7. I Have More Souls Than One | Fernando Pessoa
This is part of the Penguin Modern Classics collection, I’ve written about another beautiful book in the collection here.
Friends,
Portugal is high up on my list of EU countries I’d like to move to in the next few years so I’ve started to research her via poetry (and other more tradish means like jobs, sunshine and food 😊).
Fernando Pessoa is one of Portugal’s well known poets and this teeny book has him writing poems in 4 different voices or alter egos.
Here are my four faves from each:
Pessoa as Alberto Caeiro
If, After I Die
If, after I die, they should want to write my biography,
There's nothing simpler.
I've just two dates - of my birth, and of my death.
In between the one thing and the other all the days are
mine.
I am easy to describe.
I lived like mad.
I loved things without any sentimentality.
I never had a desire I could not fulfil, because
I never went blind.
Even hearing was to me never more than an
accompaniment of seeing.
I understood that things are real and all different from
each other;
I understood it with the eyes, never with thinking.
To understand it with thinking would be to find them
all equal.
One day I felt sleepy like a child.
I closed my eyes and slept.
And by the way, I was only Nature poet.
Pessoa as Ricardo Reis
I Want
Calm because I’m unknown,
And myself because I’m calm,
I want to fill my days
With wanting nothing from them.
For those whom wealth touches,
Gold irritates the skin.
For those on whom fame blows,
Life fogs over.
On those for whom happiness
Is their sun, night will fall.
But those who hope for nothing
Are glad for whatever comes.
Pessoa as Alvaro de Campos
I Am Tired
I am tired, that is clear,
Because, at certain stage, people have to be tired.
Of what I am tired, I don't know:
It would not serve me at all to know
Since the tiredness stays just the same.
The wound hurts as it hurts
And not in function of the cause that produced it.
Yes, I am tired,
And ever so slightly smiling
At the tiredness being only this -
In the body a wish for sleep,
In the soul a desire for not thinking
And, to crown all, a luminous transparency
Of the retrospective understanding…
And the one luxury of not now having hopes?
I am intelligent: that's all.
I have seen much and understood much of what I
have seen.
And there is a certain pleasure even in tiredness
this brings us,
That in the end the head does still serve for
something.
Pessoa as Pessoa
As She Passes
When I am sitting at the window,
Through the panes, which the snow blurs,
I see the lovely images, hers, as
She passes… passes… passes by…
Over me grief has thrown its veil:-
Less a creature in this world
And one more angel in the sky.
When I am sitting at the window,
Through the panes, which the snow blurs,
I think I see the image, hers,
That's not now passing… not passing by…
Discover more of Pessoa’s poetry here.
