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fernando pessoa, portuguese poet born in lisbon on the 13th of june 1888. possibly the greatest portuguese poet ever, after camoes, and universally acclaimed. his multiple faced work, invented writers and the polemic side of his experiments gave him close friends and brave enemies during his brief life. ‘i don’t know who i am, which soul i possess. (…) i feel beliefs i don’t have. (…) i feel multiple. i am like a room with numerous mirrors that twists to false reflections one anterior reality that is in none and in all of them. like a pantheist feels him a tree and even a flower, i feel as various beings. i feel like living other lives, in myself, incompletely, as if my being participates of all men, incompletely of each of them, by a sum of non-i’s synthesised in a fake one.

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his only known girlfriend, ophelia queiroz, said of him that he was “very joyful. he laughed like a child, and thinks fun of all things. when he was supposed to go to polish his shoes he would say ‘i’m going to wash my feet on the outside.’ he lived very isolated, no one to take care of him, so he used to complain about that. sometimes he was very confusing. he would arrive and say that today he was not fernando, but his friend alvaro de campos. he behaved completely different then.’

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calling himself a gnostic christian, he refuted all kind of organised churches, especially the roman. he believed in the secret tradition of christianism of israel (kabbalah) and with the essence of the masons. he was initiated directly as master to disciple, in the three first minor grades of the templar order of portugal, promising to fight against the ignorant, fanatic and tyranny. as a devout monarchist he was anti communist and anti socialist, as well.

 in 1915 he published the static drama the sailor, in 1922 the anarchist banker and the poems of portuguese sea. heteronyms works published in life were triumphal ode and the maritime ode in 1915, ultimatum in 1917 by alvaro de campos; odes by ricardo reis in 1925.

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pessoa died on the 30th of november 1935 of cirrhosis, his liver tortured by alcohol, in the st. louis of the french hospital. his last words sounds like some of his heteronym alvaro de campos: ‘give me my glasses.’

Pessoana,

     Translated by Margaret Jull Costa, 288pp, Serpent's Tail > £7.99

You may want to get the Zenith as well, for Pessoa speaks to insomniacs, being one himself; but this edition is a very good book to keep by your side during those encounters with the mundane that can vex the sensitive soul. For it is all about the mundane: the reactions of a sensibility who walks through early 20th-century Lisbon, looking at pedestrians, co-workers, grocers, the seasons, the times of day, unsure, in a kind of existential insomnia, whether he is dreaming or not, whether he exists or not. And alongside the shimmering "reality" runs the flickering existence of the author himself, who is not only the man named on the title page, but one of the 70-odd "heteronyms" he invented for himself: in this case one Bernardo Soares, an insignificant clerk working for the firm run by the charming, avuncular Senhor Vasques. "Senhor Vasques. I remember him now as I will in the future for the nostalgia I know I will feel for him then. I'll be living quietly in a little house somewhere in the suburbs, enjoying a peaceful existence not writing the book I'm not writing now and, so as to continue not doing so, I will come up with different excuses from the ones I use now to avoid actually confronting myself."

Here, then, is a corner of the Modernist project, tucked away for posterity. If Pound and Eliot spent a lot of their early time wondering about the precarious nature of identity – one of Pound's collections was called "Personae", and Eliot said in "Prufrock" that "there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet" – Pessoa, whose name actually means "person" and, secondarily, "mask", was taking the concept of the ungraspable inner reality to something like its logical conclusion. I like Adam Phillips's take on this: "Because he did not find his voice, but his voices, Pessoa never fell into the trap of knowing what he was doing; he didn't need to imitate himself to keep writing."

And so we have these page-long scraps of thought and reflection (the editor seems to have removed most of the shorter ones, some of which don't even make it to sentence-length) which find in rootless modern urban existence not something to be despised but something to be celebrated with indulgent melancholy. He makes of his relentless alienation something awestruck, almost childish. Seeing the back of a man with a briefcase and umbrella in the street, he says: "Suddenly I feel something approaching tenderness for that man." Note the cautious honesty of "something approaching"; yet barely a page later he talks of the "immense, boundless tenderness" he feels "for all of infantile humanity, for the somnambulist lives people lead, for everyone, for everything". Such is the airiness of Pessoa's spirit that we can take his numerous contradictions – and what would, elsewhere, be understood as the arrogance of the artistic sensibility – on the nod. It is the tone that is important, as much as anything he says.

Pessoa was mostly a poet and The Book of Disquiet can be read, if you wish, as a series of notes for poems as yet unwritten; or prose poems, of a kind, themselves. If all this sounds rather vague then that is because Pessoa wished it so. To read and then contemplate him is to be lifted a little bit above the earth in a floating bubble. One becomes both of the world and not of it. There's no one like him, apart from all of us.

~ 

On a noon at the end of Spring

I had a dream like a photograph.

I saw Jesus Christ descent to earth.

He came down the slope of a hill

Turned once again a child,

Running and rolling on the grass

And picking flowers to throw them away

And laughing in a way to be heard far away.

He escaped from heaven.

He was too much ours to pretend

Of the second person of the trinity.

In heaven all was false, all is discord

With flowers and trees and stones.

In heaven he had to be always serious

And from time to time to become man again

And rise on the cross, and being always dying

With a thorn crown all around

And the feet pricked with head nails,

And even with a cloth around the waist

Like the black people in the illustrations.

Not even they allowed him to have a father and a mother

Like all other children.

His dad was two people –

An old man called Joseph, a carpenter,

And that was not his father;

And the other a stupid dove,

The only ugly dove in the world

Because it wasn’t of the world nor a dove.

And his mother didn’t love before having him.

She wasn’t a woman; she was a suitcase

In which he came from heaven.

And they wanted him, born only of a mother,

And never having a father to love with respect,

To preach kindness and justice!

One day God was sleeping

And the Holy Ghost was flying,

He went to the miracle’s box and stole three.

With the first he made that no one ever knew he had run.

With the second he created himself eternally human and a boy.

With the third he created a Christ eternally on the cross

And left him nailed on the cross in heaven

And that is a model to all others.

Then he ran to the Sun

And descended on the first sun bean he caught.

Today he lives in my village with me.

He is a beautiful child of laughter and natural.

He cleans his nose to the right arm,

Jumps on pools of water,

Picks flowers and likes them and forgets them.

He throws stones at donkeys,

Steals fruit from the orchards

And runs crying and shouting at the dogs.

And, because he knows they do not like

And that everyone finds it funny,

He chases the girls

That walk in bands on the roads

With water cans on their heads

And raises their skirts.

To me he taught everything.

He taught how to look at things.

He points me all the things that exist in flowers.

He shows me how rocks are funny

When he holds them in our hands

And slowly stares at them.

He tells me horrid things about God.

He tells me he is a stupid and ill old man,

Always spitting on the floor

And swearing.

And Virgin Mary takes the eternity afternoons knitting.

And the Holy Ghosts scratches itself with its beak

And stands on chairs and shits on them.

Everything in heaven is stupid like the Catholic Church.

He tells me God do not understand

Of the things he created –

‘If he created them, which I doubt’ –

‘He says, for instance, that beings sing his glory,

But beings do not sing a thing.

If they sang they’d be singers.

Beings exist and nothing else.

That’s why they are called beings.’

And then, tired of talking jives at God,

Baby Jesus falls asleep in my arms

And I take him to my house.

He lives with me in my house halfway the hill

He is the Eternal Child, the missing god.

He is the human that is natural,

He is the divine that smiles and plays.

And that’s why I know for sure

That he is Baby Jesus, the true one.

And the child so human that is divine

Is this day to day life of poet, and it is because he’s always with me that I’m

always poet.

And that my smallest look

Fills me with sensation,

And the tiniest of sounds, whatever makes it,

Seems to talk to me.

And the new Child that lives where I live

Gives me one hand

And the other to all that exists

And that way we go through whatever path to be,

Jumping and singing and laughing

And enjoying our common secret

That it is to know all over the places

That there is not any mystery on earth

And that all is worth.

And the Eternal Child accompanies me always.

The direction of my stare is his pointing finger.

My attentive ear listening gaily to all sounds

Are tickles he does to me, playing, in my ears.

We go so well one with the other

In the company of everything

That we never think about each other,

But we live together and two

With an intimate agreement

As the right and left hand.

At nightfall we play the five stones

On the step of the house’s door,

Grave as is convenient to a god and a poet,

As if each stone

Was all the universe

And because of that a great danger to them

To fall on the earth.

After, I tell him stories of things of men

And he smiles, because all is incredible.

He laughs of kings and of the ones that are not kings,

And he’s ashamed of hear about wars,

And of commerce’s, and of vessels

That rest smoke in the air and on the high seas.

Because he knows that all misses the truth

That a flower was blossoming

And that goes with the light of Sun

Wandering on the hills and valleys

And hurting the eyes of plastered walls.

Then he falls asleep and I lay him down.

Take him in my arms inside the house

And lay him down, undressing him slowly

And as following a ritual very clean

And all maternal until he is naked.

He sleeps inside my soul

And sometimes awakes in the night

And he plays with my dreams.He turns ones upside down

Stack them on top of each other

And he claps his hands alone

Smiling at my dream.

When I die, little son,

Wish I’d be the child, the smallest,

Take me in your arms

And take me inside the house.

Undress my tired and human being

And lay me down on bed.

And tell me stories, if I awake,

To fall asleep again.

And give me your dreams to play until rising any day

You know which.

This is the story of my Baby Jesus.

For what understandable reason

Shouldn’t it be more truthful

That all philosophers think

And all religions teach?

to be continued ¬