2-12-2000

FERNANDO PESSOA

 

 

 

Todas as cartas de amor são
Ridículas.
Não seriam cartas de amor se não fossem
Ridículas.

Também escrevi em meu tempo cartas de amor,
Como as outras,
Ridículas.

As cartas de amor, se há amor,
Têm de ser
Ridículas.

Mas, afinal,
Só as criaturas que nunca escreveram
Cartas de amor
É que são
Ridículas.

Quem me dera no tempo em que escrevia
Sem dar por isso
Cartas de amor
Ridículas.

A verdade é que hoje
As minhas memórias
Dessas cartas de amor
É que são
Ridículas.

(Todas as palavras esdrúxulas,
Como os sentimentos esdrúxulos,
São naturalmente
Ridículas.)

Álvaro de Campos, 21-10-1935

 

Alle Liebesbriefe sind

lächerlich.

Sie wären  nicht Liebesbriefe, wären sie nicht

lächerlich.

 

 

 Auch ich schrieb zu meiner Zeit Liebesbriefe,

wie alle anderen,

lächerlich.

 

Die Liebesbriefe

falls Liebe vorhanden ist,

sind notgedrungenermaßen

lächerlich.

 

Letztlich jedoch

sind nur die Leute, die niemals

Liebesbriefe geschrieben haben,

lächerlich.

 

Was gäbe ich um die Zeit, in der ich,

ohne es zu bemerken,

Liebesbriefe verfasste,

lächerlich!

 

Wahr ist, heute sind nur

meine Erinnerungen

an diese Liebesbriefe

lächerlich.

 

(Alle Wörter mit dem Akzent auf der drittletzten Silbe

sind wie die Gefühle

von Hause aus

lächerlich.)

 

 

 

Ó sino da minha aldeia

Ó sino da minha aldeia
dolente na tarde calma,
cada tua badalada
soa dentro da minha alma...

E é tão lento o teu soar,
tão como triste da vida,
que já a primeira pancada
tem o som de repetida.

Por mais que me tanjas perto,
quando passo, sempre errante,
és para mim como um sonho,
soas-me na alma distante.

A cada pancada tua,
vibrante no céu aberto,
sinto o passado mais longe,
sinto a saudade mais perto...

 

CAMPANA DEL MIO VILLAGGIO
 

Campana del mio villaggio
dolente nell'imbrunire,
ogni rintocco tuo
dentro di me risuona.

Così lento è il tuo suonare,
triste come di vita,
che il tuo primo rintocco
già il secondo ricorda.

Per quanto tu sia vicina
quando passo errabondo,
per me sei come un sogno,
mi suoni dentro lontana.

Ad ogni rintocco tuo,
vibrante nel cielo aperto,
è più remoto il passato,

più urgente la nostalgia.

 

 

 

Published: 9 October 2012

 

From “Four Voices: poems by Fernando Pessoa and his ‘heteronyms’”

by Fernando Pessoa; introduced by Andrew McCulloch

 

“[He] never did find out for sure who he was, but thanks to his doubts we can manage to learn a little more about who it is we are”, wrote the Nobel laureate for 1998 José Saramago about his countryman Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa, born in Lisbon in 1888, shared the Modernists’ view of the self as a shifting mosaic of contradictory impulses and devised a series of what he called “heteronyms” to separate and dramatize them. These differ subtly both from pseudonyms and dramatic personae. “A pseudonymic work”, he wrote, “is, except for the name with which it is signed, the work of an author writing as himself; a heteronymic work is by an author writing outside his own personality . . . just as the utterances of some character in a drama would be”. At the same time, as well as being dramatic the heteronymic poem is sincere, “just as what is spoken by King Lear – not Shakespeare, but a creation of his – is sincere”.

Pessoa’s three main poetic heteronyms are Alberto Caeiro, whom he called his “master”, and two very different but equally talented disciples, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis. He even devised elaborate biographies for them: Caeiro was an innocent pastoralist who lived with an aunt in the country on the income of a few small properties, while Reis was a Jesuit-educated doctor forced by his support for the monarchy to move to Brazil. But more revealing are the intellectual distinctions between them, presented sometimes through the comments of one character about another – in his introduction to a collection of Caeiro’s poems, Reis writes “The Keeper of the Flocks acted as the surgical instrument that opened my eyes to seeing” – and sometimes by Pessoa himself. In Os Heterónimos (1917, “Presenting the Heteronyms”), for example, Pessoa made this comparison: “Caeiro has one discipline: things must be felt as they are. Ricardo Reis has another kind of 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 their fundamentally antithetical way, Reis’s rather self-conscious Horatian restraint and Caeiro’s plain-speaking anti-Romanticism do not just dramatize an argument about poetry, they articulate a much deeper and more interesting quarrel with ourselves.


From Four Voices: poems by Fernando Pessoa and his “heteronyms”


                                  From Odes

 

 

*

Destiny, O Lydia, is my dread. Nothing is sure.
At any hour, that may befall us
By which we are entirely changed.
Beyond the known, our very step
Is strange: stern spirits guard
The boundaries of custom.
We are no gods; our blindness bids us fear.
Let us prefer the meagre gift of life
To the novelty of the abyss.

 		 Temo, Lídia, o destino. Nada é certo.
Em qualquer hora pode suceder-nos
O que nos tudo mude.
Fora do conhecido e estranho o passo
Que próprio damos. Graves numes guardam
As lindas do que é uso.
Não somos deuses; cegos, receemos,
E a parca dada vida anteponhamos
À novidade, abismo. 		  

 

 

 

*

Build no Utopia, Lydia, for the time
You fancy yet to be, nor count upon
Tomorrow. Today fulfils itself, and does not wait.
You are yourself your life.
Contrive no plan, for you are not to be.
Perhaps between the cup you drain
And the same replenished, Fate
Will interpose the void.

 		 Não queiras, Lídia, edificar no espaço
Que figuras futuro, ou prometer-te
Amanhã. Cumpre-te hoje, não esperando.
Tu mesma és tua vida.
Não te destines, que não és futura.
Quem sabe se, entre a taça que esvazias,
E ela de novo enchida, não te a sorte
Interpõe o abismo?
 		  

 

 

 

*

When, O Lydia, our Autumn comes
With its implicit Winter, let’s save
A thought, not for that future
Spring, which others will enjoy,
Nor for that Summer whose dead we are,
But for the remnant of what passes on –
The present yellow in the life of leaves,
Making them different.

 		  

Quando, Lídia, vier o nosso outono
Com o inverno que há nele, reservemos
Um pensamento, não para a futura
Primavera, que é de outrem,
Nem para o estio, de quem somos mortos,
Senão para o que fica do que passa -
O amarelo actual que as folhas vivem
 E as torna diferentes.

 		  

 

RICARDO REIS
Translated by Peter Rickard

 

 

 


From The Keeper of Flocks


Today I read nearly two pages
Of a book by a mystical poet,
And I laughed like one who has wept a lot.

Mystical poets are sick philosophers,
And philosophers are madmen.

For mystical poets say that flowers feel
And they say that stones have souls
And that rivers have ecstasies by moonlight.

But flowers, if they could feel, would not be flowers,
They would be people;
And if stones had souls they would be living things, they would not be stones;
And if rivers had ecstasies by moonlight,
Rivers would be sick men.

One has to be ignorant of flowers and stones and rivers
In order to speak of their feelings.
To speak of the souls of stones, of flowers, of rivers,
Is to speak of oneself and one’s delusions.
Thank God that stones are only stones,
And that rivers are nothing but rivers,
And that flowers are merely flowers.
As for me, I write the prose of my poetry
And I rest content,
For I know that I understand Nature from without;
And I don’t understand it from within
Because Nature has no within;
Otherwise it would not be Nature.

 		  

De O Guardador de Rebanhos

Li hoje quase duas páginas
Do livro dum poeta místico
E ri como quem tem chorado muito.

Os poetas místicos são filósofos doentes,
E os filósofos são homens doidos.

Porque os poetas místicos dizem que as flores sentem
E dizem que as pedras têm alma
E que os rios têm êxtases ao luar.

Mas as flores, se sentissem, não eram flores,
Eram gente;
E se as pedras tivessem alma, eram coisas vivas, não eram pedras;
E se os rios tivessem êxtases ao luar,
Os rios seriam homens doentes.

É preciso não saber o que são flores e pedras e rios
Para falar dos sentimentos deles.

Falar da alma das pedras, das flores, dos rios,
É falar de si próprio e dos seus falsos pensamentos.
Graças a Deus que as pedras são só pedras,
E que os rios não são senão rios,
E que as flores são apenas flores.

Por mim, escrevo a prosa dos meus versos
E fico contente,
Porque sei que compreendo a Natureza por fora;
E não a compreendo por dentro
Porque a Natureza não tem dentro;
Senão não era a Natureza.

 		  


ALBERTO CAEIRO
Translated by Keith Bosely (1988)

 

 

 

 

The Truth of Masks

by Stephen Trousseé

Zbigniew Kotowicz
Fernando Pessoa: Voices of a Nomadic Soul
Menard, £8.99
ISBN 1 874320 16 0

It is one of the great enigmatic artefacts of the Twentieth Century: following Fernando Pessoa's death in 1935 (from hepatitis - he literally dissolved his identity in alcohol), researchers discovered a vast trunk overflowing with old envelopes, office stationery, handbills, stray scraps of paper and hundreds of notebooks. A merzbau of language: in a meticulous hand or a childish scrawl, with a faulty typewriter or a fancy fountain pen, Pessoa had thoroughly dispersed his self through writing. Never entirely classified until the 1960s, when it is discovered to constitute 27,543 documents, it is a remarkable legacy. In Don Paterson's phrase, it amounts to "His shredded evidence".

Researchers have now ascertained that Pessoa wrote under, or between, or through (by happy serendipity, "pessoa" is the Portuguese for "persona", literally "sounding through") in excess of seventy names. Of these, a handful cohered into heteronyms, discrete creative entities, and flourished into four of the most significant writers of the century: Caeiro, Reis, de Campos, Soares. Where Borges, Pirandello and Calvino meticulously dissect the multiplicity and vertigo of modernity, it was Pessoa's genius to embody these ideas. Like a Greek god, or a Flann O'Brien narrator, characters spring from his brow, fully-formed, to embark on mundane careers and marvellous voyages.

If modern art aspires to the condition of physics, then Rimbaud's prescient declaration of 1871, "je est un autre", may well be its e=mc2. In which case, Pessoa was the father of literary fission, exploding the coherent lyrical self into boundless possibilities. The authentic "I" is replaced with "a sinister well, full of faint echoes, inhabited by ignoble lives, slimy non-beings, lifeless slugs, the snot of subjectivity". He was to recount his discovery of the heteronyms with all the sobriety of Virginia Woolf remarking on the change in human character "on or around December 1910". For Pessoa the world changed on March 8 1914. It began in the spirit of playfulness ("I thought of playing a joke... and inventing a bucolic poet"), before taking a step into the mystic. "I wrote thirty-odd poems straight off, in a kind of ecstasy whose nature I cannot define...what followed was an apparition of someone in me, to whom I immediately gave the name Alberto Caeiro. Forgive me the absurdity of the phrase: my master had appeared in me". On the heels of Caeiro, two further poets follow in rapid succession: the melancholy classicist Ricardo Reis and the acedic futurist Álvaro de Campos.

"I desire to be a creator of myths", Pessoa wrote later, "which is the highest mystery any human being can perform". The glorious 8th is now every bit as mythologised as Bloomsday, yet subsequent manuscript analysis has proved fairly conclusively that the poems were composed on separate occasions. Nevertheless, the poetic truth is clear: what began as a ruse evolved into something authentically mysterious, not least to Pessoa himself.

Pessoa's childhood was marked by the early death of his father and several siblings, and he grew up, fluent in both Portuguese and English, in South Africa, before returning to Lisbon. From an early age he would compose letters to himself from imaginary correspondents. Harold Bloom, while gratiously admitting Pessoa to the exclusive club of the Western Canon, at the same time relegates him to a flounderer in the wake of Whitman, the heteronyms being a symptom of an agonistic struggle with the American. Kotowicz, while noting that Pessoa's anxiety of influence was more likely to have involved the Portuguese poet Camoes, suggests that the splits in Pessoa are representative of a larger fracture in Modernism, the competing claims of the artistic revolutionary and the political reactionary.

But, contra Dawkins, the explanations obscure the rainbow. As Caeiro himself wrote "Thinking about the inner sense of things / is even worse than thinking about health". Irrespective of the motivation, the proliferating personas are a delight. Caeiro is the father in the Pessoan family romance, the original vessel, of which Campos, Reis and Pessoa himself are fallen shards. "Not a pagan, but paganism itself", Caeiro is, strictly speaking, an impossible writer: a shepherd-poet supposedly living in Lisbon at the turn of the century. But he writes with the kind of clarity that the Imagists would appreciate: "Like a great blotch of filthy fire / The sunken sun stalls among remnant clouds. / From afar a vague whistle comes through the calmest afternoon. / It must be a train in the distance".

The other heteronyms bear the mark of Caiero's paganism, but never attain his unthinking contentment: Ricardo Reis, exiled in Brazil, composes wistful odes to fate. De Campos, the most interesting of the group, begins with the dynamic 'Triumphal Ode': "O factories, O laboratories, O music hall, O Luna Parks" before souring into a bitter nephew of Des Esseintes, enduring epic struggles as he packs a suitcase, preferring his opium dreams to the tawdriness of existence. In 'The Tobacconist' he writes with a wonderfully downbeat lyricism, which anticipates early Neruda: "Noble at last in the open-handed way with which I throw / The dirty linen which is me, without a laundry list, into the course of things, / And stay at home without a shirt".

Bernado Soares barely merited the title of heteronym, being so similar to Pessoa (a dismal office clerk) that he is referred to as a "mutilated self". Nevertheless, The Book of Disquietude, which he, for the most part, authored, is formally the most Pessoan of all the works. Like Cioran re-writing Hopscotch, it is a monumental treatise on dejection, consisting of stray aphoristic fragments composed over decades, for which no satisfactory order has ever been deduced. It fulfilled the author's ambition of writing the saddest book in all Portugal.

Kotowicz's extended essay provides a useful background to Pessoa's restless invention, especially on the messianic cult of Sebastianism which inspired the cryptic historiography of the long poem 'Message'. He also writes nicely of the artistic tumult in Pessoa's Lisbon. The book could have been improved by a little proof-reading: there are a number of glaring typos, including one in the sole poem that is appended. The best introduction to the writer remains the wonderful Centenary Pessoa, published by Carcanet in 1997, but Kotowicz has produced an interesting overview.

Today Pessoa maintains a mysterious currency. Quite literally: like his fellow adept of silence, exile and cunning, he has wound up on his country's banknotes. Very generously, he agreed to two posthumous interviews (both collected in the Carcanet festschrift). And in a weird way, his achievement was recognised in 1998, with the award of the Nobel prize to the Portuguese writer José Saramago, author of a book called The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis...

THE POETRY SOCIETY

 
 

 

 

FERNANDO PESSOA

(em especial sobre o LIVRO DO DESASSOSSEGO)

 

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