A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  IN LIEU OF AN AUTHOR’S PREFACE

  ALBERTO CAEIRO

  from THE KEEPER OF SHEEP

  from THE SHEPHERD IN LOVE

  from UNCOLLECTED POEMS

  RICARDO REIS

  THE CHESS PLAYERS

  ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS

  OPIARY

  TRIUMPHAL ODE

  EXCERPTS FROM TWO ODES

  MARITIME ODE

  SALUTATION TO WALT WHITMAN

  LISBON REVISITED (1923)

  LISBON REVISITED (1926)

  CLOUDS

  ENGLISH SONG

  SQUIB

  CHANCE

  NOTE

  ALMOST

  OXFORDSHIRE

  AH, A SONNET...

  MAGNIFICAT

  ORIGINAL SIN

  HOMECOMING

  POEM IN A STRAIGHT LINE

  LÀ-BAS, JE NE SAIS OÙ...

  HOLIDAY RETREAT

  FERNANDO PESSOA- HIMSELF

  from SONGBOOK

  ABDICATION

  from SLANTING RAIN

  SOME RANDOM VERSES

  PASSERBY

  DIARY IN THE SHADE

  NON NECESSE EST

  NOTHING

  THE SCAFFOLD

  GLOSSES

  CHESS

  AUTOPSYCHOGRAPHY

  INITIATION

  SENHOR SILVA

  FREEDOM

  UN SOIR À LIMA

  ADVICE

  AT THE TOMB OF CHRISTIAN ROSENKREUTZ

  PEDROUÇOS

  from MESSAGE

  FROM PART TWO / PORTUGUESE SEA

  FROM PART THREE / THE HIDDEN ONE

  RUBA’IYAT

  from FAUST

  ENGLISH POEMS

  POEMS OF ALEXANDER SEARCH

  EPIGRAM

  GOD’S WORK

  THE CIRCLE

  A TEMPLE

  from 35 SONNETS

  from THE MAD FIDDLER

  THE LOST KEY

  THE KING OF GAPS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  A LITTLE LARGER THAN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE: SELECTED POEMS

  FERNANDO PESSOA was born in Lisbon in 1888 and spent most of his childhood in Durban, South Africa. In 1905 he returned to Lisbon to enroll in college but eventually dropped out, preferring to study on his own. He made a modest living translating the foreign correspondence of various commercial firms, and wrote obsessively—in English, Portuguese, and French. He self-published several chapbooks of his English poems in 1918 and 1921, and regularly contributed his Portuguese poems to literary reviews. Mensagem, a collection of poems on patriotic themes, won a prize in a national competition in 1934. Pessoa wrote much of his greatest poetry in the guise of his three main “heteronyms”—Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis—whose fully fleshed biographies he invented, giving them different writing styles and points of view. He created dozens of other writerly personas, including the assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares, fictional author of The Book of Disquiet. Although Pessoa was acknowledged as an intellectual and a poet, his literary genius went largely unrecognized until after his death in 1935.

  RICHARD ZENITH lives in Lisbon, where he works as a freelance writer, translator, and critic. His translations include Galician-Portuguese troubadour poetry, novels by António Lobo Antunes, Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and Fernando Pessoa and Co.—Selected Poems, which won the 1999 American PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

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  First published in Penguin Books 2006

  Translation, introduction, and notes copyright © Richard Zenith, 2006

  All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint “My gaze is clear like a sunflower,”

  “I’m a keeper of sheep,” “I got off the train,” and “Autopsychography” from Fernando Pessoa & Co.,

  edited and translated by Richard Zenith. Copyright © 1998 by Richard Zenith.

  Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Pessoa, Fernando, 1888-1935.

  A little larger than the entire universe : selected poems / Fernando Pessoa ;

  edited and translated by Richard Zenith.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN : 978-1-4406-2700-2

  I. Zenith, Richard. II. Title.

  PQ9261.P417A6 2006

  861’.141—dc22 2005056561

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  Introduction: The Birth of a Nation

  Old and enormous are the stars.

  Old and small is the heart, and it

  Holds more than all the stars, being,

  Without space, greater than the vast expanse.

  FROM PESSOA’S RUBA’IYAT

  IN THE MANNER OF OMAR KHAYYAM

  Much has been made of Fernando Pessoa’s last name, which means, in Portuguese, “person.” Famous for splitting himself into a multitude of literary alter egos he dubbed “heteronyms”—more than mere pseudonyms, since he endowed them with biographies, religious and political views, and diverse writing styles—Pessoa claimed that he, within that self-generated universe, was the least real person of all. “I’ve divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor,” explained Pessoa in a passage about the genesis and evolution of his fictional writer friends. “I subsist,” he explains further on in the same passage, “as a kind of medium of myself, but I’m less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all.” The lack of any certainty about who he is, or even if he is, stands out as a major theme in Pessoa’s poetry, and he uses the heteronyms to accentuate his ironic self-detachment. In a prose piece signed by Álvaro de Campos, a dandyish naval engineer and the most provocative of the heteronyms, we read that “Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist.”

  Pessoa’s last name, in light of his existential self-doubts, is especially appreciated by the French, since personne means not only “person” but also, as in the phrase Je suis personne, “nobody.” Pessoa, however
, was very definitely, or very indefinitely, somebody. And that his last name meant “person” was surely not incidental to his monomaniacal concern with his own personhood, its multiplication and its perpetuation, through his literary oeuvre. I mean that Pessoa, who may or may not have believed in God but who very much believed in destiny and in destiny’s symbols and signposts, had his name to live up to. It was, in a slight way, determining.

  More determining, of course, was the cultural and family setting in which Pessoa, as a person and an artist, developed. For all his obsession with the inner life, he was keenly aware of how outer circumstances shape and define who we inwardly are. In a prose piece titled “Environment,” signed by Campos and published in 1927, he observed: “A place is what it is because of its location. Where we are is who we are.” But while he recognized the defining role of environment, Pessoa was by no means a hard-core determinist. In a longer version of the piece just cited, he wrote: “The man who jumped over the wall had a wall to jump over.” The wall, being a necessary condition, was in that sense determining, but not compelling, since the man could choose whether or not to jump it.

  Pessoa’s particular genius is at least partly explained by the two environments that shaped him—Lisbon, where he spent his first seven years and the whole of his adult life, and Durban, South Africa, where he lived during his intellectually and emotionally formative years, from age seven to seventeen. Pessoa’s basic personality was no doubt set in place before he moved with his mother from Lisbon to Durban, but his literary output was clearly the product of the meeting, or clash, of those two environments and their different languages, their different cultures. It’s as if English culture—and Durban, at the time, was more thoroughly, traditionally English than England itself—were a wall that the young, displaced Pessoa successfully jumped over, while remaining forever and utterly Portuguese.

  Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was born in 1888 on June 13, the feast day of St. Anthony and an official holiday in Lisbon, where elaborate festivities are organized in honor of the saint and in honor of the city itself. St. Anthony’s day is Lisbon’s day, and no birthday could be more appropriate for Pessoa, who is his native city’s quintessential writer. Even more, I would argue, than Kafka is Prague’s writer, or Joyce is Dublin’s writer. Though Kafka spent his whole life in Prague, the city isn’t much felt in his writing, except in the diaries. Joyce, on the other hand, wrote obsessively about the city of his birth, but from memory, having spent very little time there as an adult. Pessoa rarely left Lisbon as an adult, and he wrote about the city both directly (especially in The Book of Disquiet) and out of imaginative memory, through the voice of footloose Álvaro de Campos, who on return visits from Britain (where he was supposedly living) produced the nostalgia-imbued “Lisbon Revisited (1923)” and “Lisbon Revisited (1926),” two of his most striking poems.

  Both of Pessoa’s parents fostered his cultural development. The family lived just opposite Lisbon’s opera house, where as a small boy Pessoa may have attended a performance or two with his father, an impassioned music critic as well as a government employee. Pessoa’s mother, who was from the Azores, was unusually well educated and taught her son to read and write at a very young age. But Pessoa’s early Lisbon years were also, ultimately, marked by loss and separation. One month after his fifth birthday, his father died from tuberculosis, and six months later his baby brother died. Between the two deaths, the family moved to smaller quarters. In the following year Pessoa’s mother met her second husband, a naval officer who left Lisbon some months later to take up a new post in Mozambique, and soon thereafter was made the Portuguese consul in Durban, capital of the English colony of Natal.

  The prospect of his mother moving to Africa to be with her future husband and of Pessoa perhaps being left behind with relatives prompted his first poem, in July of 1895:

  TO MY DEAR MOTHER

  Here I am in Portugal,

  In the lands where I was born.

  However much I love them,

  I love you even more.

  This quatrain is often cited as a demonstration of Pessoa’s filial devotion, but it is also proof of his unusual affection for his homeland—“unusual,” since a seven-year-old whose personal relationships are mostly with his immediate family could hardly be expected to have a very clear idea of what a nation is, much less feel emotionally attached to one. Throughout his life Pessoa, though he would criticize the Portuguese for being provincial and revile Portugal’s political leaders and its economic system, was fiercely loyal to the country of his birth.

  In February of 1896 Pessoa and his mother, married to her second husband by proxy two months earlier, arrived at Durban, where the boy was enrolled in a primary school run by Irish and French nuns. Three years later he entered Durban High School, where he received a demanding, first-rate English education. Pessoa, despite being a foreigner, immediately stood out as a brilliant student, and when he sat for the Matriculation Examination of the University of the Cape of Good Hope, in 1903, he won the Queen Victoria Prize for the best essay in English. There were 899 examinees.

  Pessoa’s African experience was basically a bookish experience. Though liked well enough by his classmates, he did not participate much in sports or cultivate many friends, and neither the town of Durban nor the surrounding country seems to have left much of an impression on him. Among the hundreds of literary pieces he wrote during his adult life, Africa was never explicitly referred to until the year of his death, when in “Un Soir à Lima,” a poem evoking his mother playing the piano at home in Durban, he recalls listening to her from next to the window while he gazed outside at the vast African landscape, lit up by the moon. Pessoa’s environment, while in Africa, was mostly that of English literature: Shakespeare and Milton, the romantic poets—Shelley, Byron, Keats, Wordsworth—and Dickens and Carlyle for prose. He also read and admired Poe.

  Pessoa very nearly became an English writer. What “saved” him for Portuguese literature was a year-long trip that the family—Pessoa, his mother and stepfather, and several children born to the new couple—made to Portugal in 1901-02. It was there that Pessoa wrote his earliest known poems in Portuguese (besides the above-mentioned quatrain to his mother), one of which was published in a Lisbon newspaper in 1902. Both in Lisbon and on the island of Terceira, where the family went to visit Pessoa’s mother’s sister, the budding adolescent, who suddenly had a lot of time with no schoolwork to fill it, invented a series of elaborate, make-believe newspapers containing news, jokes, commentary and poems credited to a team of fictional journalists, several of whom he invented biographies for.

  Back in Durban, Pessoa, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, invented Charles Robert Anon, his first alter ego to sign a substantial body of creative writing, including poems, short stories, and essays. This English proto-heteronym was soon joined by the even more prolific Alexander Search, either while Pessoa was still in Durban or else shortly after his definitive return to Lisbon, in the fall of 1905. Search, who likewise wrote in English but was supposedly born in Lisbon on the same day as Pessoa, expressed, like Anon, the intellectual concerns and existential anxieties of a young man on the threshold of becoming an adult. Pessoa, in a certain way, remained forever on that threshold. Instead of getting down to the practical business of living, he continued to wrestle with theoretical problems and the big questions: the existence of God, the meaning of life and the meaning of death, good vs. evil, reality vs. appearance, the idea (is it just an idea?) of love, the limits of consciousness, and so on. All of which was rich fodder for his poetry, thriving as it did on ideas more than on actual experience.

  In December of 1904 Pessoa took the Intermediate Arts Examination and received the highest score in Natal, which would have earned him a government grant to study at Oxford or Cambridge, but there was a hitch: applicants had to have spent the four previous years at a Natal school. Because of the trip he made to Lisbon in 1901-02, Pessoa was disqualified. Instead of going to England, the
precocious seventeen-year-old returned to Lisbon, where he studied literature at a college for almost two years before dropping out. He earned no academic credits, having missed the first year’s exams due to illness, and the second year’s exams due to a student strike. While at the college and afterwards, he spent long hours at the National Library studying Greek and German philosophy, world religions, psychology, and evolutionary thought (cultural and social more than biological). He read a wide range of Western literature, especially in French (Hugo, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Rollinat, among others), in English, and in Portuguese, his readings in this last language filling a serious lacuna in his South African education.

  And he wrote steadily: poetry, fiction, philosophy, sociology, and literary criticism. During his first years back on home turf he occasionally wrote in Portuguese, somewhat more often in French (Pessoa’s solitary French heteronym, Jean Seul, emerged in 1907), and most of all in English. Pessoa’s ambition, even after he had returned to Lisbon, was to become a great poet in English, and he continued to produce poems in that language up until one week before his death. In 1917 he submitted a book-length collection of verse, The Mad Fiddler, to a London publisher who quickly rejected it, but one of the book’s poems appeared three years later in the prestigious magazine Athenaeum. In 1918 Pessoa self-published two chapbooks of his English poems, with two more following in 1921, and these received guarded praise from the British press. About his 35 Sonnets (1918), a note in the Times Literary Supplement remarked: “Mr. Pessoa’s command of English is less remarkable than his knowledge of Elizabethan English. . . . The sonnets . . . will interest many by reason of their ultra-Shakespearean Shakespeareanisms, and their Tudor tricks of repetition, involution and antithesis, no less than by the worth of what they have to say.” The Glasgow Herald was also complimentary, but noted “a certain crabbedness of speech, due to an imitation of a Shakespearean trick.”