The work of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1953) is hardly known to English-speaking peoples. Most of his life he was a low-level free-lance commercial correspondent. He reported and wrote about day-to-day transactions in the hum-drum world of business.
The routines of his earning career were completely ordinary. They provided him with only a precarious living, but gave him ample time for what really was the only thing that mattered to him: poetry. However, very little of his verse was published in his lifetime. His love of writing overwhelmed him and he lived only for that. Publication hardly mattered. It can almost be said that he wrote in strictest secrecy.
After Pessoa’s death vast quantities of unpublished prose and verse were discovered jumbled in a big trunk at his sister’s house. Since then sifting through the material, publishing it, discussing and interpreting it has become a growth industry in European academic circles.
No label fits him: symbolist, modernist, existentialist, occultist even – he was all of them at different times and sometimes simultaneously. His poetry is controlled, unsentimental, totally removed from unreflecting spontaneity.
Central to it are the mystery and terror of existence and the anguished endeavour to make sense of oneself in relation to the universe. Why in God’s name or for no reason at all did the universe come into existence? If life ends in blank nothingness what is its purpose – to what end do we potter around for a few decades and then disappear?
Pessoa is a deeply serious poet. No poem must come easily. Each must be a new raid on the inarticulate, a fresh attempt to capture the uncapturable. He expresses it like this in one stanza of a poem called. Soon As There Are Roses:
Soon as there are roses, I want no roses
I want them only when there can’t be any.
What should I do with the things, many,
On which, at will, any hand closes?
A remarkable feature of Pessoa’s work is his invention of three poetic persona through which he expresses himself. Here is an extract from a poem by “Ricardo Reis” who is Pessoa writing in his neo-pagan persona, a Horace who has wandered into the 20th century. The poem strikes a chord in me, perhaps in all of us who are old, as we face an “Autumn [which] comes/With its implicit Winter.” How distant the sound seemed once, but mortality’s whisper is much closer and louder now.
From Odes
By Fernando Pessoa (translated by Peter Rickard)
Destiny, O Lydia, is my dread. Nothing is sure.
At any hour, that may befall us
By which we are entirely changed.
Beyond the known, our every step
Is strange: stern spirits guard
The boundaries of custom.
We are not gods; our blindness bids us fear.
Let us prefer the meager gift of life
To the novelty of the abyss.
Build no Utopia, Lydia, for the time
You fancy yet to be, nor count upon
Tomorrow. Today fulfils itself, and does not wait.
You are yourself your life.
Contrive no plan, for you are not to be.
Perhaps between the cup you drain
And the same replenished, Fate
Will interpose the void.
When, O Lydia, our Autumn comes
With its implicit Winter, let’s save
A thought, not for that future
Spring, which others will enjoy,
Nor for that Summer whose dead we are,
But for the remnant of what passes on –
The present yellow in the life of leaves,
Making them different.
It is a sad thought that so much we loved, so many we loved, will never come again. But let us not despair. No day is the same, for the old as much as for the young, and what is beautiful and different in all the days which are left can be savoured to the end. Probably we should plan not much further than that. Around the next bend in the river may come great Kaieteur.
