fernando pessoa

Written in a Book Abandoned on the Trip

I come from around Beja.
I’m going to the centre of Lisbon.
I’m not bringing anything and won’t find a thing.
I feel the exhaustion from what I won’t find.
And my yearning comes not from the past or the future.
In this book I have inscribed the image of my dead design:
I was, like the grasses, and never uprooted.

(as Alvaro de Campos)

trans by Edward Honig and Susan M. Brown

fernando pessoa and why portugal's cycle lanes have a something extra

O Tejo from Abilio Vieira on Vimeo.

i picked this up across at copenhagenize. what a lovely idea!

the keeper of sheep goes along something like this

The Keeper of Sheep II

My gaze is clear like a sunflower.
It is my custom to walk the roads
Looking right and left
And sometimes looking behind me,
And what I see at each moment
Is what I never saw before,
And I’m very good at noticing things.
I’m capable of feeling the same wonder
A newborn child would feel
If he noticed that he’d really and truly been born.
I feel at each moment that I’ve just been born
Into a completely new world…

I believe in the world as in a daisy,
Because I see it. But I don’t think about it,
Because to think is to not understand.
The world wasn’t made for us to think about it
(To think is to have eyes that aren’t well)
But to look at it and to be in agreement.

I have no philosophy, I have senses…
If I speak of Nature it’s not because I know what it is
But because I love it, and for that very reason,
Because those who love never know what they love
Or why they love, or what love is.

To love is eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not to think…


trans richard zenith

you can find this and more pessoa here

fernando pessoa

Loophole

In my dark moments
When there's nobody inside me
And everything's a fog and walls
Of all life and possesses

If, for a moment, I raise my forehead
From where I'm bogged down in myself
And see he far horizon
Full of the setting or floating sun,

I come alive again, I exist, aware
And even if it's all illusion
The exterior where i forget myself,
There's nothing more i wish or ask for.
I surrender my heart to it.

trans Edwin Honig and Susan M Brown

fernando pessoa

It's raining. there is silence, since the rain itself

It's raining. There is silence, since the rain itself
Allows no sound but peacefulness.
It's raining. The sky's asleep. when the soul's been
widowed
From what it cannot tell, feeling's blind.
It's raining. My self (who I am) I take leave of...

The rain is so peaceful it loosens itself in the air
(Not even seeming cloudy) so that it seems
It's not a rain but a whispering
Which in its whispering forgets itself.
It's raining. Nothing to long for...

The re's no wind hovering, there's no sky I feel.
It's raining far away and imperceptibly,
Like something true that lies to us,
Like something overwhelming wish deceiving us.
It's raining. Nothing in me feels...

trans Edwin Honig and Susan M Brown