“Yes, at last a certain peace. . . .” My reading of the manuscript differs from the published version in the sixth and thirteenth verses.
“In this world. . . .” Variant of “grins and appearances” in v. 5: “grins of gnomes.”
“Freedom.” The tone and free-verse style of the poem (which, however, rhymes in the original) are reminiscent of Álvaro de Campos, but it is signed by Fernando Pessoa. The manuscript indicates that a quotation from Seneca was to be included as an epigraph; it’s my conjecture that the Stoic’s famous dictum on freedom is what Pessoa had in mind.
About King Sebastian, see the note on p. 432 to the poem in Message titled “Sebastian, King of Portugal.”
The penultimate verse is a swipe at Salazar, who began his meteoric rise to dictatorial power as Portugal’s finance minister, in 1928.
“Un Soir à Lima.” The title is from a piece of music by Félix Gode-froid that Pessoa’s mother played on the piano in Durban, South Africa. Pessoa wrote ten or so passages for this poem—some left in the rough and with lacunae, others that were reworked into a more or less finished state—but never attempted to articulate them. Luís Prista, who first deciphered and published the various passages, arranged them in a convincing narrative. I have followed his arrangement but left out some of the redundant and less finished sections, and I’ve separated the discrete passages by diamonds. The date appears on the last passage.
The “little ones” of the third passage are Pessoa’s half brothers, Luís Miguel and João Maria, who would both have been less than five years old. “This girl” is Pessoa’s half sister, Henriqueta Madalena, who would have been between seven and nine years old. In the passage that begins “My stepfather,” my reading of the manuscript for the eighth verse differs from the published version.
“Advice.” Published in November of 1935 in Sudoeste 3, a magazine edited by Almada Negreiros, a writer and painter who was part of the Orpheu group.
“At the Tomb of Christian Rosenkreutz.” This trio of sonnets was given to Almada Negreiros to be published in Sudoeste 3 (see previous note) but did not actually see print until 1942. The Fama Fraternitatis, published in German in 1614 and in Latin a year later, was the first public document about the Rosicrucians. It tells the story of Christian Rosenkreutz (identified only by his initials), who was purportedly born into a poor but noble German family (in 1378, according to other documents), traveled as a young man to Damascus, where he studied with astrologers and physicians, then to Egypt and finally Morocco, where he spent two years in Fez learning the alchemical arts. Returning to Germany by way of Spain, he founded the Rosy Cross brotherhood. The passage of the Fama in the epigraph describes the discovery of Christian Rosenkreutz’s tomb 120 years after his death.
Pessoa read a number of books about Rosicrucianism and was keenly interested in the symbolic import of the Rose and the Cross. The following passage, from among his writings on Rosicrucian philosophy, is helpful for understanding the three sonnets:
The twin essence, masculine and feminine, of God—the Cross. The created world, the Rose, crucified in God.
Creation is not an emanation but, more properly, a limitation, a negation of God by himself.
It would be more accurate to say that the universe is the negation of God, or the death of God. But since the negation or death of God is necessarily divine, the universe contains a divine element which is the Law—an absent element, as it were, in the abstract.
The only miracle of God is the creation of the universe.
The Law, Fatum, is an abstract element of God, whereby God is incorporeally manifested to the world. In opposition to this Law stands Christ, i.e., the desire for a Return to God, the desire for Freedom, for not having any Fatum.
“There are sicknesses. . . .” The last poem Pessoa wrote in Portuguese.
Message. The only book of Portuguese verse published by Pessoa took more than twenty years to be written. In Pessoa’s notes there is mention of a projected work of poetry titled Portugal as early as 1910, and under this working title the book slowly took shape. The book consisted, in the end, of forty-four poems written between 1913 and 1934, some of which were published in magazines; the book’s title was changed from Portugal to Message in the fall of 1934, when the book was already in production. Awarded a prize by the National Office of Propaganda for poetry that was “deeply Portuguese” and inspired by a “high sense of nationalist exaltation,” Message retold Portuguese history from a “mystical” point of view, investing historical facts and national legends with symbolic significance. Pessoa, while admitting in a letter dated 13 January 1935 that it was not, in personal terms, a felicitous publishing début, believed that “it coincided with a critical moment . . . in the transformation of the national subconscious.” That belief was badly shaken if not altogether crushed in the succeeding months, when he realized the true extent of Salazar’s program of control and censure (see the Chronology for 1935).
“Coat of Arms: The Castles.” Seven castles form the outer field of the Portuguese coat of arms.
“Coat of Arms: The Shields.” Five shields occupy the inner field of the Portuguese coat of arms.
“Ulysses.” According to legend the Greek hero, in his wanderings after the Trojan War, reached the Portuguese coast and founded Olisipo, which later came to be known as Lisbon.
“Viriato.” A shepherd and chief of the Lusitanians, inhabitants of what later became central Portugal, Viriato managed to resist the Roman legions for many years. After a series of humiliating defeats, the Romans reportedly bribed several of Viriato’s comrades to assassinate him, in 139 B.C.
“Henry, Count of Burgundy.” This French count (1066-1112) married Teresa, the illegitimate daughter of Alfonso VI, king of Castile and León, and in December of 1095 he was awarded control of Portucale, the territory between the Minho and Douro rivers, and Coimbra, below the Douro. Despite its feudal obligations to the Spanish crown, the territory became semi-autonomous, initiating the break of Portugal from Spain.
“Sebastian, King of Portugal.” This young king (1554-1578), fanatically nationalistic and religious, a mystic and a dreamer, led some 17,000 Portuguese soldiers to their nearly total slaughter in an ill-conceived expedition to Morocco. Two years later, in 1580, debilitated Portugal fell under Spanish rule, regaining its independence only sixty years later. Since Sebastian’s body was not found in the carnage that littered the sands of Ksar-el-Kebir, the site of the battle, it was said that the king had taken refuge on a desert isle. A myth developed that he would return one foggy morning as the Encoberto, the Hidden One, to free Portugal from Spanish domination. As the centuries passed, the myth of the king’s return acquired new, symbolic interpretations.
“Horizon.” First published in the magazine Contemporânea, in 1922.
“The West.” Published, with slight differences, in Contemporânea, in 1922.
“The Fifth Empire.” The “one who dreamed” of the penultimate stanza refers to Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. His dream, as interpreted by the prophet Daniel and understood by Pessoa, supplied the mythic underpinnings of the Fifth Empire doctrine, according to which Portugal, through its literature and culture, would dominate the rest of Europe. See the Introduction for a fuller explanation.
Ruba’iyat. Inspired by FitzGerald’s rendering into English of the ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam, Pessoa wrote close to two hundred poems in the same style, each a single quatrain with an aaba rhyme scheme. The thematic content of these ruba’iyat—life’s vanity and brevity, and the wisdom of enjoying the little we have—recalls the sentiments expressed in the poetry of Ricardo Reis, and it’s worth noting that the longest poem by the classicist heteronym, “The Chess Players,” is set not in Greece or Rome but in Persia.
The ruba’iyat are in chronological order. The first three, published by Pessoa in Contemporânea, in 1926, are probably the first three he wrote. The other ones published here were written between November of 1928 and October of 1935. The epigraph to the Introduc
tion, also a ruba’i, is undated.
“Don’t say that the soul. . . .” Variant of “You know only” in the last verse: “All you have is.”
Faust. Pessoa wrote about 250 passages—ranging from a single phrase to several pages in length—for this verse drama inspired by Goethe’s Faust. In fact Pessoa planned to write three different Faustian dramas, and he drafted a synopsis of the first one, which was to represent “the struggle between Life and the Intelligence,” with the latter, embodied by Faust, always losing to the former. The general theme of the first Faust is the mystery of the world, the mystery of existence, “since this is the central theme of the Intelligence.” Unable to understand Life, the Intelligence (in the person of Faust) sets out to control Life. Failing abysmally, it then tries to adapt to Life, epitomized as the experience of Love. Again it fails. In the end Death arrives, and Faust faces, with redoubled horror, not only the mystery of the known world but also the mystery of the unknown.
Attempts have been made to order the Faust material according to the plot just described, but the fragmentary passages left by Pessoa—written at random and over the course of his entire adult life, beginning at age twenty—don’t amount to anything like a play. The passages translated here, all narrated by Faust and nearly all of them in blank verse, have been ordered without regard to where Pessoa might have placed them in one or another of his three projected Fausts.
“The only mystery in the universe . . .” My reading of the manuscript differs from the published version in various particulars, most notably in the twelfth and last verses. Variant of “the soul’s body” in the last verse of the second stanza: “earth of the soul.”
“Life’s brief and fleeting nature proves . . .” Dated 3 March 1928.
“Ah, the metaphysical horror of Action!” My reading of the manuscript is different for the tenth verse and presents a new verse, the ninth, not found in the published version.
“The metaphysical dread of Someone Else!” My reading of the manuscript differs from the published version in the first stanza and in the fifth verse from the end.
“Ah, everything is symbol and analogy!” Dated 9 November 1932. Variant of “the mother illusion of this illusion” in the final verse: “the reality of this illusion.”
“In me.” Dated 6 November 1912.
“Ah, to drink life in one gulp . . .” My reading of the manuscript construes as variants two phrases that appear in the published version as additional, truncated verses. Variant of v. 17: “While I keep a strong personality.” Variant of “to hell itself ” in the final verse: “to a literal hell.”
ENGLISH POEMS
Almost all the poetry Pessoa wrote up until his twentieth year was in English, and he continued to write assiduously in that language until 1921. At that point his poetic production in English waned, but it never ceased. His last English poem, a simple love lyric, was written on November 22, 1935, a week before he died.
Alexander Search. See the Introduction for information on this English-language heteronym.
35 Sonnets. Self-published as a chapbook in 1918 (see the Introduction). Pessoa left a copy of the book with some neatly written revisions that were clearly intended for the typesetter of a new edition (never realized). The four sonnets published here include those revisions.
The Mad Fiddler. Pessoa carefully organized this collection of some fifty poems, written between 1911 and 1917, and tried to place it with an English publisher, in vain (see the Introduction).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PUBLISHED SOURCES FOR THE POEMS
Pessoa, Fernando. Canções de Beber, ed. Maria Aliete Galhoz. Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2003. Contains Pessoa’s ruba’iyat in the manner of Omar Khayyam.
———. Fausto: Tragédia Subjectiva, ed. Teresa Sobral Cunha. Lisbon: Presença, 1988.
———. Mensagem, ed. Fernando Cabral Martins. Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1997.
———. Obra Poética, ed. Maria Aliete Galhoz. 7th ed. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, 1977.
———. Poemas de Fernando Pessoa 1921-1930, ed. Ivo Castro. Lisbon: INCM, 2001.
———. Poemas de Fernando Pessoa 1931-1933, ed. Ivo Castro. Lisbon: INCM, 2004.
———. Poemas de Fernando Pessoa 1934-1935, ed. Luís Prista. Lisbon: INCM, 2000.
———. Poesia, Alberto Caeiro, eds. Fernando Cabral Martins and Richard Zenith. 2nd ed. Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2004.
———. Poesia, Alexander Search, ed. Luísa Freire. Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1999.
———. Poesia, Álvaro de Campos, ed. Teresa Rita Lopes. Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2002.
———. Poesia Inglesa (I), ed. Luísa Freire. Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2000.
———. Poesia, Ricardo Reis, ed. Manuela Parreira da Silva. Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2000.
OTHER EDITIONS CONSULTED
Pessoa, Fernando. Poemas Ingleses, vols. I-II, ed. João Dionísio. Lisbon: INCM, 1993, 1997.
———. Poemas Ingleses, vol. III, eds. Fernando Gomes and Marcus Angioni. Lisbon: INCM, 1999.
———. Poemas de Ricardo Reis, ed. Luiz Fagundes Duarte. Lisbon: INCM, 1994.
1“To the Manes of master Caeiro.” The penultimate stanza refers to Lisbon, which has seven hills and was founded, according to legend, by Ulysses. Caeiro, according to his “biography,” was born in Lisbon.
2Pedrouços is a neighborhood on the western edge of Lisbon where Pessoa
spent much of his early childhood, at the house of his great-aunt Maria and her
husband. The couple, who had no children, doted on their nephew.
A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe Page 28