A Tribute to Fernando Pessoa

Pessoa

29. Ennui

 Normann Adelsteen, A Cloudy Day On A Fjord

Under a low and sullen sky,
Frowned on by lone winds that moan by
And palely sick for light from high
Till the landscape's soul doth sigh forever,
     Forever sigh,
A black and calmness-haunted river,
That doth a town from itself sever,
Runs with an inner fear and shiver
Like a dim fate forever nigh,
      Nigher forever.

Ay, through that landscape lapsed from dream
Into a horrid truth doth gleam
That self-absorded, self-empty stream
That bears a dream of dream's emotion
      To emotion's dream -
Runs from a land whence is no notion
Towards a possible far ocean;
And they, whose eyes anguished sans motion
Bath in it, emotion's dream
      For dream's emotion. 

in «English Poems I»,
«V - Fever-Garden» by Fernando Pessoa,

Interval

 Emile Bernard

Who whispered in your ear that secret
Few goddesses have heard -
That love full of faith and fear
That's true only if kept secret?...
Who told it to you so soon?

Not me, for I'd not dare tell you.
Not someone else, for none else knew it.
But whose brow lightly grazed your hair
To fill your ear with what he felt?
Was it someone, was it?

Or was it solely your dreaming and I who dreamed you
      dreaming it?
Was it simply some jealousy of mine
That assumed it spoken, since I'll never speak it,
That supposed it done, since I only feigned it,
In dreams not even I know of?

Be that as it may - who was it that so lightly
At your ear, attending vaguely,
Told you of this love present in me
But like the merest passing thought
That yearns and feels not?

It was desire, unvoiced and bodiless,
That, hearing me dream you,
Spoke the phrase eternal, so mad and so unworthy -
The phrase the gods hope for from that joyfulness
By which Olympus is diminished?

in «Poems of Fernando Pessoa»

X. 35 Sonnets

As to a child, I talked my heart asleep
With empty promise of the coming day,
And it slept rather for my words made sleep
Than from a though of what their sense did say.
For did it care for sense, would it not wake
And question closer to the morrow's pleasure?
Would it not edge nearer my words, to take
The promise in the meting of its measure?
So, if it slept, 'twas that it cared but for
The present sleepy use of promised joy,
Thanking the fruit but for the forecome flower
Which the less active senses best enjoy.
     Thus with deceit do I detain heart
     Of which deceit's self knows itself  a part.
 

in «English Poems I», «35 Sonnets» by Fernando Pessoa,
selected by Luísa Nunes, Assíro & Alvim

Rivers

Jennifer  Wu, Gondola

Many rivers run
     Down to many seas.
All my cares are one:
     On what river of these
     Could my heart have peace? 

Two banks to each river.
     None where I may stray
Hearing the rushes shiver
     And seeing the river ever
     Pass, yet seem to stay.

Maybe there is another
     River, but far in Me.
There I may meet the Brother
     Of my eternity.
     In what God will this be?

Nothing; all the leaves
     Fallen from the tree.
Many a river cleaves
     Its way past what grieves
     To what grieves in me. 

in «English Poems I», Four Sorrows by Fernando Pessoa,
selected by Luísa Nunes, Assíro & Alvim