoa! But, unfortunately, I did! and it shattered my heart! I can't tell you how sorry I am! and how angry I am! not angry at you, but at myself! for thinking that any writer could displace my dear Dostoyevsky!

Nevertheless, you will remain a good poet. One of the MOST wonderful poets I've ever known. And your Book of Disquiet will remain as one of my all-time favorite books - with The Brothers Karamazov on the same shelf. That's enough for me to keep loving you.

[Anwesha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was drowned
and no, I didn't try to clasp a bunch of reasons to hold me back.
I let my lungs get filled with the nothingness of everything.

I went down, down, deep down.
went with the gravity of your nonchalance.
I landed at the bottom of your world
where starting and ending means the same.
where philosophy has no name
and thinking means to cease existing.

There I found you.
A name with many persons

O multiple existences,
You have a heart a little larger than the entire Universe.

[ash · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I didn't know then that I was happy.
I know it now, because I no longer am” 😭😭😭

[مهدیار دلکش · Rating 3 out of 5]

ترجمه‌ی شعر، غیر از ترجمه‌های دیگه‌ست. یه مرحله، اضافه‌تر داره، و اون، شعرکردن ترجمه است که آقای مهتدی، افتضاح بودند توی این قسمت. ولی خب، پسوآ رو دوست پیدا کردم.

[Parnian.K · Rating 4 out of 5]

این کتاب رو پیش از مهاجرتم دوست عزیزم، احمد، بهم هدیه کرد و جزء انگشت‌شمار کتاب‌هایی بود که با خودم اوردم. گنجینه‌ی‌ بسیار کوچک و ارزشمندی که به‌زور توی چمدون‌های کوچیکم جا کردم و از دریاها و اقیانوس‌ها عبور دادم. کتاب‌هایی که دلم نمیومد بخونمشون، چون نمی‌خواستم تموم شن و کتابخونه‌ی کوچیک فارسیم توی غربت ته بکشه. شاید بخاطر همین بود که از سال ۲۰۲۱ که این کتابو شروع کردم، هیچ‌وقت دلم نیومد که تا به امروز تمومش کنم. سالی چند شعرشو می‌خوندم و قطره‌قطره می‌نوشیدمش. و امروز در دقایق پایانیِ ۲۰۲۴ به اتمام رسید؛ با یادِ انسان‌های عزیزِ اقامتم در شیراز و خاطراتِ روزهای خوبش و دوستی‌های خوب‌ترش.
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این شعر رو دوست خوبم احمد با صدای خودش برام خوند وقتی که کتاب رو بهم هدیه کرد و من حالا با خوندنش هربار از دلتنگی به گریه می‌افتم. دلتنگی برای احمد، سپیده، کامران، ریحانه، زهرا، علیرضا، ملیکا و تمامِ دوست‌های عزیز دیگه‌ای که در ایران جا گذاشتم ولی دوستی‌هاشون، مهرشون و خاطراتشون رو با خودم به اینجا اوردم:
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«از قطار پیاده شدم
و خداحافظی کردم از مردی که ملاقات کرده بودم.
برای هجده ساعت در کنار هم بودیم
و گفت‌وگویی خوش با هم داشتیم
دوستی در سفر، و غمگین بودم از پیاده‌شدن
غمگین از ترک گفتنِ این دوست اتفاقی
که هرگز نامش را ندانستم.
چشمانم را خیس از اشک حس کردم…
هر خداحافظی یک مرگ است
بله، هر خداحافظی یک مرگ است
در قطاری که زندگی می‌نامیم
ما همگی وقایعی هستیم اتفاقی / در زندگی‌های یکدیگر،
و همگی احساسِ غم می‌کنیم / وقت پیاده‌شدن که می‌رسد.»
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ترجمه در بعضی جاها خیلی خوب و در بعضی جاها ناخوب بود. به‌طور کلی اما راضی بودم از ترجمه و همچنین از پیش‌خوانی و پس‌خوانی خوبی که مترجم درباره‌ی زندگینامه‌ی شاعر/ها به کتاب اضافه کرده. سرنوشت این شاعر واقعاً جالبه! در قالب ۴ شخص (و حتی بیشتر) با چهار نام مختلف شعر نوشته و برای هرکدوم از شخصیت‌های خلق‌شده زندگینامه‌ی‌ جداگانه‌ای هم نوشته؛ تاریخ و محل تولدشون، حرفه‌شون، زمان و چگونگیِ مرگشون. و این چهار شاعر واقعاً با هم متفاوت‌اند در نوشتن و نگاه‌کردن به پدیده‌ها، و این شگفت‌انگیزه.
«پسه‌آ محل تلاقی شخصیت‌ها و ذهنیت‌های بسیاری بود که اگرچه در خود او شکل بسته بودند اما در نهایت به خود او شکل بخشیدند، شاعری که قدم‌زنان از پسه‌آ دور می‌شد و هردو می‌دانستند که در همان لحظه و حال، در حال نزدیک‌شدن به یک‌دیگرند.»
من از این مجموعه، بیشتر از همه، شعرهای آلوارو دو کامپوس رو دوست داشتم.
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«پسه‌آ حقیقتاً شاعری‌ست که تمام عمر در زبان خانه کرده بود و در زبان زیست، زبانی که گاه بر شانه‌های خویش به خارج از زمان حمل می‌کرد و بعد باز در سکوت در آن سکونت می‌یافت.»
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۳۱ دسامبر ۲۰۲۴

[johnny ♡ · Rating 3 out of 5]

more mid than expected.

[Andrew]

I don't read full books of poetry often, and that goes double for translated poetry. This was my first attempt at Pessoa's poetry-proper -- I'd read The Book of Disquiet before, and I don't think that counts, really, but if it does, this is my first attempt at Pessoa's verse, as he uses his multiple-personality approach to write in any damn way he sees fit. Some of these heteronyms are delightful, and others are downright obnoxious, as you might expect (although the obnoxious ones are self-consciously so, I think?). There are some other semi-futurist voices, which I'm not quite sure about yet, but I feel are important.

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are anxieties from dreams that are more real
Than the ones life brings; there are sensations
Felt only by imagining them
That are more ours than our very own life.
There are countless things that exist
Without existing, that lastingly exist
And lastingly are ours, they’re us…

[Ehsan · Rating 5 out of 5]

وجه ممیزه این کتاب شعر از نگاه من این است که اشعار در چند بخش تقسیم بندی شده و هر بخش از زبان یک شخصیت نوشته شده و اما همه اشعار متعلق به خود پسوآ است. در واقع هدف پسوا از این شیوه خاص این بوده که بگوید وجود شخصیتی هر انسان امری واحد و منسجم نیست؛ بلکه وجودی چندپاره دارد‌. چرا که شخصیت انسان در موقعیت و مکان است که معنا می‌یابد.
بخش اول از زبان روستازاده ای است که جهان را به ساده‌ترین وجه می‌بیند و بدون هیچ فلسفه ورزی و می‌گوید بدان چه می‌بینم نمی‌اندیشم و آنچه می‌اندیشم را نمی‌بینم. بخش دوم از زبان پزشکی است که جهان را ناشی از تقدیر می‌داند و بخش سوم نیز از زبان شخصی که متاثر از ماشینیزم به یاس و رنج رسیده است.

[Zoe Tuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first encounter with Pessoa was probably a photocopy in one of Hoa Nguyen's workshops, followed by the Exact Change edition of The Book of Disquiet. I acquired another collection on the way (somewhere in the San Antonio library...by which I mean my parents' house), but didn't really get into it.

It was poetry, so I was left (somewhat daftly) thinking that I liked Pessoa for his prose, and for bequeathing to future generations the concept of heteronyms. O, was I ever wrong! This edition is superb. Really this book requires three or four reviews, and I am not just being quippy.

Alberto Caeiro truly is the master! His concise philosophical and spiritual poems...I must use a cliche here, but which? Left a deep impression? Resonated strongly? It was like I had found a clear, pure and strongly flowing stream from which to irrigate my mind. I also found this book close on the heals of a Taoism kick, for what it's worth.

Ricardo Reis affected me as well. [more review perhaps to follow?:]

Alvaro de Campos - I had very little patience for his Whitmanesques with their dashes of Futurism.

I will return to him and his big breathe, tho'.

I think it's fascinating that none of Pessoa's personas were female.

[Ben Winch · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you haven’t read Pessoa yet, please, don’t start here. This is a hold-all for the leftovers, the b-sides. It’s the parts of his oeuvre where Pessoa – modernism’s great underachiever – spreads himself so thin he almost evaporates. Its translator, Richard Zenith, while acutely grasping the paradoxes of the prose (see The Book of Disquiet), writes prosaic poetry. In his earlier collection, Pessoa & Co, he got away with it, just, on the strength of the originals. (The long poem “Time’s Passage”, otherwise unavailable in English, was worth the price of purchase alone.) But here, even the choice of title does damage to the legacy. Quirky and throwaway? Yeah, Pessoa could be both – it’s part of what makes him so inspiring, so unique, the fact that he so often flirted with failure. But I like a little meat with my seasoning. Get Penguin’s Selected Poems instead.

[Yu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got to Pessoa because I met a wealthy businessman who I suppose to ask for his successful experiences, instead, we talked Pessoa and his poems.

His poems are very philosophical, and his ideas are somehow of the same traits like Susan Sontag's. They both think sensations are more important than reason, because the world and universe itself is for our human being to feel, not to think, and judge.

I read those poems in short times, could read them again definitely.

Without literature, we cannot be rich.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very monastic. Couldn't say philosophical, but that's probably the most accurate. It's spiritual, but not. It, really, makes you want to join a monastery. It made me think of the Baron of Arizona when Vincent Price is doing field work and says he prefers field work. Sure, he was being a swindler, there, but there was still something genuine. Vincent Price knew how to fake a real love for the world. Pessoa, in a sense, acted something akin to a swindler with his heteronyms. I guess it's like a similar situation. He knew how to take a real love for the world.

[Bianca Andreea · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Memory not distinguishing
What I've seen from what I've been."