Disquiet, Please

fernando pessoa’s notebook

i12bent:

Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese Modernist, who invented multiple poetic personae, was born June 13, 1888 (d. 1935)…

Fernando Pessoa:

I don’t know how many souls I have.
I’ve changed at every moment.
I always feel like a stranger.
I’ve never seen or found myself.
From being so much, I have only soul.
A man who has soul has no calm.
A man who sees is just what he sees.
A man who feels is not who he is.

Attentive to what I am and see,
I become them and stop being I.
Each of my dreams and each desire
Belongs to whoever had it, not me.
I am my own landscape,
I watch myself journey -
Various, mobile, and alone.
Here where I am I can’t feel myself.

That’s why I read, as a stranger,
My being as if it were pages.
Not knowing what will come
And forgetting what has passed,
I note in the margin of my reading
What I thought I felt.
Rereading, I wonder: “Was that me?”
God knows, because he wrote it.

© Translation: 1998, Richard Zenith
From: Fernando Pessoa & Co. – Selected Poems
Publisher: Grove Press, New York, 1998

milkyfangs:

yama-bato: ontheborderland:

Nothing holds me to anything.
I want fifty things at once.
With a meat-hungry anguish I yearn
For what I don’t know —
Definitely for the indefinite …
Restless I sleep and live in the restless dream
Of someone who sleeps restlessly, half of me dreaming.

They closed all the abstract and necessary doors on me.
They drew the curtains on all the hypotheses I might have seen on the street.
There is no house on the side street with the number they gave me.

I woke to the same life I departed after sleeping.
Even my dream armies suffered defeat.
Even my dreams felt false as I dreamed them.
Even the life I only desire — even that life — cloys …

—Fernando Pessoa

(Image via gevan)

i12bent:

Symbols? I’m sick of symbols…
Some people tell me that everything is symbols.
They’re telling me nothing.

What symbols? Dreams…
Let the sun be a symbol, fine…
Let the moon be a symbol, fine…
Let the earth be a symbol, fine…
But who notices the sun except when the rain stops
And it breaks through the clouds and points behind its back
To the blue of the sky?
And who notices the moon except to admire
Not it but the beautiful light it radiates?
And who notices the very earth we tread?
We say earth and think of fields, trees and hills,
Unwittingly diminishing it,
For the sea is also earth.

Okay, let all of this be symbols.
But what’s the symbol – not the sun, not the moon, not the earth –
In this premature sunset amidst the fading blue
With the sun caught in expiring tatters of clouds
And the moon already mystically present at the other end of the sky
As the last remnant of daylight
Gilds the head of the seamstress who hesitates at the corner
Where she used to linger (she lives nearby) with the boyfriend who left her?
Symbols? I don’t want symbols.
All I want – poor frail and forlorn creature! –
Is for the boyfriend to go back to the seamstress.

— Fernando Pessoa, as Alvaro de Campos

Fernando Pessoa’s manuscript
via: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal

nevver:

The Book of Disquiet