The Politics of Fernando Pessoa
newleftreview.org
newleftreview.org
These things are highly subjective but he's easily my favorite 20th century poet. So creative, incredibly deep, yet so accessible. But as these things go, there's always a loss of fidelity in translation, particularly to non-Romance languages.
If anyone wants to tap straight into Pessoa's world with two flawless poems, you can't go wrong with "Tabacaria" (Tobacco Shop — https://www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/pessoa/TobaccoShop.htm...) and "Poema em Linha Reta" (Poem in a Straight Line — https://thenewloud.tumblr.com/post/11328170683/poem-in-a-str...).
"If only I could eat chocolate / with as much truth as you do!"
Also, I had no idea pessoa meant person. TIL!
Curiously, I have this same thought whenever I read Pessoa.
This is hilarious, not just because it's trolling fascists but because it's completely consistent with Pessoa's belief that fictional characters can be just as "real" as real people. Reminds me of this passage from Book of Disquiet:
> No one, I suppose, genuinely admits the real existence of another person. We may concede that the person is alive and that he thinks and feels as we do, but there will always be an unnamed element of difference, a materialized inequality. There are figures from the past and living images from books that are more real to us than the incarnate indifferences that talk to us over shop counters, or happen to glance at us in the trams, or brush against us in the dead happenstance of the streets. Most people are no more for us than scenery, generally the invisible scenery of a street we know by heart.
> I feel more kinship and intimacy with certain characters described in books and certain images I’ve seen in prints than I feel with many so-called real people, who are of that metaphysical insignificance known as flesh and blood. And ‘flesh and blood’ in fact describes them rather well: they’re like chunks of meat displayed in the window of a butcher’s, dead things bleeding as if they were alive, shanks and cutlets of Destiny.
> I’m not ashamed of feeling this way, as I’ve discovered that’s how everyone feels. What seems to lie behind people’s mutual contempt and indifference, such that they can kill each other like assassins who don’t really feel they’re killing, or like soldiers who don’t think about what they’re doing, is that no one pays heed to the apparently abstruse fact that other people are also living souls.
"Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he created approximately seventy-five others, of which three stand out, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that they did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. These imaginary figures sometimes held unpopular or extreme views."