I Have More Souls Than One

by Fernando Pessoa, Jonathan Griffin (Translator)

'But no, she's abstract, is a bird
Of sound in the air of air soaring,
And her soul sings unencumbered
Because the song's what makes her sing.'

Dramatic, lyrical and ranging over four distinct personae, these poems by one of Portugal's greatest poets trace a mind shaken by intense suffering and a tireless search for meaning.

Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Fiction, Short Stories, Portugal, Philosophy, Portuguese Literature

57 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1918

About the author

Fernando 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.

Reviews

[leynes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whenever I visit a new city I try to visit as many of its bookshops as possible. In my younger years I also tried to acquire as many books as I could but those days are long gone. My spending habits are a lot more sustainable these days and since I knew that I had two piles of books left unread at home I knew that I wouldn't go on a spending spree in Prague.

Prague is a lovely city but the city center is overrun by tourists (me being one of them, of course, so I understand the irony). When I made my way over the overcrowded Karlův most I was overjoyed when I found that "Shakespeare & Sons", the lovely bookshop at the other side of the bridge, was a place of quiet. Not many customers were in the shop and so I could take my sweet time browsing its shelves. The bookshop has two levels and it's full of books in the English language. I visited other bookshops in Prague as well but "Shakespeare & Sons" was by far (!) my favorite. So I knew that I had to buy my "Prague book" in this shop.

I toyed with the idea of getting a beautiful bilingual edition of Kafka's Die Verwandlung but since I had already read that book (and thought 20,00€ was a bit much) I decided to go with this slim volume of poetry instead: I Have More Souls Than One by Fernando Pessoa. When I saw Carolyn Marie gush about this book on her channel I wanted to order it only to find that the Penguin Mini Classics run is slowly going out of print. I couldn't find a place to get it new. So I was overjoyed when I found it in this cute bookshop in Prague. (Side note: I also found the box set of the Penguin Deluxe Classics edition of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey without the books in it, and when I asked the owner if I could take the box home with me, because both of the books sit box-less on my shelves at home, he actually said: "Yes, the box's yours." My day was made!)

I hadn't read anything by Pessoa prior to this but I am absolutely sold. He seems like such a fascinating man and I know that I'll read The Book of Disquiet one day. I would also not say no to more poetry from him because this slim collection was a treat. I Have More Souls Than One is split into four parts, each focusing on a different persona/heteronym of Pessoa: Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, and Pessoa himself. I was immediately intrigued by this structure, not many writers I know work with heteronyms the way Pessoa did.

Pessoa said of his approach: "How do I write in the name of these three? Caeiro, through sheer and unexpected inspiration, without knowing or even suspecting that I'm going to write in his name. Ricardo Reis, after an abstract meditation, which suddenly takes concrete shape in an ode. Campos, when I feel a sudden impulse to write and don't know what." How cool is that? And the crazy thing is that his personas really feel different from one another. Their styles and subjects for their poetry are distinct. Super fascinating!

Apparently Alberto Caeiro was Pessoa's first great heteronym. He summarises him as follows: "He sees things with the eyes only, not with the mind. He does not let any thoughts arise when he looks at a flower... the only thing a stone tells him is that it has nothing at all to tell him... this way of looking at a stone may be described as the totally unpoetic way of looking at it. The stupendous fact about Caeiro is that out of this sentiment, or rather, absence of sentiment, he makes poetry."

"Beauty is the name of something that does not exist / Which I give to things in exchange for the pleasure they give me. / It signifies nothing."

Caeiro does not question anything whatsoever, he calmly accepts the world as it is. The recurrent themes to be found in nearly all of Caeiro's poems are wide-eyed childlike wonder at the infinite variety of nature. Central to his world-view is the idea that in the world around us, all is surface: things are precisely what they seem, there is no hidden meaning anywhere. Caeiro manages thus to free himself from the anxieties that batter his peers; for him, things simply exist and we have no right to credit them with more than that.

"If, after I die, they should want to write my biography, / There’s nothing simpler.
I’ve just two dates – of my birth, and of my death. / In between the one thing and the other all the days are mine."

Ricardo Reis' philosophy of life overlaps in some regards with that of Caeiro. Reis lives by the motto: "See life from a distance. Never question it. There's nothing it can tell you." Like Caeiro, Reis defers from questioning life. He is a modern pagan who urges one to seize the day and accept fate with tranquility. "Wise is the one who does not seek. The seeker will find in all things the abyss, and doubt in himself." Believing in the Greek gods, yet living in a Christian Europe, Reis feels that his spiritual life is limited and true happiness cannot be attained. This, added to his belief in Fate as a driving force for all that exists, as such disregarding freedom, leads to his epicureanist philosophy, which entails the avoidance of pain, defending that man should seek tranquility and calm above all else, avoiding emotional extremes.

"There are no sorrows / Nor joys either / In our life. / So let us learn, / Thoughtlessly wise, / Not to live it, / But to flow down it, / Tranquil, serene, / Letting children / Be our teachers / And our eyes be / Filled with Nature."

Where Caeiro wrote freely and spontaneously, with joviality, of his basic, meaningless connection to the world, Reis writes in an austere, cerebral manner, with premeditated rhythm and structure and a particular attention to the correct use of the language when approaching his subjects of the brevity of life, the vanity of wealth and struggle, the joy of simple pleasures, patience in time of trouble, and avoidance of extremes.

It is one of Reis' poems that gives this slim collection its title: "I have more souls than one. / There are more I's than myself. / And still I exist / Indifferent to all. / I silence them: I speak." So simple, yet so beautiful.

Álvaro de Campos manifests, in a way, as a hyperbolic version of Pessoa himself. Of the three heteronyms he is the one who feels most strongly, his motto being "to feel everything in every way." And bestie babes, I think none of ya'll are surprised that his poetry is the one that resonated with me the most. Campos is a dreamer, someone who's tired of reality. And I related to nothing more in life: "I am tired, that is clear, / Because, at a certain stage, people have to be tired. / Of what I am tired, I don't know: / […] At the tiredness being only this - / In the body a wish for sleep, / In the soul a desire for not thinking". Whew, chile, if that isn't me.

"We conquer the whole world before getting out of bed; / But we wake up and it is opaque, / We get up and it is alien,"

As such, his poetry is the most emotionally intense and varied, constantly juggling two fundamental impulses: on the one hand a feverish desire to be and feel everything and everyone, declaring that "in every corner of my soul stands an altar to a different god" (alluding to Walt Whitman's desire to "contain multitudes"), on the other, a wish for a state of isolation and a sense of nothingness.

As a result, his mood and principles varied between violent, dynamic exultation, as he fervently wishes to experience the entirety of the universe in himself, in all manners possible (a particularly distinctive trait in this state being his futuristic leanings, including the expression of great enthusiasm as to the meaning of city life and its components) and a state of nostalgic melancholy, where life is viewed as, essentially, empty.

This collection concludes with the poems of "Pessoa as Pessoa", and funnily enough, those were the hardest to understand. They seemed a lot more abstract and complicated than the poems of his personas. Pessoa wrote of love and longing, of grief and lost love, and the power of the imagination. One of my favorite quotes from this book can be found in the final poem: "There are dreamed anguishes that are more real / Than the ones life brings us, there are sensations / Felt only by imagining / Which are more ours than our life is." Simply beautiful.

[Nasrin M · Rating 3 out of 5]

آری من خسته‌ام،
و به خستگی این چنین
که در بدن، تمنای خواب
و در روح تمایل نیندیشیدن است
و برتر از همه،
به شفافیت درخشان درکی جریان‌یافته از گذشته لبخند می‌زنم...

[Lisa (NY) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't read enough poetry to judge whether this collection is any good. Apparently the poems are written by four different narrators - but I couldn't tell the difference. The words are clear and comprehensible and seemed nicely put together but mean nothing to me.

Penguin Modern Classics
#1 - Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr.
#2 - Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber by Allen Ginsberg
#3 - The Breakthrough by Daphne Du Maurier
#4 - The Custard Heart by Dorothy Parker
#5 - Three Japanese Short Stories (3 authors)
#6 - The Veiled Woman by Anais Nin
#7 - Notes on Nationalism by George Orwell
#8 - Food by Gertrude Stein
#9 - The Three Electroknights by Stanislaw Lem
#10 - The Great Hunger by Patrick Kavanagh
#11 - The Legend of the Sleepers by Danilo Kis
#12 - The Black Ball by Ralph Ellison
#13 - Till September Petronella by Jean Rhys
#14 - Investigations of a Dog by Franz Kafka
#15 - Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady by Clarice Lispector
#16 - An Advertisement for Toothpaste by Ryszard Kapuscinski
#17 - Create Dangerously by Albert Camus
#18 - The Vigilante by John Steinbeck
#19 - I Have More Souls than One by Fernando Pessoa

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

a mood

[Abeer Abdullah · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is a collection of poetry written by four different narrators who are at times indistinguishable from one another, at one point pessoa, as Recardo Reis, says:
" I think or feel and dont know
who is thinking, feeling
I am merely the place
where thinking or feeling is"
I really loved this collection, as someone who sometimes struggles with overthinking, cognitive dissonance, self doubt, and a strange but elusive fear, that this was a book of thoughts that coexisted within one person, if and one he is lucky, and at times collided. The idea is that he was a collection of desires and influences, which he seemed to constantly dismiss and destroy, and even deny completely.

As Alvaro De Campos, arguably the most struggling of the voices, Pessoa writes:

"I am nothing,
Never shall be anything.
Cannot will to be anything,
This apart, I have in me, all the dreams of the world. "

I just really liked the struggle between the aching, moody poet, and the self preserving stoic.

To want everything and nothing at all.

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

A superb little book of poems by one of the greatest poets of Portugal and one of the three most important writers of the 20th Century. I am not exaggerating when I declare Pessoa to be absolutely and precisely at the core of modern literature. This book presents a selection of verse by four of his alter-egos (his 'heteronyms') including Pessoa-as-Pessoa. In his poetry this genius was capable of taking very complex philosophical concepts and the emotions associated with them, compressing them into a geometrically perfect handful of words, and casting the result whole into the mind of the reader. It is almost a type of telepathy.

The finest poem here (in my view) is the one called 'Tobacconist's' in which the writer of the poem who has become an observer is unable to escape the weight of the universe resting on his mind until an inconsequential everyday action in its mundane details inspires him to seek relief in the performance of an inconsequential action of his own: namely the writing of this poem about the unbearable nature of the cosmos. The poem is therefore serious and meta at the same time. It is a masterpiece.

[lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Believe in myself? No, and in nothing.
Let Nature pour out over my ardent head
Her sunshine, her rain, the wind that touches my hair,
And the rest that may come if it will, or have to come, or may not.
Heart-diseased slaves of the stars,
We conquer the whole world before getting out of bed;
But we wake up and it is opaque,
We get up and it is alien,
We go out of the house and it is the entire earth
Plus the solar system and the Milky Way and the Indefinite.

[Rosemary Atwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another gem from Penguin 60s and a perfect introduction to Pessoa’s work. His poems spring from a core which encompasses both the sublime and the nihilistic, voiced by four interchangeable alter-egos which fuse language and emotion. Deeply moving and stunningly realised, this is indispensable magic-making.

[ana (ananascanread) · Rating 4 out of 5]

a poetic masterpiece that intricately weaves together themes of identity and self-discovery.

[Marloes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fucking loved this.

[Калина Котевска · Rating 5 out of 5]

*sobbing* 🤍

[Ili · Rating 4 out of 5]

ok lets pretend tobacconist's just didnt describe my whole life i-

[Pouria · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have more souls than one / Fernando Pessoa / Translated by Jonathan Griffin / Penguin Books / 56 pages / Date finished: 4 April 2020 / My score to book out of five: 1.5
I didn’t like most of the poems of the book but there were some few ones that I liked and if the rest of the book was like that, it would have been nice! I think the translation also had an impact on why I didn’t like the book in addition to content. Just the few poems that I liked exceptionally:

“I never kept sheep,
But it is as if I did watch over them.
My soul is like a shepherd.
knows the wind and the sun,
and goes hand in hand with the seasons,
to follow and to listen.
All the peace of nature without people
comes to sit by my side.”


“I have no ambitions or wants.
To be a poet is no ambition of mine.
It is my way of staying alone.”

“Lightly, lightly, very lightly
a wind, a very light one, passes
and goes away, still very lightly.
And I don’t know what I think
and have no wish to know.”


“Should they want me to have a mysticism, right, I have one.
I’m mystical, but only with the body.
My soul is simple and does not think.
My mysticism is not to try to know.
It is to live and not think about it.”

“The world is for the person who is born to conquer it,
and not for the one who dreams he can conquer it, even if he be right.
I have dreamed more than Napoleon performed.
I have squeezed into a hypothetical breast more loving kindnesses than Christ,
I have made philosophies in secret that no Kant wrote.”


“I am tired, that is clear,
Because, at a certain stage, people have to be tired.
Of what I am tired, I don’t know:
It would not serve me at all to know
Since the tiredness stays just the same.
The wound hurts as it hurts
And not in function of the cause that produced it.
Yes, I am tired,
And ever so slightly smiling
At the tiredness being only this-
In the body a wish for sleep,
In the soul a desire for not thinking
And, to crown all, a luminous transparency
Of the retrospective understanding…
And the one luxury of not now having hopes?
I am intelligent: that’s all
I have seen much and understood much of what I have seen,
And there is a certain pleasure even in the tiredness this brings us,
That in the end the head does still serve for something.”

“Give me some more wine, because life is nothing.”

[Saatwik Katiha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Almost every poem here presents (usually fleetingly) an intriguing philosophical concept; the following was a personal favorite :

"Beauty is the name of something that does not exist
Which I give to things in exchange for the pleasure they give me."

That said, the one, singular poem that makes this collection worthy of 5 full stars is Tobacconist's. Maybe it's some sort of personal bias, but it's instantly relatable in its near perfect verse-form rendition of the remorse of underachievement. If nothing else, read that one if you've ever felt worthless in life.

[Abdullah Hussaini · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have no ambitions or waants.
To be poet is no ambition of mine.
It is my way of staying alone.
- p4, as Alberto Caeiro

Pawerful dan padu betul terutamanya Pessoa sebagai Caeiro dan de Campos.

[Myra Schmitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

When in Portugal...

[Lia · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be a poet is no ambition of mine.
It is my way of staying alone.

***

Should they want me to have a mysticism, right, I have one.
I'm mystical, but only with the body.
My soul is simple and does not think.

My mysticism is not to try to know.
It is to live and not think about it.

[Margarida P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I ❤️ you Fernando Pessoa

[Rozonda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have loved Pessoa for years, and I couldn't resist buying this charming little anthology. For those who don't know the artist, this is a lovely introduction- beautifully translated into English, here you can find his most famous poem, Tobacconist's, and others not so famous but carefully chosen from a few of his most famous heteronyms. Recommended.

[Dane Cobain · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Give me some more wine, because life is nothing.” Some interesting translated poetry here, although Pessoa had far too many aliases. Pretty good stuff though, originally written in Portuguese. Worth reading!

[Rehan Farhad · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have no ambitions or wants. 
To be a poet is no ambition of mine.
It is my way of staying alone.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
If, after I die, they should want to write my biography, 
There's nothing simpler. 
I've just two dates - of my birth, and of my death. 
In between the one thing and the other all the days are mine.

[Emily Constance · Rating 5 out of 5]

This short collection reminds me of that expanding brain meme, where the first evolution is Alberto Caeiro and the final evolution is Fernando Pessoa. The first collection of poems, as told by "Alberto Caeiro" begins to disillusion Pessoa from the way we come to understand life and know things. Our life is all fake: what we think about it, what we make of it through our imagination and our ambitions and our actions and our physical sculpting of the world. Instead, we live through sight and sight alone. He starts to crave the ability to see without inferring meaning, to embrace meaningless and to live "madly" and with love for the world-not with sentimentality, as he adds, but I think for him, love equals whole passion. Living completely and honestly and deeply and thoughtlessly and unreserved: "Bright, purposeless, and transient like Nature," not caught up in the "lies of men about things...which simply exist".

My mysticism is not to try to know.
It is to live and not think about it.

There's not a whole to which this belongs,
...any real and true connection
Is a disease of our ideas.

The next soul to speak, Ricardo Reis, takes this further and presents the case that we all should "have the science of accepting" the "gracious Day that is dying" either with unawareness that night preceded the day and will succeed it...or with the graciousness to accept even death and darkness; expecting nothing, accepting everything, people will live and have lived without remorse.

To those for whom happiness is
Their sun, night comes round.
But to one who hopes for nothing
All that comes is grateful.

Álvaro de Campos, however, has a harder time with this. Being more self-aware than the previous two souls, he embodies the sense of eternal conflict that is the human condition, between self-acceptance and feeling inadequate. On the one hand, he embraces what the former two souls had to say: that "life" or "reality" as we know it is just exorcised ideas or dreams of ours. We all dream and have grand designs but in the end there is only us, as we are, and nature. And everything dies, and we only have so much time, and there is so many of us and so little time and so little space that we will not all be born to achieve our dreams-and that's okay (since they mean nothing anyway). But it's hard for him to accept that, having learned, having knowledge: "Eat, dirty little girl, eat! If I could eat chocolates with the same truth as you do! But I think and, peeling the silver paper with its fronds of tin, I leave it all lying on the floor, just as I have left life." It's too late for him to escape from the lies of men, of his mind...but there's a part of him that's found peace with that.

They knew me at once for who I was not and I did not
expose the lie, and lost myself.
when I tried to take off the mask,
It was stuck to my face.
When I got it off and looked at myself in the glass,
I had already grown old.

And there is a certain pleasure even in the tiredness this brings us,
That in the end the head does still serve for something.

And then...there is Pessoa himself. Who embraces fully this madness processed by these other souls. It is better not to know. Ignorance is truly bliss.

Formerly I was wise and had no cares...
Now that I have become the truth's slave,
The gall of having it is all I have.
I am an exile here and, dead, still alive.

Cursed be the day on which I asked for knowledge!
More cursed the one that gave it - for you did!
Where now is the unconsciousness - mine, early -
Which consciousness, like a suit, keeps hid?
I know now, almost all and am left sighing...

Their sails, like wings of what I see,
Bring me a vague inner desire to be
Who I was without knowing what it was.
So all recalls my home self and, because
It recalls that, what I am aches in me.

[Kristen Vlahiotis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book in a tiny shop in Madrid after the owner recommended it to me. Such lovely and mundane poetry. I love that poetry transcends languages and always captures raw human emotion.

[Acordul Fin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I see boats moving on the sea.
Their sails, like wings of what I see,
Bring me a vague inner desire to be
Who I was without knowing what it was.
So all recalls my home self, and, because
It recalls that, what I am aches in me.

Pessoa feels like an apt poet but I got nothing out of this collection.

[Andrei Mocuţa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Newton’s binomial is as beautiful as the Venus de Milo.
The trouble is, nobody cares about it.

óóóó — óóóóóóóóó — óóóóóóóóóóóóóóó

(The wind outside)

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[kutingtin · Rating 3 out of 5]

“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.”

“I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.”

“I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.”

[Kaj · Rating 4 out of 5]

Normally I have a hard time reading poetry in book form, but this one worked for me by reading one or two every day at breakfast while travelling in Portugal.

[prashant · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow.

[Tory · Rating 5 out of 5]

[1st read on 5/5/2022] — 5⭐️

— beautiful!!!!! obsessed with so many of these!!!

[Kenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolute perfection.