Happy Birthday!

Just a small post to note that it's the 120th anniversary of Fernando Pessoa's birth. Fernando Pessoa was/is Portugal's greatest poet and that is saying a lot, in a country of poets.

He dedicated his whole life to writing, whilst keeping jobs on the side to sustain him economically. The most notable fact about his writing was his like for creating heteronyms. The experts have mentioned there were over 70 of them! He created these characters, gave them names, ideas and a specific writing style and he wrote the poems in their names. Let's call it the many faces of Gemini.

For instance his heteronym Alberto Caeiro was really fond of nature and very connected to the Earth. Ricardo Reis was a neo-classical poet, he inherited the themes from Ancient Greece. Álvaro de Campos is more concerned with issues of the modern times, he's very intense and wants to feel everything intensely. They all had specific private lives and jobs, they even wrote letters to each other.

Pessoa also wrote epic poems: he wrote a collection called Message about the past, present and future of Portugal. Some occultists consider this to be prophetic. Pessoa himself was very interested in Occultism and Astrology, one of his heteronyms was an astrologer, he made birth charts for his greatest heteronyms and made the chart of Portugal too. He was also interested in the philosophical issues of his time, writing essays about specific schools of thought.

He even wrote for advertising. If I'm not mistaken he created the first slogan for Coca-Cola in Portugal.

For this and much more he should always be remembered.

I Am Tired

I am tired, that is clear,
Because, at 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 tiredness this brings us,
That in the end the head does still serve for something.

(24.06.1935)
'Selected Poems' translated from Fernando Pessoa by J.Griffin. (http://pintopc.home.cern.ch/pintopc/www/FPessoa/FPessoa.html)

Link: http://www.disquietude.nl/ - an impressive website with english audio of Pessoa's greatest book and animations. It's not how I usually read him but it's interesting.