Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems

FERNANDO PESSOA & CO.

FERNANDO PESSOA & CO.

Selected Poems

Edited and translated from the Portuguese by

RICHARD ZENITH

Grove Press

New York

Translation copyright © 1998, 2022 by Richard Zenith

Introduction copyright © 1998 by Richard Zenith

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Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

This revised and updated edition was published in March 2022.

This book was set in 10.5-pt. Electra LT by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN 978-0-8021-5916-8

eISBN 978-0-8021-9851-8

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

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CONTENTS

About This New and Expanded Edition

Introduction: The Drama and Dream of Fernando Pessoa

ALBERTO CAEIRO: The Unwitting Master

from THE KEEPER OF SHEEP

1 I’ve never kept sheep

2 My gaze is clear like a sunflower

5 To not think of anything is metaphysics enough

9 I’m a keeper of sheep

10 Hello, keeper of sheep

18 I’d rather be the dust of the road

20 The Tagus is more beautiful than the river that flows through my village

22 As when a man opens his front door on a summer day

23 My gaze, blue like the sky

24 What we see of things are the things

32 Yesterday afternoon a man from the cities

37 Like a large blot of smudged fire

38 Blessed be the same sun of other lands

39 The mystery of things—where is it?

40 I see a butterfly go by

42 The coach came down the road, and went on

47 On an incredibly clear day

from THE SHEPHERD IN LOVE

Before I had you

Perhaps those who are good at seeing are poor at feeling

The shepherd in love lost his staff

from UNCOLLECTED POEMS

When Spring returns

If I die young

It is night. It’s very dark. In a distant house

On this whitely cloudy day I get so sad it almost scares me

The child who thinks about fairies and believes in fairies

Morning breaks. No: morning doesn’t break

Slowly the field unrolls and shines golden

Yesterday the preacher of truths (his truths)

They spoke to me of people, and of humanity

I lie down in the grass

Dirty unknown child playing outside my door

You who are a mystic see a meaning in all things

Ah! They want a light that’s better than the sun’s

Yes: I exist inside my body

I like the sky because I don’t believe it’s infinite

To see the fields and the river

This morning I went out very early

I can also make conjectures

This may be the last day of my life

RICARDO REIS: The Sad Epicurean

from ODES

The gods grant nothing more than life

Don’t clap your hands before beauty

Ah, you believers in Christs and Marys

On this day when the green fields

Here, with no other Apollo than Apollo

Above the truth reign the gods

Let the gods

Lips red from wine

I prefer roses, my love, to the homeland

Follow your destiny

I was never one who in love or in friendship

O morning that breaks without looking at me

At those times when, walking in the fields

Obey the law, whether it’s wrong or you are

I want my verses to be like jewels

Day after day life’s the same life

Your blithe and lovely youthfulness

Who values the mind can value no destiny

As if each kiss

Fate frightens me, Lydia. Nothing is certain

I devote my higher mind to the ardent

My eyes see the fields, the fields

Not only wine but its oblivion I pour

How much sadness and bitterness

Solemnly over the fertile land

As long as I feel the breeze ruffle my hair

The one I loved is not here, you say

Looking back, I see a different me

What we feel, not what is felt

I don’t know if the love you give me is real

Want little: you’ll have everything

I was left in the world, all alone

No one in the vast religious jungle

Others narrate with lyres or harps

I tell with severity. I think what I feel

I placidly wait for what I don’t know

Countless lives inhabit us

ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS: The Jaded Sensationist

Looking at myself, I can’t believe

Listen, Daisy. When I die, although

Ah, the first minutes in cafés of new cities

Time’s Passage

It was on one of my voyages

The best way to travel, after all, is to feel

I leaned back in the deck chair and closed my eyes

Ah, Margarida

The Tobacco Shop

Porto-Style Tripe

A Note in the Margin

Deferral

Sometimes I meditate

On the Last Page of a New Anthology

Ah, the freshness in the face of leaving a task undone

At long last . . . no doubt about it

Pop

I walk in the night of the suburban street

Yes, I know it’s all quite natural

Streetcar Stop

Birthday

No! All I want is freedom

But it’s not just the cadaver

I’d like to be able to like liking

Reality

I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist

Pack your bags for nowhere at all

This old anguish

I got off the train

Music. Yes, music

Impassively

On the eve of never departing

Symbols? I’m sick of symbols

The ancients invoked the Muses

I don’t know if the stars rule the world

I’m thinking about nothing at all

All love letters are

FERNANDO PESSOA-HIMSELF: The Mask Behind the Man

from SONGBOOK

Ocean. Morning.

The Other Love

At times I’m the god that lives in me

Slanting Rain (VI)

The wind is blowing too hard

Stations of the Cross (IV)

Stations of the Cross (XIII)

The Mummy

Song

Epigram

In the light-footed march of heavy time

Christmas

By the moonlight, in the distance

Dreams, systems, myths, ideals

Mother’s Little Boy

This species of madness

Waterfront

Some Music

There’s a song I hear people sing

I feel sorry for the stars

I seem to be growing calm

I contemplate the silent pond

Like a uselessly full glass

The sun shining over the field

I don’t know how many souls I have

The soul with boundaries

I’m sorry I don’t respond

Autopsychography

I don’t know how to be truly sad

The clouds are dark

Like an astonishment in which

If I think for more than a moment

From the mountain comes a song

The wind in the darkness howls

With a smile and without haste

Outside where the trees

I hear in the night across the street

This

The day is quiet, quiet is the wind

The sun rests unmoving

The washwoman at the fountain

To travel! To change countries

Day by day we change into whom

Sleep

This great wavering between

I have in me like a haze

I divide what I know

When I feel tired and want to be someone

from MESSAGE

Prince Henry

The Stone Pillar

The Sea Monster

Ferdinand Magellan

Portuguese Sea

Prayer

Storm

Notes to the Introduction and the Poems

Bibliography

ABOUT THIS NEW AND EXPANDED EDITION

Pessoa’s literary work is an editor’s nightmare, perhaps more than any other produced in the twentieth century by a major Western writer. Pessoa published relatively little and left only a small percentage of the rest of his huge output—over 25,000 manuscript sheets have survived—in anything close to a finished state. The handwritten texts, which constitute the vast majority, tend to teeter on the brink of illegibility, requiring not just transcription but decipherment. Sometimes lines and stanzas are dispersed on a page (or in the margins around an earlier text) like the pieces of a puzzle whose correct order, if there is one, cannot with certainty be determined. To top off the confusion, Pessoa often left two, three, six, or seven textual alternates above or below a given word or phrase without crossing anything out, leaving his final decision for a later revision that all too rarely occurred.

The previous paragraph appeared in the first edition of Fernando Pessoa & Co., published in 1998, and served as a warning to readers—always worth repeating—that the writing world of Pessoa is intrinsically unstable, endowed with a built-in uncertainty. Even when most editors agree on how best to decipher a difficult word or passage, a quantum of doubt remains, and each of the many manuscripts on which Pessoa left alternate wordings is a kind of multiple-choice quiz for which there are no right or wrong answers.

But the problem of editing Pessoa also makes his work endlessly fascinating, forever susceptible to new configurations and interpretations. In the year 2009 I proposed an experiment to the Casa Fernando Pessoa, a museum and cultural center that occupies the building in Lisbon where the poet lived during his last fifteen years. I had noticed a manuscript that had twenty-one alternate words or phrases—known to specialists as textual variants—scribbled by Pessoa in the margins of a typewritten, twelve-line ode signed by his heteronym Ricardo Reis and dated February 2, 1928. It so happens that all the variants of this particular poem can be used without invalidating the use of any other of the variants. In other words, they can be used in any and all combinations, and the ode will still make sense. So what if we asked a computer programmer to generate all the possible versions of the ode by realizing those myriad combinations? The Casa Fernando Pessoa found a willing programmer, and for a time it was possible to consult, online, more than 28,000 versions of that one poem with twenty-one variants—28,000! Nowhere was Pessoa’s inclination to multiplicity and dispersion more evident than in his unsettled literary texts.

Keeping in mind the extraordinary example of that twelve-line ode by Ricardo Reis, readers who compare different translations of Pessoa’s work should remember that some discrepancies may be due to the different source texts adopted by his translators. Which isn’t a problem. The diversity of renderings into other languages, like the array of variant poems in the original Portuguese, makes Pessoa’s work uniquely dynamic, a living thing that keeps on growing, evolving.

The translations in this new edition of Fernando Pessoa & Co. have been thoroughly revised, and some of the changes result from my preferring a different alternate among the several that Pessoa left for a given word or phrase. Other changes reflect corrected readings of the original manuscripts. Corrections in the source text are especially frequent in the poems signed with Pessoa’s own name. To take one example, the first editors of the poem This great wavering between (p. 279) had read a certain word in the second stanza as instante, which I translated (in 1998) as moment; more recent editors have corrected that reading to intento, which means intention or purpose (reason to be in my reworked translation). The penultimate word of that same poem had been published throughout the twentieth century as antes (before) but has been corrected to nelles (in them) in the latest editions of Pessoa’s poetry.

Most of the changes to my translations, however, have nothing to do with variants and improved readings of the manuscripts; they simply result from my ambition to do better, to convey more effectively the meaning and tone of the originals. Despite his seeming addiction to hesitancy and incompletion, Pessoa produced a number of poems—such as Autopsychography and The Tobacco Shop—that are finished to perfection. But the translator of a poem, whether by Pessoa or any other poet, will never be able to say This is it. I’ve arrived at a definite version in my own language. We arrive at a version that seems to us possible, acceptable, publishable. I’m tremendously grateful for the opportunity to revisit the translations in this book—after more than twenty years of closer contact with Pessoa’s work and further experience as a translator—to make them, I hope, even more acceptable and worth publishing.

The content of this new edition has also changed. I have removed six poems that are not up to the level of Pessoa’s most compelling work and have added twenty-one others. The most striking additions are in the Álvaro de Campos section—particularly the loud and long sensationist poem that begins The best way to travel, after all, is to feel—and in the Pessoa-himself section, where three poems merit special notice. The narrator of The Other Love, written in 1913, pines for an imaginary young man who is after all female, a Venus-­Ephebus, and sexual indefinition becomes an intriguing metaphor (and perhaps not only a metaphor) for Pessoa’s mental life in a poem written twenty-one years later, When I feel tired and want to be someone. Yet another Pessoa-himself poem, Mother’s Little Boy, seems to take off from where Rimbaud’s The Sleeper in the Valley ends and is a dramatic tour de force quite unlike anything else by Pessoa. One of the new odes by Ricardo Reis, At those times when, walking in the fields, speaks of love’s power to annul, at certain moments, the lovers’ awareness of each other. And a new poem by Alberto Caeiro, I like the sky because I don’t believe it’s infinite, curiously presages the skepticism of many modern physicists regarding the oft-alleged but unproven infinity of space and time. Other new poems reiterate in original ways some of the themes that were already present in this collection of Pessoa’s major poetic voices.

The Caeiro poem that denies infinity is not only a new addition to this book; it is new even to readers of Portuguese, having been discovered in 2008 on the flyleaf of a book from Pessoa’s personal library, now at the Casa Fernando Pessoa. At this point, more than eighty-five years after the poet’s death, virtually all of his poetry in Portuguese has been published (much of his fragmentary verse in English has yet to see print), and there is an increasing consensus about the correct readings of the original manuscripts. But the universe of Pessoa’s writing will continue to expand, thanks to the work of his translators and thanks, especially, to his