From one of greatest poets of the 20th century
I’m afraid I won’t even dare to attempt to translate this poem, but for does who don’t understand Portuguese I’m sure you can easily find poetry by Fernando Pessoa or one of his heteronyms. This is the last dated poem of Fernando Pessoa as his heteronym: Ricardo Reis and it has a lot to do with me, what could be better on my birthday ;)
Se penso ou sinto, ignoro
Quem é que pensa ou sente.
Sou somente o lugar
Onde se sente ou pensa.
Tenho mais almas que uma.
Há mais eus do que eu mesmo.
Existo todavia
Indiferente a todos.
Faço-os calar: eu falo.
Os impulsos cruzados
Do que sinto ou não sinto
Disputam em quem sou.
Ignoro-os. Nada ditam
A quem me sei: eu escrevo.
More than 70 years afterwards this poem is still Portugal
NEVOEIRO
Nem rei nem lei, nem paz nem guerra,
Define com perfil e ser
Este fulgor baço da terra
Que é Portugal a entristecer -
Brilho sem luz e sem arder,
Como o que o fogo-fátuo encerra.
Ninguém sabe que coisa quere.
Ninguém conhece que alma tem,
Nem o que é mal nem o que é bem.
(Que ânsia distante perto chora?)
Tudo é incerto e derradeiro.
Tudo é disperso, nada é inteiro.
Ó Portugal, hoje és nevoeiro...
É a Hora!
by Fernado Pessoa
Now in English some other poems, all by Fernando Pessoa or his heteronyms:
The Tobacconist's
I'm nothing.
I'll allways be nothing.
I can't even wish to be something.
Aside from that, I've got all the world's dream inside me.
Windows of my room,
The room of just one of the millions in the world nobody
knows
(And what would they know, if they knew that?),
You open on the mystery of a street people are constantly
crossing,
A street blocked off to all though,
A street that's real, impossibly real, and right,
unconsciously right,
With the mystery of things lying under live beings and
stones,
With death spreading darkness on walls and white hair on
heads,
With fate driving the cart of everything down nothingness
road.
Today I'm bowled over, as though hit by the truth.
Today I'm clearheaded, as though I were going to die,
Having no more brotherly feeling for things
Than to say good-bye, turning this house and this side of
the street
Into a line of coaches in a long train with its whistle
shrieking good-bye
From inside my head,
And a nerve-wracking, bone-cracking jerk as it moves off.
Today I'm mixed up, like someone who thought
something and grasped it, then lost it.
Today I'm torn between the allegiance I owe
Something real outside me - The Tobacco Shop across
the street,
And something real inside me - the feeling that it's all a
dream.
I failed in everything.
Since I was up to nothing, maybe it was all really
nothing.
From learning and training for anything useful I escaped
By slipping off to the country with great plans,
By found only grass and threes there,
And when there were people, they were just like any
others.
I leave the window, sit down in a chair. What should I
think about?
"The Tobacco Shop", Álvaro de Campos,
Recalling who I was, I see somebody else.
In memory the past becomes the present.
Who I was is somebody I love,
Yet only in a dream.
The longing that torments me now
Is not from me nor by the past invoked,
But his who lives in me
Behind blind eyes.
Nothing knows me but the moment,
My own memory is nothing, and I feel
That who I am and who I was
Are two contrasting dreams.
(1930)
from «ODES» in «Poems of Fernando Pessoa»
I'm begining to know myself. I don't exist.
I'm the space between what I'd like to be and what others
made of me.
Or halfe that space, because there's life there too...
So that's what I finally am...
Turn off the light, close the door, stop shuffling your
slippers out there in the hall.
Just let me at ease and all by myself in my room.
It's a cheap world.
my glance is clear like a sunflower
My glance is clear like a sunflower.
I usually take to the roads,
Looking to my right and to my left,
And now and then looking behind me...
And what I see each moment
Is something I'd never seen before,
And I'm good at noticing such things...
I know how to feel the same essential wonder
That an infant feels if, on being born,
He could note he'd really been born...
I feel that I am being born each moment
Into the eternal newness of the World...
I believe in the World as in a Daisy
Because I see it. But I don't think about it
Because thinking is not understanding...
The World was not made for us to think about
(To think is to be eye-sick)
But for us to look at and be in tune with...
I have no philosophy: I have senses...
If I speak of Nature, it's not because I know what
Nature is
But because I love it, and that's why I love it,
For a lover never knows what he loves,
Why he loves or what love is...
Loving is eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not think...
from «The keeper of Sheep» by Alberto Caeiro
It’s amazing how you can still be overwhelmed with the beauty of a person you know for so long, loving is really eternal innocence…
To end here goes some words that everybody should follow:
To be great, be whole
To be great, be whole; exclude
Nothing, exaggerate nothing that is you.
Be whole in everything. Put all you are
Into the smallest thing you do.
The whole moon gleams in every pool,
It rides so high.
(1933)
from «Ricardo Reis ODES» (Poems of Fernando Pessoa)
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