Marking the 85th anniversary of
Fernando Pessoa’s death – 30/11/1935
Born in Lisbon on 13 June 1888 and educated in Durban, South Africa, Fernando Pessoa is one of the most intriguing literary personalities of the past century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language. This year marks the 85th anniversary of his death in Lisbon in 1935.
As a prolific writer he created more than seventy different characters who had their own different personalities and different ways of writing. They had their own independent life so he preferred to call them heteronyms rather than pseudonyms.
Under his own name, Pessoa wrote various poems and some of these in English and French. He proposed some poetry collections to publishers outside Portugal but these were not received well. Curiously, probably because of Pessoa’s educational background, a reviewer from the Times Literary Supplement commented that the author’s “command of English is less remarkable than his knowledge of Elizabethan English.”
From his collection “35 English Sonnets“, which was self-published in Lisbon in 1918, I have selected some poems and published these in this blog over the past year or so, in original text and translations in Italian:
- As to a chid, I talked my heart asleep
- Chuva obliqua
- How can I think
- How many masks wear we, and undermasks
- If that apparent part of life’s delight
- Like to a ship
- Oh to be idle loving idleness
- Thy words are torture to me
- When I do think my meanest line
- Whether we write or speak or do but look
Poems published in Portuguese under the heteronym of Alvaro de Canpos and translated into English:
Below one of the most popular poems by Pessoa, written under the heteronym of รlvaro de Campos, “Poem in a Straight Line”, translated into English by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown, read by David Yetzer.
Translated Poetry ๐โก๏ธ๐ฎ๐น
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