Fernando Pessoa/Alvaro de Campos

 I Got Off the Train

I got off the train
And said goodbye to the man I'd met.
We'd been together for eighteen hours
And had a pleasant conversation,
Fellowship in the journey,
And I was sorry to get off, sorry to leave
This chance friend whose name I never learned.
I felt my eyes water with tears...
Every farewell is a death.
Yes, every farewell is a death.
In the train that we call life
We are all chance events in one another's lives,
And we all feel sorry when it's time to get off.

All that is human moves me, because I'm a man.
All that is human moves me, not because I have an affinity
With human ideas or human doctrine
But because of my infinite fellowship with humanity itself.

The maid who hated to go,
Crying with nostalgia
For the house where she'd been mistreated...

All of this, inside my heart, is death and the world's sadness.
All of this lives, because it dies, in my heart.

And my heart is a little larger than the entire universe.

Alvaro De Campos
aka Fernando Pessoa
Translated by Richard Zenith

Fernando Pessoa/ Alberto Caeiro

From The Keeper of the Sheep

 

XVI

 

If only my life were an oxcart 

That creaks down the road in the morning, 

Very early, and returns by the same road 

To where it came from in the evening . . .

 

I wouldn’t have to have hopes, just wheels . . . 

My old age wouldn’t have wrinkles or white hair . . . 

When I was of no more use, my wheels would be removed 

And I’d end up at the bottom of a ditch, broken and 

overturned.

 

Or I’d be made into something different 

And I wouldn’t know what I’d been made into . . . 

But I’m not an oxcart, I’m different. 

But exactly how I’m different no one would ever tell me.

 

(Translated by Richard Zenith)

Fernando Pessoa/Alvaro de Campos

                    Picasso

On The Last Page Of A New Anthology

So many good poets!
So many good poems!
They’re really good and all alike,
With so much concurrency not one stays with you,
Or they endure by chance, posterity’s lottery,
Gaining place by the Empresario’s whim...
So many good poets!
What am I writing poems for?
When I write them they seem to me
What my sensation, with which I write them, seems to me —
The only big thing in the world —
The universe outside swells with my largess.
Afterwards, written, right there, readable...
Well, now... And in this anthology of minor poets?
So many good poets!
What is genius, finally; how does one distinguish
Genius from dexterity, good poets from bad?
I have no idea if you can really distinguish...
It’s better to sleep...
I shut the anthology more weary of it than I am of the world...
Am I vulgar?...
So many good poets!
Holy God!...

(5/1/28)

Fernando Pessoa/Alvaro de Campos

from Notebooks

 In me every thought, however much I’d like to preserve it intact, turns sooner or later into reverie. If I wish to set forth reasons or launch a train of argument, what comes out of me are sentences initially expressive of the thought itself, then phrases subsidiary to those initial sentences, and finally shadows and derivatives of those subsidiary phrases. I begin to meditate on the existence of God and soon find myself speaking of faraway parks, feudal processions, rivers that pass almost soundlessly beneath the windows of my contemplation . . . And I find myself speaking about them because I find myself seeing them, feeling them, and there’s a brief moment when my face is grazed by a real breeze rising from the surface of the dreamed river through metaphors, through the stylistic feudalism of my central self-abandon.

I like to think, because I know it won’t be long before I stop thinking. It’s as a point of departure that thinking delights me—a cold, metallic harbor station from which to set sail for the vast South. I sometimes try to focus my mind on a large metaphysical or even social problem, because I know that, ensconced in the hoarse voice of my reason, there are peacock tails ready to spread open for me as soon as I forget I’m thinking, and I know that humanity is a door in a wall that doesn’t exist, so I can open it onto whatever gardens I like.

Fernando Pessoa/ Alvaro de Campos

"So Many Gods"

So many gods!   

They’re like books—you can’t read everything, you never know anything.   

Happy the man who knows but one god, and keeps him a secret.   

Every day I have different beliefs— 

Sometimes in the same day I have different beliefs— 

And I wish I were the child now crossing   

The view from my window of the street below.   

He’s eating a cheap pastry (he’s poor) without efficient or final cause,   

An animal uselessly raised above the other vertebrates,   

And through his teeth he sings a ribald show tune . . .   

Yes, there are many gods,   

But I’d give anything to the one who’d take that child out of my sight.   

                                                                TRANSLATED BY RICHARD ZENITH

Fernando Pessoa/Alvaro de Campos

 

 

Sonnet

When I look at myself I see a stranger

So obsessed am I with feeling
That I sometimes lose my way when I step free
From all the sensations I receive.

The air I breathe, the liquor I imbibe,
Both belong to my way of existing,
And I never quite know how to conclude
The sensations I so unwillingly conceive.

Nor have I ever properly ascertained
If I do actually feel what I feel. Am I
Really the person I seem to be?

Am I really who I believe I am?
Even in my sensations I’m a semi-atheist,
Unsure that I am the one feeling those feelings.

                Translation by Margaret Jull Costa & Patricio Ferrari