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35 Sonnets
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40 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1918
About the author
Fernando Pessoa
1,259 books6,678 followersFernando António Nogueira Pessoa was a poet and writer.
It is sometimes said that the four greatest Portuguese poets of modern times are Fernando Pessoa. The statement is possible since Pessoa, whose name means ‘person’ in Portuguese, had three alter egos who wrote in styles completely different from his own. In fact Pessoa wrote under dozens of names, but Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos were – their creator claimed – full-fledged individuals who wrote things that he himself would never or could never write. He dubbed them ‘heteronyms’ rather than pseudonyms, since they were not false names but “other names”, belonging to distinct literary personalities. Not only were their styles different; they thought differently, they had different religious and political views, different aesthetic sensibilities, different social temperaments. And each produced a large body of poetry. Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis also signed dozens of pages of prose.
The critic Harold Bloom referred to him in the book The Western Canon as the most representative poet of the twentieth century, along with Pablo Neruda.
It is sometimes said that the four greatest Portuguese poets of modern times are Fernando Pessoa. The statement is possible since Pessoa, whose name means ‘person’ in Portuguese, had three alter egos who wrote in styles completely different from his own. In fact Pessoa wrote under dozens of names, but Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos were – their creator claimed – full-fledged individuals who wrote things that he himself would never or could never write. He dubbed them ‘heteronyms’ rather than pseudonyms, since they were not false names but “other names”, belonging to distinct literary personalities. Not only were their styles different; they thought differently, they had different religious and political views, different aesthetic sensibilities, different social temperaments. And each produced a large body of poetry. Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis also signed dozens of pages of prose.
The critic Harold Bloom referred to him in the book The Western Canon as the most representative poet of the twentieth century, along with Pablo Neruda.
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June 1, 2014
Do you know the painting by the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte, where a well-dressed young man stands in front of a mirror, but chillingly the mirror reflects the back of his head, not his face? That is the feeling one has when reading these poems. An unsettling feeling; a feeling of distance and distortion. A fleeting sense that all is not quite as it appears.
Interestingly, the painting "La Reproduction Interdite" ("Not to be Reproduced") of 1937 is a portrait which is also of a poet, Edward James. On the mantelpiece, reflected as it would normally appear to us, is a book by Edgar Allan Poe, entitled, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym". Magritte much admired Poe's works, and made several references to them in his paintings. Many of Poe's stories also conjure up these feelings of isolation, emptiness and self-deception; the ambiguity of the human condition. Things in Poe's stories too, are never as they appear. But whereas Poe used this device to haunt and horrify us, Pessoa was more concerned with philosophical musings about identity, and what he represented as an "Other" separate version of himself.
Poe wrote stories about doppelgangers (see "William Wilson", link here to my review.) And indeed the poet and writer Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa had over 70 alter-egos during his lifetime. Many had their own voice and writing styles. Four voices stand out in particular. Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis wrote both prose and poetry, and Alberto Caeiro, the fourth main "voice", wrote poetry. Pessoa invented the term "heteronyms" to describe these nom-de-plumes, preferring this to "pseudonyms". He maintained they were not false names but "other names", each having their own distinct literary persona. Each had differing political and religious views; different ways of thinking and different temperaments. This led to his extraordinary claim that they wrote things that he, Pessoa himself, would or could, never write. His own name, Pessoa, means "person" in Portuguese. It seems clear that his view of these alter-egos was not as imaginary characters, as his readers might see them. Clearly they were facets of Pessoa's own character, but he maintained they were separate entities, or "Other."
35 Sonnets was self-published in 1918, along with another short volume of verse, when Pessoa was thirty years of age, and before he had achieved any literary success. It was received without enthusiasm, the critics apparently not recognising a talent that was to become one of Lisbon's best loved writers. Because of Pessoa's heteronyms, it has been wittily said that the four greatest Portuguese poets of modern times are Fernando Pessoa! Yet his was a brief flame of talent; he died in 1935, at the age of forty-seven.
The first sonnet starts,
"Whether we write or speak or do but look
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or book." (1)
These concepts of the human condition, and the process of self-examination allied with hints of self-deception, perceptions and illusion are explored throughout the series of sonnets.
"I find me listening to myself, the noise
Of my words othered in my hearing them."
"I love my love for thee more than I love thee." (13)
The poet proceeds to not only contemplate himself and his own sensations, vainly attempting definition and a detached viewpoint. He also becomes aware of an Other, a lover, but only as the Other relates to his own experience.
At the start of sonnet 14, the inner world is beginning to expand, yet the reader is still overwhelmed by the sense of isolation, fragility, impermanence, emptiness, and an overall sense of loss,
"We are born at sunset and we die ere morn,"
And the rhyming couplet to end sonnet 15,
"I daily live, i'th' fame I dream to see,
But by my thought of others' thought of me." (15)
again reverts to philosophical musings on self-image and identity, and perceptions of the Other. The couplet ending the next sonnet encapsulates the sense of the whole poem. It is the kind of "summing-up", sonnets so often have. The poet reiterates the transitoriness of feelings. The more one tries to grasp at thoughts or feelings, (in this case, joy) the more they will just drift away,
"Yet the more thought we take to thought to prove
It must not think, doth further from joy move." (16)
Pessoa is moving us into the realms of paradox. Things may not be just not as they appear, but in actuality may be the opposite. Again, he ponders the illusory nature of things, how aspects are masked by others. Here are the final lines from sonnet 25, which explores the idea of Fate, maintaining that we are mere puppets,
"An unknown language speaks in us, which we
Are at the words of, fronted from reality." (25)
The idea of reality surfaces time after time,
"Only what in this is not this is real.
If this be to have sense, if to be awake
Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things,"
The poet - or is he a philosopher - decides to trust his own thoughts,
"for truth commune with imaginings," rather than,
"This common sleep of men, the universe."
"My weary life" in sonnet 29, describes the ennui of, "this endless succession of empty hours," which,
"dull even thought's active inaction,
Tainting with fore-unwilled will the dreamed act
Twice thus removed from the unobtained fact."
These later sonnets, despite their simple language, return again and again to the idea of paradox, of illusion, of destiny and powerlessness in the hands of Fate. All is deceit, self-deception, mirrors and mask. The convoluted byways remind the reader of drawings by M. C. Escher. At first the mazes appear to be be complicated but solvable. Yet as we look further, they are revealed as impossible. Impossible objects, impossible thoughts. More paradoxes in sonnet 33,
"And there means something by the nought it means.
For thinking nought does on nought being confer," (33)
Within the vast maze, the vast conundrum, aspects seem to have a duality, and take on their opposite side, as in the final couplet,
"So why call this world false, if false to be
Be to be aught, and being aught Being to be?"
And by the end of sonnet 35, Pessoa has expanded his thinking from the internal self to encompass the entire universe.
The Elizabethan sonnet is an interesting and highly structured form by which to express these thoughts about reality, illusion, paradox and the self. "The Times Literary Supplement" rather waspishly remarked that the author's,
"command of English is less remarkable than his knowledge of Elizabethan English."
Yet a tight short form lends itself very well to such a paring-down of language; to what seems to be an attempt to grasp the illusion. They remind a modern reader of R. D. Laing's poems, (link here to my review) having the same psychoanalytical quality, yet they are if anything more disturbing, with more of a sense of isolation. And he is not only popular but very highly regarded by modern critics. Harold Bloom refers to him in "The Western Canon" as "the most representative poet of the twentieth century, along with Pablo Neruda."
One personal experience may be worth a smile. In the third sonnet, Pessoa observes, with an eye to destiny,
"That future eyes more clearly shall feel me
In this inked page than in my direct soul;" (3)
It seemed a fitting paradox to me, that I came across these words of Pessoa, not on an "inked page" as he musingly predicted, but in an e-book - a form impossible for the poet to envisage.
"The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming."
Interestingly, the painting "La Reproduction Interdite" ("Not to be Reproduced") of 1937 is a portrait which is also of a poet, Edward James. On the mantelpiece, reflected as it would normally appear to us, is a book by Edgar Allan Poe, entitled, "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym". Magritte much admired Poe's works, and made several references to them in his paintings. Many of Poe's stories also conjure up these feelings of isolation, emptiness and self-deception; the ambiguity of the human condition. Things in Poe's stories too, are never as they appear. But whereas Poe used this device to haunt and horrify us, Pessoa was more concerned with philosophical musings about identity, and what he represented as an "Other" separate version of himself.
Poe wrote stories about doppelgangers (see "William Wilson", link here to my review.) And indeed the poet and writer Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa had over 70 alter-egos during his lifetime. Many had their own voice and writing styles. Four voices stand out in particular. Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis wrote both prose and poetry, and Alberto Caeiro, the fourth main "voice", wrote poetry. Pessoa invented the term "heteronyms" to describe these nom-de-plumes, preferring this to "pseudonyms". He maintained they were not false names but "other names", each having their own distinct literary persona. Each had differing political and religious views; different ways of thinking and different temperaments. This led to his extraordinary claim that they wrote things that he, Pessoa himself, would or could, never write. His own name, Pessoa, means "person" in Portuguese. It seems clear that his view of these alter-egos was not as imaginary characters, as his readers might see them. Clearly they were facets of Pessoa's own character, but he maintained they were separate entities, or "Other."
35 Sonnets was self-published in 1918, along with another short volume of verse, when Pessoa was thirty years of age, and before he had achieved any literary success. It was received without enthusiasm, the critics apparently not recognising a talent that was to become one of Lisbon's best loved writers. Because of Pessoa's heteronyms, it has been wittily said that the four greatest Portuguese poets of modern times are Fernando Pessoa! Yet his was a brief flame of talent; he died in 1935, at the age of forty-seven.
The first sonnet starts,
"Whether we write or speak or do but look
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or book." (1)
These concepts of the human condition, and the process of self-examination allied with hints of self-deception, perceptions and illusion are explored throughout the series of sonnets.
"I find me listening to myself, the noise
Of my words othered in my hearing them."
"I love my love for thee more than I love thee." (13)
The poet proceeds to not only contemplate himself and his own sensations, vainly attempting definition and a detached viewpoint. He also becomes aware of an Other, a lover, but only as the Other relates to his own experience.
At the start of sonnet 14, the inner world is beginning to expand, yet the reader is still overwhelmed by the sense of isolation, fragility, impermanence, emptiness, and an overall sense of loss,
"We are born at sunset and we die ere morn,"
And the rhyming couplet to end sonnet 15,
"I daily live, i'th' fame I dream to see,
But by my thought of others' thought of me." (15)
again reverts to philosophical musings on self-image and identity, and perceptions of the Other. The couplet ending the next sonnet encapsulates the sense of the whole poem. It is the kind of "summing-up", sonnets so often have. The poet reiterates the transitoriness of feelings. The more one tries to grasp at thoughts or feelings, (in this case, joy) the more they will just drift away,
"Yet the more thought we take to thought to prove
It must not think, doth further from joy move." (16)
Pessoa is moving us into the realms of paradox. Things may not be just not as they appear, but in actuality may be the opposite. Again, he ponders the illusory nature of things, how aspects are masked by others. Here are the final lines from sonnet 25, which explores the idea of Fate, maintaining that we are mere puppets,
"An unknown language speaks in us, which we
Are at the words of, fronted from reality." (25)
The idea of reality surfaces time after time,
"Only what in this is not this is real.
If this be to have sense, if to be awake
Be but to see this bright, great sleep of things,"
The poet - or is he a philosopher - decides to trust his own thoughts,
"for truth commune with imaginings," rather than,
"This common sleep of men, the universe."
"My weary life" in sonnet 29, describes the ennui of, "this endless succession of empty hours," which,
"dull even thought's active inaction,
Tainting with fore-unwilled will the dreamed act
Twice thus removed from the unobtained fact."
These later sonnets, despite their simple language, return again and again to the idea of paradox, of illusion, of destiny and powerlessness in the hands of Fate. All is deceit, self-deception, mirrors and mask. The convoluted byways remind the reader of drawings by M. C. Escher. At first the mazes appear to be be complicated but solvable. Yet as we look further, they are revealed as impossible. Impossible objects, impossible thoughts. More paradoxes in sonnet 33,
"And there means something by the nought it means.
For thinking nought does on nought being confer," (33)
Within the vast maze, the vast conundrum, aspects seem to have a duality, and take on their opposite side, as in the final couplet,
"So why call this world false, if false to be
Be to be aught, and being aught Being to be?"
And by the end of sonnet 35, Pessoa has expanded his thinking from the internal self to encompass the entire universe.
The Elizabethan sonnet is an interesting and highly structured form by which to express these thoughts about reality, illusion, paradox and the self. "The Times Literary Supplement" rather waspishly remarked that the author's,
"command of English is less remarkable than his knowledge of Elizabethan English."
Yet a tight short form lends itself very well to such a paring-down of language; to what seems to be an attempt to grasp the illusion. They remind a modern reader of R. D. Laing's poems, (link here to my review) having the same psychoanalytical quality, yet they are if anything more disturbing, with more of a sense of isolation. And he is not only popular but very highly regarded by modern critics. Harold Bloom refers to him in "The Western Canon" as "the most representative poet of the twentieth century, along with Pablo Neruda."
One personal experience may be worth a smile. In the third sonnet, Pessoa observes, with an eye to destiny,
"That future eyes more clearly shall feel me
In this inked page than in my direct soul;" (3)
It seemed a fitting paradox to me, that I came across these words of Pessoa, not on an "inked page" as he musingly predicted, but in an e-book - a form impossible for the poet to envisage.
"The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming."
August 16, 2018
Thirty-five sonnets by one of Portugal’s best-known writers provide for a work that is concise in the extreme. When comparing this work by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa with William Shakespeare’s better-known sonnets, the final score would be Shakespeare 154, Pessoa 35. Yet when it comes to thought-provoking philosophical content and sheer poetic facility, Pessoa holds his own when his work is set beside that of the Bard.
Pessoa was one of the most important European writers of the 20th century, and was a truly Protean literary figure. As the sea-god Proteus from classical Greek mythology could transform into whatever shape suited him, Pessoa worked within a variety of literary frameworks. He wrote poetry, novels, translations, and works of literary criticism in Portuguese, French, and English, and even wrote under dozens of assumed names that he called “heteronyms” – meaning that he was not hiding behind a literary name (a “pseudonym” or “false name”) but rather crafting an “other voice” (the meaning of “heteronym”) that was suitable for the stylistic and thematic needs of a work composed in that “other voice.” It sounds complex, and potentially frustrating, and at the same time delightfully challenging – all of which provides a good descriptor of Pessoa’s work.
35 Sonnets, composed in English and published at Lisbon in 1918, shows how closely Pessoa studied Shakespeare’s work, and demonstrates how carefully Pessoa considered the conventions of the English sonnet form in which Shakespeare worked. Following the conventions of his time, Shakespeare wrote most of his sonnets as love poems addressed to an unknown beloved who (in spite of the spilling of a great deal of critical ink) remains unknown; the philosophical content of the poems had to be, as it were, worked in among the love talk. By contrast, Pessoa foregrounds philosophical content in his sonnets. Pessoa’s sonnets are, by and large, serious considerations of the kinds of issues of meaning that many modernist writers of his time were confronting.
This emphasis is apparent from the beginning of Sonnet I. The speaker starts off by emphasizing the inability of words to transmit the fullness of lived human reality – “Whether we write or speak or do but look/We are ever unapparent. What we are/Cannot be transfused into word or book.” I wondered if Pessoa might be invoking Walt Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” with its central image of the human soul as a spider throwing out filament in hopes of connecting with something. At the same time, I reflected that if Pessoa was channeling Whitman, he was breaking with the philosophical optimism of the “good grey poet” from Brooklyn, as Pessoa’s speaker states that “The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged/By any skill or thought or trick of seeming” (emphasis mine), and concludes that “We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,/And each to each other dreams of others’ dreams” (p. 1).
Sonnet IV, written to a deceased beloved whom the speaker still imagines as alive and beautiful, similarly emphasizes that difficulty of finding connection. Having indulged in recollections of his beloved’s beauty, the speaker visits her gravesite and finds that all his romantic recollections of his once-living and once-beloved beauty have gone cold: “I knew not how to feel, nor what to be/Towards thy fate’s material secrecy” (p. 4).
Sonnet XIII, like Sonnet IV, interrogates the conventions of the love sonnet. Where it is conventional for the author of a love sonnet to declare that his poetry is as nothing next to the beauty of his beloved, the speaker offers an intellectually honest declaration that it’s all about him – that the whole point is his proving to himself that he can write immortal words of love that will last long after both he and his beloved are dead: “Poet’s love this (as in these words I prove thee):/I love my love for thee more than I love thee” (p. 13).
Sonnet V applies a similar pessimism to day-to-day living, as the speaker tries in vain to urge himself to great action, amidst the nagging little distractions of every day:
How can I pause my thoughts upon the task
My soul was born to think that it must do
When every moment has a thought to ask
To fit the immediate craving of its cue? (p. 4)
Similarly, in Sonnet IX, the speaker hates himself for his idleness and procrastination, stating, “Hence live I the dead life each day doth bring,/Repurposed for next day’s repurposing” (p. 8) – an inspired incorporation of repetition and paradox.
Ultimately, the speaker of Sonnet V concludes despairingly that “I feel beggared of infinity,/Like a true-Christian sinner, each day flesh-driven/By his own act to forfeit his wished heaven” (p. 4). The Christian imagery here reinforces a theme of Pessoa’s philosophical writings – a sense that the traditional Roman Catholic Christianity in which he was raised proved, for him, insufficient as a basis on which to build a life.
Considering that Pessoa had those dozens of “heteronyms,” perhaps it should be no surprise that a number of these sonnets ask questions of identity, as with Sonnet VIII:
How many masks wear we, and undermasks,
Upon our countenance of soul, and when,
If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks,
Knows it the last mask off and the face plain? (p. 6)
Sonnet XI is more optimistic, with its extended metaphor of the human soul as a ship on an extended voyage. Here, once again, I thought I detected echoes of American Romantic poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson:
Like to a ship that storms urge on its course
By its own trials our soul is surer made.
The very things that make the voyage worse
Do make it better; its peril is its aid. (p. 11)
Sonnet XXII, by contrast, offers a quite different set of reflections on the soul. In the octave that begins the sonnet, the speaker imagines his soul as something of antiquity comparable to that of pharaonic Egypt:
My soul is a stiff pageant, man by man,
Of some Egyptian art than Egypt older,
Found in some tomb whose rite no guess can scan,
Where all things else to coloured dust did moulder.
Whate’er its sense may mean, its age is twin
To that of priesthoods whose feet stood near God,
When knowledge was so great that ’twas a sin
And man’s mere soul too man for its abode. (p. 22)
It is an intriguing metaphor – the soul as something like a mummy that one might find in a tomb of ancient Egypt – but ultimately the speaker, in frustration, states in the sonnet’s concluding sestet that he can find no fullness or completion or meaning in the elaborate metaphor that he has crafted:
But when I ask what means that pageant I
And would look at it suddenly, I lose
The sense I had of seeing it, nor can try
Again to look, nor hath my memory a use
That seems recalling, save that it recalls
An emptiness of having seen those walls. (p. 22)
That tone of melancholy suffuses many of these sonnets, as when Sonnet XXIX presents the speaker bemoaning “My weary life, that lives unsatisfied/On the foiled-off brink”. The speaker regrets his status as one “To whom the power to will hath been denied/And the will to renounce doth also miss”. That focus on paradox continues as the speaker describes “My sated life, with having nothing sated”; and as he considers his weary, sated life, “this endless succession of empty hours,/Like deserts after deserts, voidly one”, the speaker expresses indifference as to whether this life continues or not: “This life let the Gods change or take away” (p. 30).
Pessoa sent copies of 35 Sonnets to a number of British literary journals, and the reviews, while respectful, were somewhat mixed. Today, we may be better able to see, than were those reviewers of the time, how this modest collection prefigures the way in which Pessoa, throughout his career, questioned and challenged prevailing literary forms, sought out examples of paradox and contradiction, and emphasized important philosophical questions of meaning in human life.
Pessoa was one of the most important European writers of the 20th century, and was a truly Protean literary figure. As the sea-god Proteus from classical Greek mythology could transform into whatever shape suited him, Pessoa worked within a variety of literary frameworks. He wrote poetry, novels, translations, and works of literary criticism in Portuguese, French, and English, and even wrote under dozens of assumed names that he called “heteronyms” – meaning that he was not hiding behind a literary name (a “pseudonym” or “false name”) but rather crafting an “other voice” (the meaning of “heteronym”) that was suitable for the stylistic and thematic needs of a work composed in that “other voice.” It sounds complex, and potentially frustrating, and at the same time delightfully challenging – all of which provides a good descriptor of Pessoa’s work.
35 Sonnets, composed in English and published at Lisbon in 1918, shows how closely Pessoa studied Shakespeare’s work, and demonstrates how carefully Pessoa considered the conventions of the English sonnet form in which Shakespeare worked. Following the conventions of his time, Shakespeare wrote most of his sonnets as love poems addressed to an unknown beloved who (in spite of the spilling of a great deal of critical ink) remains unknown; the philosophical content of the poems had to be, as it were, worked in among the love talk. By contrast, Pessoa foregrounds philosophical content in his sonnets. Pessoa’s sonnets are, by and large, serious considerations of the kinds of issues of meaning that many modernist writers of his time were confronting.
This emphasis is apparent from the beginning of Sonnet I. The speaker starts off by emphasizing the inability of words to transmit the fullness of lived human reality – “Whether we write or speak or do but look/We are ever unapparent. What we are/Cannot be transfused into word or book.” I wondered if Pessoa might be invoking Walt Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” with its central image of the human soul as a spider throwing out filament in hopes of connecting with something. At the same time, I reflected that if Pessoa was channeling Whitman, he was breaking with the philosophical optimism of the “good grey poet” from Brooklyn, as Pessoa’s speaker states that “The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged/By any skill or thought or trick of seeming” (emphasis mine), and concludes that “We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,/And each to each other dreams of others’ dreams” (p. 1).
Sonnet IV, written to a deceased beloved whom the speaker still imagines as alive and beautiful, similarly emphasizes that difficulty of finding connection. Having indulged in recollections of his beloved’s beauty, the speaker visits her gravesite and finds that all his romantic recollections of his once-living and once-beloved beauty have gone cold: “I knew not how to feel, nor what to be/Towards thy fate’s material secrecy” (p. 4).
Sonnet XIII, like Sonnet IV, interrogates the conventions of the love sonnet. Where it is conventional for the author of a love sonnet to declare that his poetry is as nothing next to the beauty of his beloved, the speaker offers an intellectually honest declaration that it’s all about him – that the whole point is his proving to himself that he can write immortal words of love that will last long after both he and his beloved are dead: “Poet’s love this (as in these words I prove thee):/I love my love for thee more than I love thee” (p. 13).
Sonnet V applies a similar pessimism to day-to-day living, as the speaker tries in vain to urge himself to great action, amidst the nagging little distractions of every day:
How can I pause my thoughts upon the task
My soul was born to think that it must do
When every moment has a thought to ask
To fit the immediate craving of its cue? (p. 4)
Similarly, in Sonnet IX, the speaker hates himself for his idleness and procrastination, stating, “Hence live I the dead life each day doth bring,/Repurposed for next day’s repurposing” (p. 8) – an inspired incorporation of repetition and paradox.
Ultimately, the speaker of Sonnet V concludes despairingly that “I feel beggared of infinity,/Like a true-Christian sinner, each day flesh-driven/By his own act to forfeit his wished heaven” (p. 4). The Christian imagery here reinforces a theme of Pessoa’s philosophical writings – a sense that the traditional Roman Catholic Christianity in which he was raised proved, for him, insufficient as a basis on which to build a life.
Considering that Pessoa had those dozens of “heteronyms,” perhaps it should be no surprise that a number of these sonnets ask questions of identity, as with Sonnet VIII:
How many masks wear we, and undermasks,
Upon our countenance of soul, and when,
If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks,
Knows it the last mask off and the face plain? (p. 6)
Sonnet XI is more optimistic, with its extended metaphor of the human soul as a ship on an extended voyage. Here, once again, I thought I detected echoes of American Romantic poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson:
Like to a ship that storms urge on its course
By its own trials our soul is surer made.
The very things that make the voyage worse
Do make it better; its peril is its aid. (p. 11)
Sonnet XXII, by contrast, offers a quite different set of reflections on the soul. In the octave that begins the sonnet, the speaker imagines his soul as something of antiquity comparable to that of pharaonic Egypt:
My soul is a stiff pageant, man by man,
Of some Egyptian art than Egypt older,
Found in some tomb whose rite no guess can scan,
Where all things else to coloured dust did moulder.
Whate’er its sense may mean, its age is twin
To that of priesthoods whose feet stood near God,
When knowledge was so great that ’twas a sin
And man’s mere soul too man for its abode. (p. 22)
It is an intriguing metaphor – the soul as something like a mummy that one might find in a tomb of ancient Egypt – but ultimately the speaker, in frustration, states in the sonnet’s concluding sestet that he can find no fullness or completion or meaning in the elaborate metaphor that he has crafted:
But when I ask what means that pageant I
And would look at it suddenly, I lose
The sense I had of seeing it, nor can try
Again to look, nor hath my memory a use
That seems recalling, save that it recalls
An emptiness of having seen those walls. (p. 22)
That tone of melancholy suffuses many of these sonnets, as when Sonnet XXIX presents the speaker bemoaning “My weary life, that lives unsatisfied/On the foiled-off brink”. The speaker regrets his status as one “To whom the power to will hath been denied/And the will to renounce doth also miss”. That focus on paradox continues as the speaker describes “My sated life, with having nothing sated”; and as he considers his weary, sated life, “this endless succession of empty hours,/Like deserts after deserts, voidly one”, the speaker expresses indifference as to whether this life continues or not: “This life let the Gods change or take away” (p. 30).
Pessoa sent copies of 35 Sonnets to a number of British literary journals, and the reviews, while respectful, were somewhat mixed. Today, we may be better able to see, than were those reviewers of the time, how this modest collection prefigures the way in which Pessoa, throughout his career, questioned and challenged prevailing literary forms, sought out examples of paradox and contradiction, and emphasized important philosophical questions of meaning in human life.
February 28, 2021
I
Ni al hablar o escribir, ni en la mirada
Whether we write or speak or do but look
nos mostramos jamás: nuestra conciencia
We are ever unapparent. What we are
ni en voz ni en libro puede ser cifrada.
Cannot be transfused into word or book.
Revelamos tan sólo una apariencia.
Our soul from us is infinitely far.
Por más que el pensamiento pueda verse
However much we give our thoughts the will
tras el espejo que del alma aflora,
To be our soul and gesture it abroad,
el corazón no llega a conocerse.
Our hearts are incommunicable still.
En lo que se revela, se lo ignora.
In what we show ourselves we are ignored.
Existe entre las almas un abismo
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
que no logra salvar el pensamiento,
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
y nos separa—dentro de nosotros—
Unto our very selves we are abridged
de nuestro ser el pensamiento mismo.
When we would utter to our thought our being.
Somos sueños del propio entendimiento,
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
y sueños de otros sueños de los otros.
And each to each other dreams of others' dreams.
Feb 27, 21
Ni al hablar o escribir, ni en la mirada
Whether we write or speak or do but look
nos mostramos jamás: nuestra conciencia
We are ever unapparent. What we are
ni en voz ni en libro puede ser cifrada.
Cannot be transfused into word or book.
Revelamos tan sólo una apariencia.
Our soul from us is infinitely far.
Por más que el pensamiento pueda verse
However much we give our thoughts the will
tras el espejo que del alma aflora,
To be our soul and gesture it abroad,
el corazón no llega a conocerse.
Our hearts are incommunicable still.
En lo que se revela, se lo ignora.
In what we show ourselves we are ignored.
Existe entre las almas un abismo
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
que no logra salvar el pensamiento,
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
y nos separa—dentro de nosotros—
Unto our very selves we are abridged
de nuestro ser el pensamiento mismo.
When we would utter to our thought our being.
Somos sueños del propio entendimiento,
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
y sueños de otros sueños de los otros.
And each to each other dreams of others' dreams.
Feb 27, 21
September 7, 2023
كم هو عميق هذا الانسان وكم هو غير مفهوم احيانا ..
يا إلهي كم هو جارح للقلب حين اقرأ لهذا الرجل
يا إلهي كم هو جارح للقلب حين اقرأ لهذا الرجل
March 22, 2017
Thy words are torture to me, that scarce grieve thee--
That entire death shall null my entire thought;
And I feel torture, not that I believe thee,
But that I cannot disbelieve thee not.
Shall that of me that now contains the stars
Be by the very contained stars survived?
Thus were Fate all unjust. Yet what truth bars
An all unjust Fate's truth from being believed?
Conjecture cannot fit to the seen world
A garment of its thought untorn or covering,
Or with its stuffed garb forge an otherworld
Without itself its dead deceit discovering;
So, all being possible, an idle thought may
Less idle thoughts, self-known no truer, dismay.
That entire death shall null my entire thought;
And I feel torture, not that I believe thee,
But that I cannot disbelieve thee not.
Shall that of me that now contains the stars
Be by the very contained stars survived?
Thus were Fate all unjust. Yet what truth bars
An all unjust Fate's truth from being believed?
Conjecture cannot fit to the seen world
A garment of its thought untorn or covering,
Or with its stuffed garb forge an otherworld
Without itself its dead deceit discovering;
So, all being possible, an idle thought may
Less idle thoughts, self-known no truer, dismay.
September 18, 2015
I'd never read any Pessoa before and I plan on reading The Book of Disquiet, but I wanted to get a feel of his style and this was short and lovely. He's quite painful to read because he's confused and nauseous right before your eyes, and it's blurry and full of headache, loss and self hatred. The subtle juxtaposition of the form of the sonnet and the horror and confusion and annihilation of both self and the meaning of being is really strange and powerful, I think since they're very short I'll be reading them again in the future. lovely, definitely recommended.
April 14, 2017
What a man, even the poetry he wrote in english is depressing.
-----
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others' dreams
-
All is either the irrational world we see
Or some aught-else whose being-unknown doth rot
Its use for our thought's use.
Whence taketh me
A qualm-like ache of life, a body-deep
Soul-hate of what we seek and what we weep
-
How can I think, or edge my thoughts to action,
When the miserly press of each day's need
Aches to a narrowness of spilled distraction
My soul appalled at the world's work's time-greed?
How can I pause my thoughts upon the task
My soul was born to think that it must do
When every moment has a thought to ask
To fit the immediate craving of its cue?
-
How many masks wear we, and undermasks,
Upon our countenance of soul, and when,
If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks,
Knows it the last mask off and the face plain?
The true mask feels no inside to the mask
But looks out of the mask by co-masked eyes.
Whatever consciousness begins the task
The task's accepted use to sleepness ties.
Like a child frighted by its mirrored faces,
Our souls, that children are, being thought-losing,
Foist otherness upon their seen grimaces
And get a whole world on their forgot causing;
And, when a thought would unmask our soul's masking, Itself goes not unmasked to the unmasking.
-
As to a child, I talked my heart asleep
With empty promise of the coming day,
And it slept rather for my words made sleep
Than from a thought of what their sense did say.
For did it care for sense, would it not wake
And question closer to the morrow's pleasure?
Would it not edge nearer my words, to take
The promise in the meting of its measure?
So, if it slept, 'twas that it cared but for
The present sleepy use of promised joy,
Thanking the fruit but for the forecome flower
Which the less active senses best enjoy.
Thus with deceit do I detain the heart
Of which deceit's self knows itself a part.
-
Like to a ship that storms urge on its course,
By its own trials our soul is surer made.
The very things that make the voyage worse
Do make it better; its peril is its aid.
And, as the storm drives from the storm, our heart
Within the peril disimperilled grows;
-
We never joy enjoy to that full point
Regret doth wish joy had enjoyèd been,
Nor have the strength regret to disappoint
Recalling not past joy's thought, but its mien.
Yet joy was joy when it enjoyèd was
And after-enjoyed when as joy recalled,
It must have been joy ere its joy did pass
And, recalled, joy still, since its being-past galled.
Alas! All this is useless, for joy's in
Enjoying, not in thinking of enjoying.
Its mere thought-mirroring gainst itself doth sin,
By mere reflecting solid life destroying,
Yet the more thought we take to thought to prove
It must not think, doth further from joy move.
-
When in the widening circle of rebirth
To a new flesh my travelled soul shall come,
And try again the unremembered earth
With the old sadness for the immortal home,
Shall I revisit these same differing fields
And cull the old new flowers with the same sense,
That some small breath of foiled remembrance yields,
Of more age than my days in this pretence?
Shall I again regret strange faces lost
Of which the present memory is forgot
And but in unseen bulks of vagueness tossed
Out of the closed sea and black night of Thought?
Were thy face one, what sweetness will't not be,
Though by blind feeling, to remember thee!
-
How yesterday is long ago!
The past Is a fixed infinite distance from to-day,
And bygone things, the first-lived as the last,
In irreparable sameness far away.
How the to-be is infinitely ever
Out of the place wherein it will be Now,
Like the seen wave yet far up in the river,
Which reaches not us, but the new-waved flow!
This thing Time is, whose being is having none,
The equable tyrant of our different fates,
Who could not be bought off by a shattered sun
Or tricked by new use of our careful dates.
This thing Time is, that to the grave-will bear
My heart, sure but of it and of my fear.
-
When I have sense of what to sense appears,
Sense is sense ere 'tis mine or mine in me is.
When I hear, Hearing, ere I do hear, hears.
When I see, before me abstract Seeing sees.
I am part Soul part I in all I touch--
Soul by that part I hold in common with all,
And I the spoiled part, that doth make sense such
As I can err by it and my sense mine call.
The rest is wondering what these thoughts may mean, That come to explain and suddenly are gone,
Like messengers that mock the message' mien, Explaining all but the explanation;
As if we a ciphered letter's cipher hit
And find it in an unknown language writ.
-----
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others' dreams
-
All is either the irrational world we see
Or some aught-else whose being-unknown doth rot
Its use for our thought's use.
Whence taketh me
A qualm-like ache of life, a body-deep
Soul-hate of what we seek and what we weep
-
How can I think, or edge my thoughts to action,
When the miserly press of each day's need
Aches to a narrowness of spilled distraction
My soul appalled at the world's work's time-greed?
How can I pause my thoughts upon the task
My soul was born to think that it must do
When every moment has a thought to ask
To fit the immediate craving of its cue?
-
How many masks wear we, and undermasks,
Upon our countenance of soul, and when,
If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks,
Knows it the last mask off and the face plain?
The true mask feels no inside to the mask
But looks out of the mask by co-masked eyes.
Whatever consciousness begins the task
The task's accepted use to sleepness ties.
Like a child frighted by its mirrored faces,
Our souls, that children are, being thought-losing,
Foist otherness upon their seen grimaces
And get a whole world on their forgot causing;
And, when a thought would unmask our soul's masking, Itself goes not unmasked to the unmasking.
-
As to a child, I talked my heart asleep
With empty promise of the coming day,
And it slept rather for my words made sleep
Than from a thought of what their sense did say.
For did it care for sense, would it not wake
And question closer to the morrow's pleasure?
Would it not edge nearer my words, to take
The promise in the meting of its measure?
So, if it slept, 'twas that it cared but for
The present sleepy use of promised joy,
Thanking the fruit but for the forecome flower
Which the less active senses best enjoy.
Thus with deceit do I detain the heart
Of which deceit's self knows itself a part.
-
Like to a ship that storms urge on its course,
By its own trials our soul is surer made.
The very things that make the voyage worse
Do make it better; its peril is its aid.
And, as the storm drives from the storm, our heart
Within the peril disimperilled grows;
-
We never joy enjoy to that full point
Regret doth wish joy had enjoyèd been,
Nor have the strength regret to disappoint
Recalling not past joy's thought, but its mien.
Yet joy was joy when it enjoyèd was
And after-enjoyed when as joy recalled,
It must have been joy ere its joy did pass
And, recalled, joy still, since its being-past galled.
Alas! All this is useless, for joy's in
Enjoying, not in thinking of enjoying.
Its mere thought-mirroring gainst itself doth sin,
By mere reflecting solid life destroying,
Yet the more thought we take to thought to prove
It must not think, doth further from joy move.
-
When in the widening circle of rebirth
To a new flesh my travelled soul shall come,
And try again the unremembered earth
With the old sadness for the immortal home,
Shall I revisit these same differing fields
And cull the old new flowers with the same sense,
That some small breath of foiled remembrance yields,
Of more age than my days in this pretence?
Shall I again regret strange faces lost
Of which the present memory is forgot
And but in unseen bulks of vagueness tossed
Out of the closed sea and black night of Thought?
Were thy face one, what sweetness will't not be,
Though by blind feeling, to remember thee!
-
How yesterday is long ago!
The past Is a fixed infinite distance from to-day,
And bygone things, the first-lived as the last,
In irreparable sameness far away.
How the to-be is infinitely ever
Out of the place wherein it will be Now,
Like the seen wave yet far up in the river,
Which reaches not us, but the new-waved flow!
This thing Time is, whose being is having none,
The equable tyrant of our different fates,
Who could not be bought off by a shattered sun
Or tricked by new use of our careful dates.
This thing Time is, that to the grave-will bear
My heart, sure but of it and of my fear.
-
When I have sense of what to sense appears,
Sense is sense ere 'tis mine or mine in me is.
When I hear, Hearing, ere I do hear, hears.
When I see, before me abstract Seeing sees.
I am part Soul part I in all I touch--
Soul by that part I hold in common with all,
And I the spoiled part, that doth make sense such
As I can err by it and my sense mine call.
The rest is wondering what these thoughts may mean, That come to explain and suddenly are gone,
Like messengers that mock the message' mien, Explaining all but the explanation;
As if we a ciphered letter's cipher hit
And find it in an unknown language writ.
May 17, 2020
غريبة هي كلمات فرناندو ، فأول مرة تقرأها تتعجب من ربطه لكلمات غير معقولة ، ولا تجد حتى اجابة لنوع الكتاب ، ولكن ماهي الا لحظات الا وتجد الكلمات تنير امام وجهك كالنجوم فتبدأ تقرأها واحدة بعد الاخرى ، الكتاب من الكتب المفضلة التي قرأتها هذه السنة ، وانا جازم ان هناك بعض الجمل التي لم افهمها وسأفهمها اذا قرأتها مرة اخرى ، لم تكن جميع السوناتات مثل بعضهم ، فبعضهم كانت جداً عادية ، لكن اغلبها كانت ملفتة للعقل وتريد قرأتها اكثر من مرة لكي تفهم حقيقتها اكثر واكثر 🗾🗾.
الا انني تمنيت ان يبعد كلمة الاله في سوناتاته التي كانت مستفزة..
"وعبر ليل أفكاري ، كرداءً ممزق يتبع طريقاً ، لم يره من قبل ابداً ، أسحب هذا الماضي ، الذي يرى الممكن كالفجر ، يهبط بشحوب صامت وشاسع، على الليل الذي مضى قبله...."🌑🌑
الا انني تمنيت ان يبعد كلمة الاله في سوناتاته التي كانت مستفزة..
"وعبر ليل أفكاري ، كرداءً ممزق يتبع طريقاً ، لم يره من قبل ابداً ، أسحب هذا الماضي ، الذي يرى الممكن كالفجر ، يهبط بشحوب صامت وشاسع، على الليل الذي مضى قبله...."🌑🌑
January 17, 2021
Year of New Authors
'Thank God That's Over'
A Short, Severely Shite Poem Review by Oblomov McTwonk III
I try, I try so very hard with poetry,
Though my goodwill is oft met with futility.
And as valiant as my trying is,
Tis' little here but solipstic ennui and lovelessness.
These sonnets supposedly bear the note of brilliance,
But of this written misery, my eyes saw nought but pants.
Pessoa's lines of tongue twisters felt irritatingly absurd,
But true annoyance lay within his endlessly reusing words.
Methinks the author decided why use but one word, one time,
Why force a more beautiful and complex rhyme,
If in lyrical plagerisim you can cheat,
And fill your wordcount with constant repeats.
To give but one such example of many I thought obscene:
‘‘Recalling not past joy's thought, but its mien.
Yet joy was joy when it enjoyed was
And after-enjoyed when as joy recalled’
See what I bloody mean?
And yet, through moody, darkened verses,
I recognise there a genuine wounded soul he nurses,
Some rare, catching beauty did let itself appear,
And for one of only two sonnets I enjoyed, look here:
XVII
My love, and not I, is the egoist.
My love for thee loves itself more than thee;
Ay, more than me, in whom it doth exist,
And makes me live that it may feed on me.
In the country of bridges the bridge is
More real than the shores it doth unsever;
So in our world, all of Relation, this
Is true— that truer is Love than either lover.
This thought therefore comes lightly to Doubt's door—
If we, seeing substance of this world, are not
Mere Intervals, God's Absence and no more,
Hollows in real Consciousness and Thought.
And if 'tis possible to Thought to bear this fruit,
Why should it not be possible to Truth?
But with language sad, my soul unmoved,
Most songs just left me most bemused.
And with so lacking a thesaurus he,
How did these songs achieve posterity?
To defend these sonnets of which I longed for an ending,
(Fuck knows my patience was quickly spending),
I believe I've found the real traitor,
And lay much blame on the naff translator.
Though you may try a more artful edition,
I doubt t'would truly save this work from perdition.
Should thee attempt these sonnets what did my head in?
I'd stick to Poe, Lermontov or Wilfred Owen.
September 16, 2019
هذا لم يكن كافيا!
هذا أول ما طرأ على بالي عندما أنهيت هذا الديوان. إنها رحلة عميقة فلسفية وجودية تغوص في نفس بيسوا وتطفو لقلبك أنت إلى درجة أن تنتهي من السوناتا مستفهما مرة، ومغمورا مرة، وحتى منتشيا مرات أخر.
الترجمة كانت جيدة إلى حد ما، التشكيل كان زائداً عن الحد مما تسبب بإرباكي بعض الشيء. بعض السطور تخيلتها بترجمة أفضل ربما.
مجملاً، عمل جيد جداً وعميق وليس للجميع!
هذا أول ما طرأ على بالي عندما أنهيت هذا الديوان. إنها رحلة عميقة فلسفية وجودية تغوص في نفس بيسوا وتطفو لقلبك أنت إلى درجة أن تنتهي من السوناتا مستفهما مرة، ومغمورا مرة، وحتى منتشيا مرات أخر.
الترجمة كانت جيدة إلى حد ما، التشكيل كان زائداً عن الحد مما تسبب بإرباكي بعض الشيء. بعض السطور تخيلتها بترجمة أفضل ربما.
مجملاً، عمل جيد جداً وعميق وليس للجميع!
February 29, 2020
XVIII.
Indefinite space, which, by co-substance night,
In one black mystery two void mysteries blends;
The stray stars, whose innumerable light
Repeats one mystery till conjecture ends;
The stream of time, known by birth-busting bubbles;
The gulf of silence, empty even nought;
Thought's high-walled maze, which the outed owner troubles
Because the string's lost and the plan forgot:
When I think of this and that here I stand,
The thinker of these thoughts, emptily wise,
Holding up to my thinking of thing-hand
And looking at it with thought alien-eyes,
The prayer of my wonder looketh past
The universal darkness lone and vast.
July 4, 2014
I liked that he used an old form of poetry and his themes were ahead of his time, but nothing spoke to me
January 20, 2020
الترجمة ليست جيدةً كفاية.
إلا أنَّ أفكار بيسوا تتجلى لنا -كما نعرفه ويعرفنا-
بالرغم من كل شيء.
إلا أنَّ أفكار بيسوا تتجلى لنا -كما نعرفه ويعرفنا-
بالرغم من كل شيء.
January 3, 2018
I read this for the Portugal stop of my Around the World in 80 Books challenge. Whilst I do not tend to read sonnets very often, I liked this collection for adding something a little different to my reading. Only a few of these sonnets were really to my taste, and although I found Pessoa's prose rich and intelligent, I found it difficult to connect with the majority of them due to their content, or the archaic feel of their prose. I certainly found interest within Pessoa's writing, though, and will try more of his work in the future.
April 24, 2024
“My heart weighs. I am sad” same bro
February 6, 2023
بسيط في كلماته شديد العمق في معانيه ومدلولاته. عن الفكر، القدر، الزمن، الأمل، الألم والحقيقة والمعنى. كتاب صغير في حجمه وثقيل في مضمونه، على الأقل بالنسبة لي.
December 16, 2016
"The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged... we are dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams, and to each other dreams of others' dreams."
"The world is woven all of dream and error"
There are some nice ideas in this, and some beautiful lines. It's the first I've read of Pessoa, and a few of the sonnets really struck me. I definitely appreciated the content more than the form, though that's due to my own ignorance of the sonnet.
However, I thought some of them got a bit repetitive, and the wordplay is tiring after a while, mainly because it's of the same style.
"The world is woven all of dream and error"
There are some nice ideas in this, and some beautiful lines. It's the first I've read of Pessoa, and a few of the sonnets really struck me. I definitely appreciated the content more than the form, though that's due to my own ignorance of the sonnet.
However, I thought some of them got a bit repetitive, and the wordplay is tiring after a while, mainly because it's of the same style.
January 19, 2015
This is the first time I've read Pessoa's poetry and I don't know why it took me so long. His poetry is as strange as the man himself. These sonnets are dark and existential and invoke a certain feeling. If you love reading strange, unusual, philosophical writing you will no doubt enjoy Fernando Pessoa.
February 7, 2025
Being a Fernando Pessoa book, it’s mark of quality is ensured. 35 Sonnets is not a translation but penned in English by Pessoa himself and published in 1918.
The logical tensions conducted in his turn of phrase, in the awkward grammatical pairings, and the repetition of an idea in various word forms shows a playfulness and resonance with contradiction that has made many writers great. One favorite it recalls is Nabokov’s opening to Speak, Memory on the Aristotelian frame of life, between two great chasms:
This connection of life and consciousness, of wakefulness and sleep, the light and the dark is perhaps my favorite and each time reading this volume, as each poem takes time to pass over and process, and then to return to for careful consideration and interpretation. For the value of Pessoa’s work here is not surface level, and the poems do not operate very well upon a first reading. Another favorite sonnet was near the end with the line, “An exile’s yearnings through my thoughts escape.”
The logical tensions conducted in his turn of phrase, in the awkward grammatical pairings, and the repetition of an idea in various word forms shows a playfulness and resonance with contradiction that has made many writers great. One favorite it recalls is Nabokov’s opening to Speak, Memory on the Aristotelian frame of life, between two great chasms:
XIV.
We are born at nightfall and we die ere morn,
And the whole darkness of the world we know,
How can we guess its truth, to darkness born,
The obscure consequence of absent glow?
Only the stars do teach us light. We grasp
Their scattered smallnesses with thoughts that stray,
And, though their eyes look through night's complete mask,
Yet they speak not the features of the day.
Why should these small denials of the whole
More than the black whole the pleased eyes attract?
Why what it calls "worth" does the captive soul
Add to the small and from the large detract?
So, out of light's love wishing it night's stretch,
A nightly thought of day we darkly reach.
This connection of life and consciousness, of wakefulness and sleep, the light and the dark is perhaps my favorite and each time reading this volume, as each poem takes time to pass over and process, and then to return to for careful consideration and interpretation. For the value of Pessoa’s work here is not surface level, and the poems do not operate very well upon a first reading. Another favorite sonnet was near the end with the line, “An exile’s yearnings through my thoughts escape.”
XXXI
I am older than Nature and her Time
By all the timeless age of Consciousness,
And my adult oblivion of the clime
Where I was born makes me not countryless.
An exile's yearnings through my thoughts escape
For daylight of that land where once I dreamed, Which I cannot recall in colour or shape
But haunts my hours like something that hath gleamed
And yet is not as light rememberèd,
Nor to the left or to the right conceived;
And all round me tastes as if life were dead
And the world made but to be disbelieved.
Thus I my hope on unknown truth lay; yet
How but by hope do I the unknown truth get?
March 3, 2018
Good. I have done. My heart weighs. I am sad.
The outer day, void statue of lit blue,
Is altogether outward, other, glad
At mere being not-I (so my aches construe).
I, that have failed in everything, bewail
Nothing this hour but that I have bewailed,
For in the general fate what is't to fail?
Why, fate being past for Fate, 'tis but to have failed.
Whatever hap-or stop, what matters it,
Sith to the mattering our will bringeth nought?
With the higher trifling let us world our wit,
Conscious that, if we do't, that was the lot
The regular stars bound us to, when they stood
Godfathers to our birth and to our blood.
— Sonnet XXXV
The outer day, void statue of lit blue,
Is altogether outward, other, glad
At mere being not-I (so my aches construe).
I, that have failed in everything, bewail
Nothing this hour but that I have bewailed,
For in the general fate what is't to fail?
Why, fate being past for Fate, 'tis but to have failed.
Whatever hap-or stop, what matters it,
Sith to the mattering our will bringeth nought?
With the higher trifling let us world our wit,
Conscious that, if we do't, that was the lot
The regular stars bound us to, when they stood
Godfathers to our birth and to our blood.
— Sonnet XXXV
January 9, 2022
Quite good, if I may say so. I am no expert, but I believe some critics put him almost on par with Shakespeare on sonnets.
November 14, 2022
هو ذاك الذي يسعى
على الرغم من يقينه أن لا فرصة لديه.
على الرغم من يقينه أن لا فرصة لديه.
February 25, 2023
أوقفتني الترجمة عدة مرات أُعيد ما قرأت حتى اتوصل لفهم المعنى ، لا أعلم هل كان ذلك عيبًا في الترجمة أو في الأصل
⭐️⭐️⭐️ لــ سادس عشر كُتُبْ 2023
⭐️⭐️⭐️ لــ سادس عشر كُتُبْ 2023
June 18, 2023
"فَمَنْ ذَاكَ الَّذِي يَتَعَلَّمُ السَّبَاحَةَ دُونَ مَاءٍ عندما يَظُنُّ أَنَّهُ أَقْرَبُ مَا يَكُونُ مِنْ تَعَلُّمها ويكون حقيقة بعيداً كُل البعد."
لا أدري إن كان الخلل فيّ أم في ترجمة الأشعار، لا يبدو أني أستسيغ كتب الشعر المترجمة، لكني أحاول...
لا أدري إن كان الخلل فيّ أم في ترجمة الأشعار، لا يبدو أني أستسيغ كتب الشعر المترجمة، لكني أحاول...
September 1, 2024
"رُوحِي مَوٌكِبٌ مِنَ الصّلابَة"
September 30, 2024
Not feeling this one.
February 23, 2026
25 Sonnets by Pessoa is a collection of dark, existential reflections, wonderfully written and rich in atmosphere. The Shakespearean influence is clear in both structure and language, which made it a slower, more deliberate read for me.
February 9, 2015
I like Pessoa; at least, I like to think I would have liked him, would have liked to have had salad, folar de chaves, and wine with him at some Lisbon sidewalk cafe....but there's his poetry. I either like his poems or do not, completely. There is never any middle ground it seems. Still, one must give credit to anyone that writes original works in a language foreign to them, not in their "mother tongue".
I have read and reviewed the Penguin Books Pessoa collection A Littler Larger Than the Entire Universe and feel the same about the poems there: like or dislike, cut and dried, black or white. I so WANT to like all of them but I just don't. Although I do really like numbers 9, 11, and 31 of these sonnets. Still, he has moments of almost mystical clarity in his poems. Besides, he has more published than I ever will. So, Game Over! Fernando wins! How? Now I need to read his Antinous.....maybe with some salad, folar de chaves, and wine.
I have read and reviewed the Penguin Books Pessoa collection A Littler Larger Than the Entire Universe and feel the same about the poems there: like or dislike, cut and dried, black or white. I so WANT to like all of them but I just don't. Although I do really like numbers 9, 11, and 31 of these sonnets. Still, he has moments of almost mystical clarity in his poems. Besides, he has more published than I ever will. So, Game Over! Fernando wins! How? Now I need to read his Antinous.....maybe with some salad, folar de chaves, and wine.
May 14, 2022
Translated from Portuguese. Pessoa, best known for his ‘Book of Disquiet’ -which I forgot to steal from Jerome when I had the chance- paints surreal and unsettling tableaus in short and percussive verse.
“The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others' dreams”
“The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others' dreams”
May 31, 2016
I'm also reading the Book of Disquiet and I think the works go together nicely - brilliant and just plain weird at times. But every now and then an absolutely perfect phrase.
The first one is a standout:
"...Our soul from us is infinitely far. However much we give our thoughts the will To be our soul and gesture it abroad, Our hearts are incommunicable still..."
The first one is a standout:
"...Our soul from us is infinitely far. However much we give our thoughts the will To be our soul and gesture it abroad, Our hearts are incommunicable still..."
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