A Centenary Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 1857547241
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
eaten cold, But they brought it to me cold. I did not complain, but it was cold, It can never be eaten cold, but it came cold. Poem in a Straight Line I never knew who had been beaten up. All those I know have been champions in everything. And I, so often shabby, so often dirty, so often worthless, I so often an irresponsible parasite, Unforgivably foul, I who so often could not be bothered to take a bath, I who so often have been ridiculous, foolish, Who have wrapped my feet
I may call my third adolescence, passed here in Lisbon, I lived with Greek and German philosophers and with the French decadents, whose effects were briskly swept from my spirit by Swedish drill and by reading ‘Dégénérance’ by Nordau.’ [Letter to José Osório de Oliveira, 1932] He continued to write poetry – during the first four years after his return to Lisbon (in 1905) in English, not Portuguese. 107 English poems have survived. In August 1907, grandmother Dionísia died, leaving Pessoa a
of modern life in matters of civilization in general. And our great race will set off in search of a new India which has no spacial existence, in ships made from the stuff of dreams. And its true destiny, its supreme destiny, of which the work of the navigators was only the dim earthly prelude, will be realized providentially. [24] The time granted to us for this interview is coming to an end and I should like to ask you one last question. If you had managed to publish the Book of Disquietude
industry. Most of his descendants do not share these illusions. Some see machines as marvellous toys. I think of Valéry Larbaud and of Barnabooth, who resembles Álvaro de Campos in more ways than one. Larbaud’s attitude to the machine is epicurean; the attitude of the Futurists was visionary. They see it as the destroyer of false humanism and, of course, of natural man. They do not set out to humanize the machine but to construct a new human species similar to it. Mayakovsky would be one
of the tyrant in command of physical strength, inorganic and unrepresentative, as found in decadent empires and political dictatorships; be it in the natural despotism of the tyrant endowed with mental power, organic and representative, concealed messenger, when his hour is at hand, of the unconscious destinies of a people. In religion there is metaphysics, which is the religion of captivation, since it seeks to insinuate itself through reasoning, and to explain or to prove something is to wish