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Morton Marcus: He said: I sometimes have lucky ideas, ideas suddenly lucky in ideas and in the words they naturally fall into. I write and then I read. Why did I write this? Where did I get this from? Where

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did this come from? It's too good to be mine. What if we in this world were mere pens and ink with which someone else writes and means what we said down here. His name is Fernando Pessoa and he is the subject of tonight's

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show, and he is one of the most unique poets of the 20th century, who is coming more to the fore of interest and popularity in the ranks of World Poetry. This is Mort Marcus, and welcome to the Poetry Show and a night which, if you have never

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heard of Fernando Pessoa before, I think you're going to find absolutely intriguing. Let me just backtrack a little here. In 1972, I did a review of Andrei Codrescu's first book of poems, in which he takes five characters and writes, what

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turned out to be, although it was cut in the book, more than twenty poems in the voices and psyches of each character and the interaction of each character. I said, in my review, I thought this is one of the really interesting directions

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that poetry could go in. And I hope to see more of it. Well, Andre did not continue in that line, as many of you know that he has become a novelist, a fine poet, and a commentator on NPR, and he has abandoned this approach to poetry. In fact, he

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abandoned it when he wrote his first long prose piece called, "Monsieur Teste," and it was obvious that he was modeling this idea of alter egos or different identities on the creation of the alter ego of Paul Valéry by Paul Valéry of

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"Monsieur Teste." In 1975, three years later, I was at the MacDowell Colony, and each artist is supposed to do a performance in his medium towards the end of his stay. And a gentleman by the name of Edwin

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Honig, a very, very well-known poet and especially a translator from Portuguese and Spanish, read a long, long poem by a Portuguese poet by the name of Fernando Pessoa, which was called, "Maritime Ode." It knocked me off my chair. I

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couldn't believe it. I had a long talk with Honig afterwards and he told me as he had told the gathering the story of Fernando Pessoa, and the fact that Pessoa had done what I had talked about was the possibility in my review of Codrescu's book.

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And I am going to do my show tonight on Fernando Pessoa, but I've got to read, so it is clear to you, what is going on in the world and work of this extraordinary poet who, in the end, and to me, in his most interesting persona, becomes a

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Anyway, allow me to read from this wonderful new collection of Literary alter egos were almost the fashion among early 20th translations by Richard Zenith called, "Pessoa and Company: Selected Poems," put out by Grove Press. And now, by the

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way, in paperback, you can get it in any bookstore. Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon on the 13th of June 1888. When scarcely century writers. Pound had his Mauberly, Rilke his Malte five years old, he lost his father. His mother remarried a

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year and a half later, and Fernando- and took Fernando to Durban, South Africa, where his stepfather served as the Portuguese Council. Fernando attended English school in 20th century Walt Whitman.

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Durban, where he lived with his family until the age of seventeen. When he was thirteen, he made a year long visit to Laurids Brigge, and Valery has Monsieur Teste, but no one took Portugal, returning there for good in 1905. He began studying

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letters at the University of Lisbon in 1906 but dropped out after eight months. During the following years, he stayed with relatives or in rented rooms, making his living by translating and drafting business letters in English and French. He began

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the game out as far as Pessoa who gave up his own life to publishing criticism in 1912, creative prose in 1913, and poetry in 1914. This was also the year when the alter egos he called heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and

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Alvaro de Campos came into existence. In 1915, he dropped confer quazy real substance on the trinity of co-poets he the circumflex from his surname. Throughout the rest of his life, Pessoa contributed poems and prose pieces to magazines. He

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published several chapbooks of his English poems in 1918. And in 1921, and a single book of Portuguese poems in 1934. He had one romantic relationship of brief duration. He died in 1935 designated as heteronyms, giving each a personal biography,

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from cirrhosis of the liver. Why cirrhosis of the liver? Does that mean he was a heavy drinker? Yes, Fernando Pessoa was a very heavy drinker. psychology, politics, aesthetics, religion, and

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physique. Alberto Caeiro, considered the master by the other two poets, was an ingenuous, unlettered man who lived in the country and had no profession. Ricardo Reis was a doctor and a classicist who wrote odes in the style of

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Horace. Alvaro de Campos, a naval engineer started out as an exuberant futurist with a Walt Whitman-esque voice, but over time he came to sound more like a mopey existentialist. The Caeiro has one discipline, things must be felt as they are-

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pythias description and distinction of the heteronyms was made by Pessoa in a text he wrote in English. It went this way: I'm sorry. Caeiro has one discipline, things must be felt as they are. Ricardo Reis has another kind of discipline:

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things must be felt, not only as they are, but also as to fall in with a certain ideal of classic measure and rule. In Alvaro de Campos', things must simply be felt. In addition to these three full-fledged heteronyms, the

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mature Pessoa gave birth to a number of others. In fact, we have at least seventy-two names he either made biographies of, or who he wrote articles under, in a number of different concerns. He was a sociologist, he was a philosopher, he was an

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essayist in the grand style, he wrote articles on such things as political commentary, linguistic theory, literary criticism, he was an expert in horoscopes, and very, very strange things. So he wrote a treatise on wrestling under the name of Carlos Otto.

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And he wrote many, many other strange things, which I won't necessarily go into, but very funny indeed. Of these three heteronyms, I am intrigued with one, and the one who the critics say is closest to Pessoa himself, and that is Alvaro de

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Campos, a man who says that he wanted to feel everything and yet became more and more detached from the world. In fact, this poetry, though it is concerned with feelings and emotions, is really very intellectual. These are very

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detached characters who comment on their own lives, but really, we have no idea what reflects the life outside and what reflects the life inside, what is coming from the imagination of Pessoa, what is coming from the imagination of Alvaro de

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Campos, what is coming from Caeiro or Reis' imaginations. Also, there are a number of English sonnets that Pessoa himself wrote. And it is very interesting that the weakest poems are the ones he wrote in English, though he understood

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English, made his life as a- his livelihood as a translator, still, he could not speak or write English that well. Each one of these poets has interesting work, but the most interesting is for me Alvaro de Campos. And I'm going to read,

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and the first poem I read was supposedly in his heteronym. Let me tell you the books in case you're interested, and I will repeat these, and then I will get into the poetry for the rest of the evening of just Alvaro de Campos, which you may be very-

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well, I think I'll read one or two of the other poets to give you a sense of them. I've been talking about the Grove Press book, "Selected Poems," or, "Pessoa and Company," by Richard Zenith with an excellent, excellent introduction of very

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good translations. What you should be aware of, though, is that many of the poems in this book do not appear in any of the other books of Pessoa. A lot of new work is coming out. We have 125,000

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pages of prose and poetry by Pessoa, which critics in Portugal have been trying to ferret out and scratching their heads to make sense of because some of these are on the backs of napkins, on the backs of menus, they're scrawled, people

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cannot understand his handwriting. He does sign them and date them with various different names, of course, and then he was once, in fact, many times he tried to organize all these things into some kind of a cannon, sometimes kind of a

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library, if you will, which would show the many different facets of the universe, through the eyes of these different persona that he was developing but he never got around to doing that. Many of these poems are fragments, they are not

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finished, as the prose pieces, "The Book of Disquietude," especially, which Richard Zenith has published, and which I would suggest you read, becomes, in the end, a collection of short essays or aphoristic paragraphs, and never coheres and Pessoa

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never stopped writing it. So Zenith's wonderful Selected Poems known as, "Fernando Pessoa and Company," then the first produced Eco Book, E-C-SO-A-E(?), of the early and revised poems of Edward Honig,

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assisted by Susan M. Brown, called simply, "The Poems of Fernando Pessoa." It no longer is under an Eco label, but it is a City Lights book now, and certainly it is very important for you to get this book again because of the work of Honig,

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and because some of the translations not only are marvelous but you will not find them in the Richard Zenith book. Those are the three books that are most available. The others are a- and is already in the second edition with new poems

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not seen before, a book out by Penguin, very easy to find, translated by Jonathan Griffin. It is terrible, it is terrible. He takes as the major poet Fernando Pessoa himself, gives very little of the other poets, but the translations are just

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very, very poor. And I'm not talking as an expert in Portuguese. I mean, even in their sentence structure, even in the way they read, even the way they express ideas, it is not a book that I would recommend. The third is a

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University of Texas book, which is also put out in Edinburgh from the Edinburgh Scotland Bilingual Library, and it's Pessoa's Selected Poems. If you can get them, they are very Anglicised and it's a very nice scholarly book with a huge

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introduction, as is the Zenith book, and it has some poems that again, are not found in the other books. But I must say also, because the poems are so Anglicised, and because it seems as though the translator is not a poet himself, it doesn't have

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the immediacy, certainly of the Honig translation -- Honig, of course, is a contemporary American poet -- and nor does it have the Richard Zenith books either. So with that in mind, I am going to go right to some Alvaro de

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Campos poems. And the best poems it seems to me are the long ones. And I think one of the great poems of the 20th century is, "The Tobacco Shop," which I will read and it is a long poem. The other one is this poem that I mentioned, the first one I

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ever heard by Fernando Pessoa, "The Maritime Ode," which would probably take me this whole second half-hour to read, but I will read you parts of it. Alvaro- what I love about these poems is that they speak with a directness and an originality of

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metaphor and can talk about ideas in such emotional ways and emotional feelings, if you will -- obviously that's what emotions are -- can talk about emotions so intellectually that they're just something quite new. And this directness, by the

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way, Zenith feels, he recognizes it also, is because of Pessoa's reading of Walt Whitman, and he sort of thinks even that he out-Whitmans Whitman. So, let me read some of these poems to you. They are about, in many cases, sitting in one's apartment and

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looking out and not being active at all. So, the imagination exists and yet the question is, what does exist, what is real, what is not real? Who am I? Am I anything? and I will read these. And here is one called, "Note," written in 1929. Again, Pessoa

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died in 1935, he was born in 1888, so as you can imagine, he only lived to be forty-seven years old. NOTE, this is Alvaro de Campos and that's what I will read, this heteronym,

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My soul came apart like an empty jar. It fell overwhelmingly down the stairs, dropped from the hands of a careless maid. It fell, smashed into more pieces, and there was China in the jar. Nonsense? Impossible? How should I know? I have more sensations

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now than when I felt I was all me. I'm a litter of shards strewn on a doormat, about to be swept up. My fall raised the din like a crash of a jar. The gods that exist lean over the banister, staring down at the shards their maid left of me.

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They're not mad at her. They indulge her. What was I? An empty vase? They stare at the shards absurdly conscious, but conscious of themselves, not of the shards. The gods stare down and smile. Indulgence- indulgent, they smile at the

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heatless maid. The big star-carpeted staircase spreads out. A shard is shining, glossy side up among the stars. Is it my work? My one and only soul? My life? A shard. And the gods squint at it not knowing why it got left there.

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That sort of illustrates the ease with which these metaphors come out. Here's the directness in a wonderful little poem, and the fairy queen mentioned in here is obviously his muse or the classical definition of a muse. It's called simply the

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first line: I HAVE A TERRIBLE COLD I have a terrible cold and everyone knows how terrible colds change the whole structure of the universe, making us sore

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at life, making us sneeze till we get metaphysical. My day is wasted, full of blowing my nose, my headaches vaguely a sad fix for a minor poet to be in. Today, I'm really a minor poet. Whatever I was before it was only wishful and that's gone.

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Oh, fairy queen, goodbye forever. Your wings were sunbeams and my feet are clay. I'll never be well if I don't go to bed and stretch out. I never was well, unless I was stretched out across the universe. Oh, excusez moi. Oh, what a terrible

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cold. I need some truth, and aspirin. And you get the sense of so many of these things being scrawled down once and not revised, he obviously had a real sense of Portuguese colloquial language, which really comes over in all

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the translations. So let us continue on here. I'm looking at the different- here's, well, let me go into, "Salutations to Walt Whitman," because I'm describing how Whitman-esque he is. And here is one of these early wonderful, huge, long poems that

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he wrote. I don't know how much I'm going to read of this poem but I will go on and read probably, maybe until the end of this half-hour, but maybe not, maybe only five minutes. Here is, "Salutations to Walt Whitman," and this is written

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obviously in 1915. He had just discovered, Pessoa had discovered a year before, these different identities, and he actually said that Alvaro de Campos came to him in a dream and never let him go.

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SALUTATION TO WALT WHITMAN Infinite Portugal, June 11th, 1915, ahoy, ahoy, ahoy! From here in Portugal, with all past ages in my brain, I salute you, Walt. I salute you, my brother in the universe. I, with my

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monocle and tightly-buttoned frock coat, I am not unworthy of you, Walt, as you well know, I am not unworthy of you, my greeting is enough to make it so. I, so given to indolence, so easily bored, I am with you, as you well know, and understand

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you and love you. And though I never met you, born the same year you died, I know you love me too. You knew me and I am happy. I know that you knew me, that you considered and explained me. I know that this is what I am, whether on

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Brooklyn ferry ten years before I was born, or strolling up Rio de Ouro, thinking about everything that is not really Rio de Ouro, and just as you felt everything, so I feel everything. And so here we are clasping hands, clasping hands,

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Walt, clasping hands with the universe doing a dance in our souls. Oh, singer of concrete absolutes, always modern and eternal, fiery concubine of the scattered world, great pederast brushing up against the diversity of things, sexualized

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by rocks, by trees, by people, by their trades, itch for the swiftly passing, for casual encounters, for what's merely observed. My enthusiast for what's inside everything. My great hero going straight through death by leaps and

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bounds, roaring, screaming, bellowing greetings to God. Singer of wild and gentle brotherhood with everything, great epidermic democrat, up close to it all and body and soul, carnival of each and every action, bacchanalia of all

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intentions, twin brother of every sudden impulse. John Jacques Rousseau of the world hell-bent to produce machinery, Homer of all the inaccessible, of wavering carnality, Shakespeare of the sensation on the verge of steam propulsion,

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Milton Shelley of the dawning future of electricity, Incubus of all gestures, spasm penetrating every object force, souteneur of the whole universe, whore of all solar systems. How often do I kiss you a picture, Walt? Wherever you are now, I

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don't know where it is, but it is God. You feel this, I know you feel it. And my kisses are warmer, flesh and blood, and you like it that way, old friend, and you thank me from over there. I know this well. Something tells me, some

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pleasure in my spirit, some abstract slant direction in the depths of my soul. There was nothing of the engageante in you, rather the muscular, the cyclopic, though in facing the universe, yours was the attitude of a woman and every blade of

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grass, every stone, every man was a universe for you. Walt, dearest old man, my great comrade, [unidentified]. I belong to your Bacchic orgy of freed sensations. I am yours. From the tingling of my toes to the nausea of my dreams, I am

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yours. Look at me. Up there close to God, you see me contrary-wise from inside out. You divine my body. You see my soul, you see it properly, and through its eyes you take in my body. Look at me. You know that I, Alvaro de Campos, ship's

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engineer, sensationist poet, I'm not your dust disciple, I'm not your friend, I'm not your singer. You know that I am you and you are happy about it. Well, if you know, "Song to Myself," and another poem of

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Whitman's called, "I Seek A Woman," this is a great parody, great fun, and yet at the same time, great seriousness. The thing of course that I haven't mentioned about Pessoa, which should be clear to you, is that comedy, humor, is certainly one

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of the ways in which he pursues his subject matter. We have a few minutes before the end of this half-hour. Let me read to you one or two more of these poems. Okay, we got to go where- your eyes are supposed to tell you- this is going and it's not

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where the page is. And here we go. This is called: DEFERRAL The day after tomorrow, not until the day after tomorrow. I'll spend tomorrow thinking about the day after tomorrow.

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And then maybe we'll see, but not today, today is out of the question. Today I can't, the confused persistence of my objective subjectivity, the fatigue of my real intermittently appearing life, the anticipated and infinite

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weariness, a multi-world weariness just to catch a streetcar. This species of soul- well, not until the day after tomorrow. Today I want to get ready. I want to get ready to think tomorrow about the day after that will be the decisive

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one. I've already planned it out. But no, today I'm not planning anything. Tomorrow is the day for plans. Tomorrow I'll sit at my desk to conquer the world but I'll only conquer the world the day after tomorrow. I feel like crying, I suddenly

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feel deep within like crying. No, don't try to find out anymore. It's a secret I'm not telling until the day after tomorrow. When I was a child, I was amused by the Sunday circus every week. Today I'm only amused by the Sunday circus of

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every week of my childhood. The day after tomorrow, I'll be different. My life will triumph. All of my real qualities of intelligence are addition and practicality will be conveyed by an official announcement but by an announcement to be made

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tomorrow. Today I want to sleep. I'll draft announcements tomorrow. Today, what show is playing that would reenact my childhood, I'll be sure to buy tickets tomorrow since the day after tomorrow is when I want to go, not before. The day after

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tomorrow, I'll have the public image, which tomorrow I'll rehearse. The day after tomorrow, I'll finally be what today I could never be, the day after tomorrow, not before. I feel tired the way a stray dog feels cold. I feel very tired.

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Tomorrow, I'll explain it to you, or the day after tomorrow is perhaps not until the day after tomorrow. The future? Yes, the future. That Portuguese music is to sound some atmosphere for the

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poet whose work we're getting into, Fernando Pessoa, who, one of the most original poets of the 20th century, invented more than seventy-two separate selves in poetry, three major alter egos he called heteronyms. And we are concerned with one of

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them, whose name is Alvaro de Campos. And I am going to read- I think I will just go into this long poem, you can settle down, which I think is one of the astonishing poems of the 20th century. And it is called -- I'm not going to say it until I find

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it -- "The Tobacco Shop." THE TOBACCO SHOP I'm nothing, I'll always be nothing. I can't want to be something but I have in me all the dreams of the world. Windows

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of my room, the room of one of the world's millions nobody knows and if they knew me, what would they know? You open onto the mystery of a street continually crossed by people, a street inaccessible to any and every thought, real, impossibly

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real, certain, unknowingly certain, with a mystery of things beneath the stones and beings, with death making the walls damp, and the hair of men white with destiny, driving the wagon of everything down the road of nothing. Today, I'm

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defeated, as if I'd learned the truth. Today, I'm lucid, as if I were about to die and had no greater kinship with things than to say farewell. This building and this side of the street becoming a row of train cars with a whistle for departure

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blowing in my head, and my nerves jolting and bones creaking as we pull out. Today, I'm bewildered, like a man who wondered and discovered and forgot. Today I'm torn between the loyalty I owe to the outward reality of the tobacco shop

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across the street and to the inward reality of my feeling that everything's a dream. I failed in everything. Since I had no ambition, perhaps I failed in nothing. I left the education I was given, climbing down from the window at the back

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of the house. I went to the country with big plans but all I found was grass and trees. And when there were people, they were just like others. I step back from the window and I sit in a chair. What should I think about? How should I know what

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I'll be? I, who don't know what I am, but what I think? But I think of being so many things. And there are so many who think of being the same thing that we can't all be it. Genius? At this moment, a hundred thousand brains are dreaming, they're

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geniuses like me, and it may be that history won't remember even one. All of their imagined conquests amounting to so much dumb. Now, I don't believe in me. Insane asylums are full of lunatics with certainties. Am I who have no certainties more

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right or less right? No, not even in me. And how many garrets and how many non-garrets of the world are self-convinced geniuses at this moment dreaming? How many lofty and noble and lucid aspirations? Yes, truly, lofty, and noble,

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and lucid, and perhaps even attainable, will never see the true light of day or find a sympathetic ear. The world is for those born to conquer it, not for those who dream they can conquer it, even if they're right. I've done more in dreams

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than Napoleon. I've held more humanities against my hypothetical breasts than Christ. I've secretly invented philosophy such as Kant never wrote. But I am and perhaps will always be the man in the garret, even though I don't live in one.

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I'll always be the one who wasn't born for that. I'll always be merely the one who had qualities. I'll always be the one who waited for a door to open in a wall without doors, and sang the song of the infinite in a chicken coop, and

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heard the voice of God in a covered well. Believe in me? No, not in anything. Let nature pour over my seething head its sun, its rain, and the wind that finds my hair. And let the rest come if it will, or must, or let it not come. Cardiac slaves of

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the stars, we conquered the whole world before getting out of bed. But we woke up and it's hazy, we got up and it's alien, we went outside and it's the entire earth plus the solar system and the Milky Way and the indefinite. Look out there, eat

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your chocolates, little girl. Eat your chocolates! Believe me, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates, and all religions put together teach no more than the candy shop. Eat, dirty little girl, or I'll eat your chocolates. If only I could

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eat chocolates with the same truth as you, little girl. But I think and, removing the silver paper that's tin foil, I throw it all on the ground as I've thrown down life. But at least from my bitterness over what I'll never be, there

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remains the hasty writing of these poems. A broken gateway to the impossible, but at least I confer on myself a contempt without tears. Noble at least in a sweeping gesture, by which I fling the dirty laundry, that's me, with no list into the stream

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of things and I stay home shirtless. Oh, my consoler who doesn't exist and therefore consoles, be you a Greek goddess conceived as a living statue or a patrician woman of Rome impossibly noble and dire, or a princess of the troubadours, all

00:39:15.320 - 00:39:34.130

charm and grace, or an 18th century Marchioness de Colette and aloof, or a famous courtesan from our parents generation, or something modern, I can't quite imagine what. Whatever all of this is, whatever you are, if you can inspire, then inspire

00:39:34.130 - 00:39:55.580

me. My heart is a poured out bucket. In the same way, invokers of spirits invoke spirits, I invoke my own self and find nothing. I go to the window and see the street with absolute clarity. I see the shops, I see the sidewalks, I

00:39:55.580 - 00:40:18.530

see the passing cars. I see the closed living beings who pass see each other, I see the dogs that also exist. And all of this weighs on me like a sentence of exile, and all of this is foreign, like everything else to me. I've lived, studied, loved,

00:40:18.860 - 00:40:34.910

and even believed. And today there's not a beggar I don't envy just because he isn't me. I look at the tatters and sores and false out of each one and I think, perhaps you never lived or studied or loved or believed for it's possible to do all of

00:40:34.910 - 00:40:52.670

this without having done any of it. Perhaps you've merely existed, as when a lizard has its tail cut off and the tail keeps on twitching without the lizard. I made of myself, what I was no good at making and what I could have made of myself, I

00:40:52.670 - 00:41:12.890

didn't. I put on the wrong costume and it was immediately taken for someone I wasn't and I said nothing and was lost. And I went to take off my mask, it was stuck to my face. When I got it off and saw myself in the mirror, I had already grown old.

00:41:13.970 - 00:41:32.360

I was drunk and no longer knew how to wear the costume that I haven't taken off. I threw out the mask and slept in the closet, like a dog tolerated by the management because it's harmless and I'll write down the story to prove I'm sublime.

00:41:35.330 - 00:41:52.940

Musical essence of my useless verses, if only I could look at you as something I had made instead of always looking at the tobacco shop across the street, trampling on my consciousness of existing like a rug a drunkard stumbles on or a doormat stolen

00:41:52.940 - 00:42:13.850

by gypsies, and it's not worth a thing. But the tobacco shop owner has come to the door of his shop and is standing there. I look at him and the discomfort of a half-twisted neck compounded by the discomfort of a half-grasping soul is what I

00:42:13.850 - 00:42:34.640

bring with me. The tobacco shop owner will die and I will die. He'll leave his signboard, I'll leave my poems, his sign will also eventually die, and so will my poems. Eventually the street where the sign was will die and so will the language in which my

00:42:34.640 - 00:42:50.000

poems were written, then the whirling planet where all of this happened will die. On other planets of other solar systems, something like people, will continue to make things like poems and to live under things like signs, always one thing

00:42:50.000 - 00:43:08.630

facing the other, always one thing as useless as the other, always the impossible as stupid as reality. Always the inner mystery as true as the mystery sleeping on the surface, always this thing or always that or neither one thing nor the other.

00:43:11.060 - 00:43:31.070

But a man has entered the tobacco shop, to buy tobacco? And plausible reality suddenly hits me. I half rise from my chair, energetic, convinced, human, and will try to write these verses in which I say the opposite of what I feel. I light

00:43:31.070 - 00:43:48.620

up a cigarette as I think about writing them. And in that cigarette, I savor a freedom from all thought. My eyes follow the smoke as if it were my own trail and I enjoy for a sensitive and fitting moment, a liberation from all speculation.

00:43:49.400 - 00:44:09.050

And an awareness that metaphysics is a consequence of not feeling very well. And I leaned back in my chair and keep smoking. As long as destiny permits, I'll keep smoking. If I married my mart washer woman's daughter, perhaps I would be

00:44:09.050 - 00:44:27.140

happy. I get up from the chair, I go to the window. The man has come out of the tobacco shop. Is he putting change into his pocket? Oh, I know him! It's unmetaphysical Esteves. The tobacco shop owner has come to the door with him as if by

00:44:27.140 - 00:44:44.090

divine instinct, Esteves turns around and sees me up at my window. He waves hello, and I shout back, "Hello, Esteves!" and the universe falls back into place without ideals, without hopes, and the owner of the tobacco shop smiles.

00:44:49.370 - 00:45:06.080

To me that is an absolute tour de force, and one of the things that I love about Pessoa is that even in these half comic poems, he is of course talking about very, very serious feelings and attitudes that we all have, and I think that we can, at least in

00:45:06.080 - 00:45:27.710

part if not in- always, openly recognize as our individual poems. Let me read you the last poems now that he wrote, and I'm skipping some longer ones. And if I have time, I will read some of them. But here are the poems that were written the last three

00:45:27.710 - 00:45:50.750

or four years of Pessoa's life in the guise of Alvaro de Campos. Obviously, de Campos really talked to our friend because he killed off Caeiro in around 1917 and yet he still kept writing poems about him till 1930 saying that Caeiro

00:45:50.750 - 00:46:15.260

would come back from the dead to dictate to him. But the only real one of these heteronyms who evolves, changes, and grows old is Alvaro de Campos and it is de Campos who is writing the last poems, or who Pessoa is writing the last poems as. So, let me

00:46:15.290 - 00:46:35.820

read some of these later poems of Alvaro de Campos from 1934 and 1935. I GOT OFF THE TRAIN I got off the train and said goodbye to the man I'd met. We'd

00:46:35.820 - 00:46:52.980

been together for eighteen hours and had a pleasant conversation, fellowship on the journey, and I was sorry to get off, sorry to leave this chance friend whose name I never learned. I felt my eyes water with tears. Every farewell is a death. Yes, every

00:46:52.980 - 00:47:12.240

farewell is a death. In the train that we call life we are all chance events in one another's lives and we all feel sorry when it's time to get off. All that is human moves me, because I'm a man. All that is human moves me, not because I

00:47:12.240 - 00:47:31.170

have an affinity with human ideas or human doctrines, but because of my infinite fellowship with humanity itself. The maid who hated to go, crying with nostalgia from the house of the people who always mistreated her. All of this, inside my

00:47:31.170 - 00:47:58.980

heart, is death and the world's sadness. All of this lives because it dies inside my heart. And my heart is a little larger than the entire universe. Here is another poem called:

00:47:58.980 - 00:48:16.200

THE OLD ANGUISH This old thing which I've carried around for centuries, overflowed from its vessel, in tears and wild imaginings, in nightmarish dreams without terror, in sudden huge emotions

00:48:16.200 - 00:48:37.890

that make no sense. It overflowed. I'm at a loss to know how to live life with this malaise that's crumbling my soul. If at least I could be positively crazy. But no: always this in-betweenness, this almost being crazy, this "it might be

00:48:37.890 - 00:49:00.030

tha." This. An inmate in an insane asylum is at least someone. I'm an inmate in an asylum without an asylum. I'm consciously crazy, I'm a lucid lunatic, I'm alien to everything and equal to all: I'm sleeping while awake with dreams that are

00:49:00.030 - 00:49:23.070

madness because they are not dreams. I'm-poor old house, my last childhood. Could you ever have imagined I'd so desert myself? What happened to your boy? He went nuts. What happened to the one who slept soundly under your provincial rooftop?

00:49:23.640 - 00:49:45.030

He went nuts. What happened to who I was? He went nuts. Today, he's who I am. If at least I had some kind of religion. The religion, for example, of that idol from Africa we had at home, the one I mentioned. It was unsightly, it was grotesque, but

00:49:45.030 - 00:50:06.780

it contained the divinity of everything that's believed in. If I could believe in some old idol or other -- oh, Jupiter, Jehovah, humanity -- any one would do, for isn't everything merely what we think it is? Shatter, heart of painted glass.

00:50:11.850 - 00:50:28.470

And the next one called, "Impassively," is him looking at, obviously, a woman crocheting and suddenly he realizes that the act of crocheting is really a metaphor for what he does with his life and he is no different from the

00:50:28.470 - 00:50:45.860

woman who is crocheting. IMPASSIVELY Impassively, indifferently, distractedly, I looked at the crochet you make with two hands. I look at it from the top of a

00:50:45.860 - 00:51:09.350

non-existent hill, stitch after stitch, forming a cloth. Why are your hands and soul entertained by this riddled thing through which a burnt match can be pushed? But then again, why do I criticize you? No reason. I also have my crochet, it dates from

00:51:09.350 - 00:51:35.900

when I began to think, stitch on stitch, forming a whole without a hole. A cloth, and I don't know if it's for a garment or for nothing. A soul, and I don't know if it's for feeling or living. I watch you intently. I stopped seeing you. Crochet,

00:51:36.200 - 00:52:05.710

soul, philosophy, all the religions of the world, all that entertains us in the leisure hours of our existence -- a hook needle, a loop in silence. All right, here's some symbols, and he's written several things

00:52:05.710 - 00:52:17.630

on symbols. This is called: SYMBOLS? I'M SICK OF SYMBOLS Symbols? I'm sick of symbols. Some people tell me that everything is symbols. They're telling me nothing. What

00:52:17.630 - 00:52:35.630

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

00:52:35.630 - 00:52:55.610

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

00:52:55.610 - 00:53:11.150

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

00:53:11.150 - 00:53:32.720

side 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 has left her? Symbols? I don't want symbols. All I want -- poor

00:53:32.750 - 00:53:59.780

frail and forlorn creature -- is for the boyfriend to get back with the seamstress. And I will continue with this. This is another one called: "The Ancients Invoke- The Ancients Invoke the Muses," and as you

00:53:59.780 - 00:54:21.590

know, poets would -- in the beginning of epic poems such as the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Aeneid -- poets would evoke, "Oh muse, come and give me the strength to be inspired, and write this poem down and make it great poetry." So here is Alvaro

00:54:21.590 - 00:54:35.420

de Campos, one of the heteronyms, or alter egos of Fernando Pessoa, who we've been talking about tonight, reading or talking to and about muses, and it's called: THE ANCIENTS INVOKED THE MUSES

00:54:37.430 - 00:55:02.570

The ancients invoked the Muses. We invoke ourselves. I don't know if the Muses appeared -- no doubt it depended on what was invoked and how -- but I know that we don't appear. How often have I leaned over the well that's me and bleated, "Hey!" to

00:55:02.570 - 00:55:25.820

hear an echo. I've heard no more than I've seen -- the faint dark glimmer there in the useless depths of the well. No echo for me, just the hint of a face, which must be mine since it can't be anyone else's. Just an almost invisible luminously

00:55:25.820 - 00:55:58.900

smudged image there in the depths, in the silence and the deceptive light of the depths. What a Muse! So again, we get this joking jocular tone, which we have seen and heard before tonight. I will end with his birthday poem, and

00:56:03.340 - 00:56:16.280

this gives you again Alvaro de Campos' attitude. BIRTHDAY Back when they used to celebrate my birthday, I was happy and no one was dead. In the old house, even my birthday was a centuries

00:56:16.280 - 00:56:32.270

old tradition and everyone's joy, mine included, was as sure as any religion. Back when they used to celebrate my birthday, I enjoyed the good health of understanding nothing, of being intelligent in my family's eyes, and of not having the hopes that

00:56:32.270 - 00:56:49.490

others had for me. When I began to have hopes, I no longer knew how to hope. When I began to look at life, it had lost all meaning for me. Yes, that person I knew is me, that person with a heart and family, that person of quasar rural evening spent all

00:56:49.490 - 00:57:09.080

together, that person who was a boy they loved, that person, my God, whom only today I realized I was, how far away, not even an echo when they used to celebrate my birthday. The person I am today is like the damp in the hall at the back of the house

00:57:09.110 - 00:57:24.590

that makes the walls mildew. What I am today, and the house of those who loved me trembles through my tears. What I am today is they are having sold the house, it's all of them having died, it's I having survived myself like a spent

00:57:24.590 - 00:57:46.220

match. Back when they used to celebrate my birthday- Oh, how I loved like a person those days. How my soul physically longs to return there, the metaphysical and carnal journey and a duality of me to me. To eat the past like the bread of hunger, with

00:57:46.220 - 00:58:02.840

no time for better between the teeth. I see it all again, so vivid it blinds me to what's here, the table with extra play settings, fancy of China, more glasses, the sideboard full of sweets and fruits and other things in the shadow of the

00:58:02.840 - 00:58:22.370

lower shelf. Elderly aunts, different cousins, and all for my sake, back when they used to celebrate my birthday. Oh, stop it, art. Don't think. Leave thinking to the head. Oh, my God, my God, my God, I no longer have birthdays. I endure, my

00:58:22.370 - 00:58:42.680

days add up, I'll be old when I'm old, that's all. If only I'd stolen my goddamn past and brought it away with me in my pocket. When they used to celebrate my birthday. His name was Fernando Pessoa. He was a man who made up many

00:58:42.680 - 00:58:53.780

identities, three different poets, seventy-two identities in all. He is one of the most nique poets of the century and e was the subject of tonight's oetry Show. This is Mort-