Original subtitles

Into another may death dismember me, to be left

As the nothing of nothing, or nothing of all;

I end at last this hollow conscience, Of existence all that is left.

I hear a whistling and heated tumult Of shadow-intentions and of impulses

Brimming from conscience's chalice To flow over life...

...only a feeling Of desiring eternal peace.

Vague ambition of shutting one's eyes Vague hope not to open them again.

Weary yearning to live no longer;

My exhausted brain neither laments Nor is able to lament.

Disorderly Ideas mingled in my ancient being

Emerge from it, to disappear With no clues to the understanding.

Dazzled already, vain, incoherent Bitter, vague disorganizations

That no sufferings permit.

Come then oh Death! I hear your footsteps!

Your bosom Must be soft and your heartbeat

A strange and hazy melody Transporting into sleep and beyond.

Nothing passes now,

Nothing, nothing...

Go away, Life!

Ah, the horror of dying!

And meeting the mystery face to face Powerless to avoid it, powerless...

Lisbon, 30th November 1935 Hospital of St. Louis

Look Daisy: when I die you're to tell my friends there in London,

although you may not feel it,

that you're hiding the great sorrow of my death.

You'll go from London to York, where you were born

(so you say... for I believe nothing you tell me),

and tell that poor boy who gave me so many happy hours,

although you may not know it, that I've died...

even he, whom I thought I loved so, won't be bothered at all.

Then go and give the news to that strange Cecily

who believed that I'd be great...

Damn life and those that live it!

THE OTHER ONE

about Fernando Pessoa and Mário de Sá-Carneiro

At the top of the first page can be read July 25 - 1907,

and at the bottom of the second, also headed by the date July 25,

is the conclusion: no more.

At nineteen, Fernando Pessoa was keeping a diary in English.

Not surprising.

In Durban, where his stepfather was Consul,

he had spent his youth: West St. Convent and the High School.

He returned to Lisbon to study at the University.

He leaves the course a year later during a prolonged strike:

The agitated times of Lisbon 1910, the end of monarchy and the republic.

Mário de Sá-Carneiro, two years younger,

had also study only a few months at Coimbra University.

He perhaps wasn't even interested in which he was going to study.

At that time Mário de Sá-Carneiro

was a young man, well-dressed always,

son of an indulgent father who took him to Paris every year

and enabled him to keep up to date with French literature;

At nineteen, Sá-Carneiro begins acquiring friends, literary projects,

goes to theatres and frequents cafés.

Tall, with extravagant gestures, he was then quite handsome

but, with the years, and an increasing girth,

he came to be called, and to call himself, "the great bear".

In 1912 he meets Fernando Pessoa,

who is then dividing his life between his literary pursuits,

since the establishment of the Íbis printing-office

to the creation of "Águia" magazine,

and earning his living from foreign commercial correspondence.

They meet in 1912,

little after Sá-Carneiro's first short-stories book was published,

13th October, 1912 a little before Sá-Carneiro's decision to "go and study" in Paris.

This departure, moreover, was announced in the society columns:

On yesterday's express to Paris proceeded Mr. Mário de Sá-Carneiro,

one of the most brilliant young men of his generation.

Many of Sá-Carneiro's friends turned out to bid him farewell:

General Sá-Carneiro and Captain Carlos de Sá-Carneiro,

grandfather and father of our friend,

Messrs. Mário Duarte, Fernando Pessoa, Ponce de Leão, the actors...

In Paris he becomes a passionate sightseer of the "great city".

He associates with artists, goes to shows, frequents cafés, and writes.

Paris, 16th November 1912 But already he is invited by the fear of himself and of the future.

He writes to Fernando Pessoa:

I'm suffering because I feel it's almost time for play to finish

and for me to go back into class.

I've lived this last few days in constant agony,

even coming to the point of crying all night.

Most painful of all is that the others can't understand my misery

because, in short, I drew up the following table the other day:

I am in Paris - I am totally bored

I've got money - I'm extremely unhappy

I can do what I like - I'm suffering a great deal

I haven't any worries - My desolation is limitless

I have no regrets...

In the "disappearing" in my letter there was a revolver at the temples;

but there was something else besides. I find two ways of disappearing;

one easy and brutal - deep water, the report of a pistol;

the other smooth and difficult: the suffocation of every ideal,

the despoiling of all that is beautiful or precious in us.

Ah! how often I have a violent desire to achieve this "disappearance"!

But how? How?

When I meditate for hours on suicide,

what results is a painful regret of having inevitably to die one day

without having killed myself.

(However, I'm sure that won't be my end. As I say in Incest:

"My friends can set their minds at rest.")

...That S-C liked me very much; "also who doesn't like you?"

A glimpse of sun. Went on to Mayer's office,

from there to the Third District to get Mário's marriage certificate.

Twice to Lavado's office; he wasn't there either time. Did nothing.

Finished letter to Sá-Carneiro, and one, for Mother,

long and bitter, of which I will make a copy.

I sent two poems to Sá-Carneiro,

Arm with no Body and The Voice of God.

Lavado office (Rua da Prata) at 5 p.m. Nothing to do.

At home all night. Slept in the evening.

Awake from midnight to 4 a.m. writing various pieces on Oscar Wilde,

education, the aristocracy theory.

Read W.W. Jacobs until I fell asleep to quieten my stimulated mind.

This morning I got a postcard from Álvaro Pinto.

I feel very anaemic and exhausted, although highly excited.

25.3.1913 Haven't looked at this diary for days.

Don't remember this day.

27.3.1913 To the "Theatre" to get some cash for the tramway.

Left at 8.30.

Only Boavida and Camarinha there. At home at night.

Slept heavily from 10 till morning,

but a sad sleep, full of dreams, physically painful.

Omitted due to delay and forgetfulness.

My dear Fernando, Here comes another poem.

I did it, let's see, in three hours, at this café, amid noise,

with a retired soldier, quite senile, beside me, who talks to himself.

I think it really beautiful, I am amazed at having done it.

What's happening to me at the moment is very interesting.

How is it that suddenly I can intermix such a different art?...

...for the first time I find myself composing outwards from within.

Before feeling these lines, I had a foreboding of them,

they weighted heavy within me...

I foresee a great interval, I rave every colour,

I live in purple and die in sound...

Alcohol

Neither opium nor morphine.

What burnt me was alcohol More rare and penetrating:

I am delirious for myself alone

Morning so strong it darken my skies.

Dispersion

(A Sunday in Paris Reminds me of the vanished person

Who felt with emotion Sundays in Paris:

For a Sunday is family, Is well-being, is simplicity,

And those who look at beauty Have neither well-being nor family).

(A Sunday in Paris Reminds me of the vanished person

Who felt with emotion Sundays in Paris:

For a Sunday is family, Is well-being, is simplicity,

And those who look at beauty Have neither well-being nor family).

The poor youth of yearning... You, yes, you were someone!

And it was for that also That you drowned in yearnings.

And it was for that also That you drowned in yearnings.

And it was for that also That you drowned in yearnings.

While Fernando Pessoa, prejudiced and wary of the symbolists,

with the patriotic fervour of a recently-naturalized Portuguese,

sought a Lusitanian direction for the "new poetry"

(he was then the critic of Águia),

Sá-Carneiro was naturally finding

the links of the chain that fastened him to European art:

Baudelaire; Rimbaud; Mallarmé

Meanwhile, my dear, strange and inconceivable

are many of the admirable sonnets by Mallarmé.

Impressionism, decadence, futurism, cubism.

'Boredom is the malaise resulting from the disintegration

within the psyche between intentions, constellated in terms of value,

and the space of time in which they are inserted.'

1913 was, for Sá-Carneiro, the most satisfactory for him as a writer.

Dispersion, yes, while still in Paris with passionate interest in the city

and, immediately after his return to Lisbon on holiday in June 1913,

after meeting his friends again, especially Fernando Pessoa,

the short stories The Time Embalmer,

Mystery, I Myself the Other,

and Lucio's Confession which he finishes in September.

For God's sake, and thinking of your Eternal Salvation

see if it would be possible to turn up here tomorrow, the 31st,

anytime, in the morning or in the afternoon.

Tomorrow I'll have the dispersed proofs of Dispersion.

Which, if you don't lend a hand,

will certainly appear as a positive stream of misprint!

So, gird on one more crown of thorns St. Fernando (proof-reading person).

To which talented souls are condemned!

Warmest wishes, Sá-Carneiro.

Under the experienced eye of Pessoa emerges the edition of Dispersion,

Sá-Carneiro's first volume of poetry which will go on sale in 1914.

This year also sees the publication of Lucio's Confession.

Sá-Carneiro creates in fiction the "other" which is inside him

and which he had already sensed.

At the beginning of the novella,

the narrator meets the person who is to become his greatest

- almost inseparable and insufferable - friend.

"...in this way we were obscurely two,

neither of us knowing exactly if the other wasn't himself,

if the uncertain other person would live..."

Fernando Pessoa In the Forest of Alienation

'Having spent ten years in prison for a crime I didn't commit

and for which I offered no defence;

dead as regards life and dreams,

unable to hope for anything now and wanting nothing,

I am at last making my confession: that is, demonstrating my innocence.

Perhaps you won't, of course you won't, believe me. It hardly matters.

I have no stake in yelling that I didn't kill Ricardo de Loureiro.'

Lúcio will meet Ricardo at a party given by an American woman,

a millionairess avid for exotic and a voluptuous exhibitionism,

in a morbid and spectacular setting.

"The lights shone more densely, sharply, more penetrating,

streaming down now from the dome

and the curtain rose on an indeterminate Asiatic temple...

To the sound of sultry, harsh and distant music,

she appeared, the redhead... And began to dance..."

'Oh, how to convey her silent, humid, crystal-cool steps;

the surge of her undulating flesh; the alcohol of her gilded lips -

the harmony diffused in her movements;

the diffracted horizon that her whirling aroused, hazily...'

'The doors opened and lost, hatless,

we found ourselves in the street, on fire, perplexed...

The cool night air cut into us and woke us up,

and as if we had come out of a dream the three of us had in common,

we anxiously looked at each other, in dumb amazement...'

Today the sky is monotonous like the idea of never making port.

The fine rain is vacant...

The Time savours of having been...

Nothing in the way of beds for ships!

Absorbed in its own distraction, your gaze is a senseless curse...

In one and the same night,

Fernando Pessoa gave birth to the first of his great heteronyms:

Alberto Caeiro, the "master".

8th March, 1914 He wrote more than 30 poems,

and after those, he wrote "Slanting Rain" signed by Fernando Pessoa.

I have never kept sheep, But it is as if I have kept them.

My soul is like a shepherd, Acquainted with wind and with sun

And, led by the Season's hand, Follows and gazes.

At evening, leaning on the windowsill,

Knowing aslant of the fields opposite,

I read the book of Cesário Verde Until my eyes smart.

What sorrow I feel for him! A peasant In the city, a prisoner set free.

But his manner of looking at houses...

"Essential constitution of things"...

"Essential meaning of the Universe"...

All this is false, all this means nothing.

It's incredible that one might thing of such things.

It's like thinking of causes and ends.

When the beginning of morning is breaking

And through the trees

A vague lustrous gold

Gradually smothers the darkness.

My sky-blue gaze Is calm as sunlit water.

It is thus blue and calm for It neither question nor is amazed...

Alberto Caeiro

My dream of an infinite port crosses this landscapes

And the colour of flowers is transparent as sails of great ships

That cast off from the quay dragging in the water for shade

The outlines in the sun of those ancient trees.

And the shopkeeper smiles among the memories of my childhood...

And the music ceases like a wall come tumbling down

The ball rolls over the precipice of my interrupted dreams,

And atop a blue horse, the maestro, yellow jockey turning black,

Says his thanks, laying his baton on the fugue of a wall

And bows with a smile, a white ball on his head,

White ball that disappears down his back...

Fernando Pessoa

Alberto Caeiro On an exceedingly clear day

When one wished one had worked hard

So as to have done with work that day,

I glimpsed, like a road between trees,

What might be the Great Secret,

That Great Mystery of which the false poets speak.

I saw that there is no Nature, That Nature does not exist,

That there are hills, valleys, plains,

That there are trees, flowers, grass,

That there are rivers and stones,

But that there is no whole to which this belongs,

That a real and true totality Is a disease of our ideas.

Nature is parts without a whole.

This is perhaps the mystery they speak of.

It was this, that without thinking or stopping,

I judged correctly must be the truth

That people try to find and do not find

And that I alone, because I did not set out to find it, found.

Fernando Pessoa

I took the Tagus, in such a way That I forget I am looking,

And suddenly this hits me In collision with the musing -

What is being-river, and flowing? What is me watching me-being-it?

Of a sudden, I feel little; Empty, the moment, the place,

Everything is suddenly hollow - Even my act of thinking.

Everything - I and the world about -

Remains more than exterior.

Everything loses being, remaining, And disappears from my thought.

I remain unable to link Being, idea, named soul

To me, to earth and to heaven...

And suddenly I find God.

12th June, 1914 Two other heteronyms emerge: Ricardo Reis, poet of classical odes,

and Álvaro de Campos, poet of the free odes of futurism.

Come sit down with me, Lydia, by the riverside,

Peacefully let us watch its course and learn

That life passes, and that we are not holding hands.

(Let us hold hands).

Then let us, grown-up children,

Consider that life passes and waits not,

Nothing leaves and never returns,

Goes on its way to a far-off sea, close to Fate, further than the gods.

You will be sweet to my memory remembering you like this

by the river,

Sorrowful pagan girl with flowers in her lap.

Ricardo Reis

In the painful LIGHT of the great electric lamps of the factory

I am feverish and write...

European hours, productive, jammed in Between machinery and useful tasks!

Large cities come to a halt in cafés, oasis of noisy uselessness

Where rumblings and motions of the Useful are crystallized and hurry

And the wheels, and the cogwheels and the bearings of the Progressive!

Oh factories, oh laboratories, Oh music halls, oh Lunar Parks.

Oh battleships, oh bridges, Oh, floating docks -

In my turbulent and fiery mind I have you as with a lovely woman,

Completely, as one as a lovely woman one does not love,

Met by chance and oh so interesting.

Come on! and the rails and the engine-rooms and Europe!

Come on and hurrah for all-me and everything, engines working, whoa!

Leaping over everything with everything! Hoop-la!

Oh, to be everyone and everything!

London Álvaro de Campos

Ricardo Reis

No better destiny than self knowledge

Can the one who enjoys his mind enjoy.

Preferable to know One is nothing, than be ignorant:

Nothing inside nothing.

If there is not in me the power that overcomes

the three Fates and the mausoleums of the future,

May the gods already grant me The power to know it;

And beauty, uncreatable by my craft, I might enjoy as external and given,

Repeated in my passive eyes, Lakes that death dries up.

Álvaro de Campos Alone, on the desert quay, this summer morning,

I look over to the bar, towards the Indefinite, and am pleased to see,

Small, black and clear, a steamer coming in.

It comes from afar, distinct, classic, in its own way.

I look at the steamer from afar, with a great independence of soul,

And within me a wheel begins to turn, slowly.

The whole of maritime life! everything in maritime life!

All this fine seduction insinuates itself into my blood

And indeterminately I brood over voyages.

Oh, the lines of distant coasts, flattened by the horizon!

Oh, the capes, the islands, the sandy shores!

The maritime solitudes like certain moments in the Pacific.

The waters call me. The tides call me.

The distances call me, lifting a corporeal voice.

All maritime epochs felt in the past, calling.

You, my English sailor friend Jim Barns, you it was

Who taught me that age-old English cry

That so poisonously sums up For complex souls like mine

The waters' confused calling,

The unknown and implicit voice of all that is the sea,

Of shipwreck, distant voyages, and perilous crossings.

I hear you from here, now, and wake up at any thing.

The wind shudders. Morning rises. The heat expands.

I feel my cheeks grow red. My conscious eyes dilate.

The ecstasy in me arises, increases, advances,

And with a blind tumultuous roar

The lively turning of the wheel is emphasized.

Broken keels, ships to the bottom, blood on the seas!

The decks running with blood, fragments of bodies!

Fingers chopped off on the bulwarks! Children's heads, here, there!

People with eyes out of sockets, screaming, howling!

I heed only the sea, the prize, the sack!

I feel beating me, beating within me, just the veins of my temples.

The sensation in my eyes is drops of hot blood!

Oh pirates, pirates, pirates! Pirates, love me and hate me!

Mingle me with you, pirates!

Your fury, your cruelty, how they speak to the blood

Of that woman's body which once was mine and whose rut survives!

It would be interesting to hang sons in view of their mothers

(Yet I feel I'm their mothers),

To bury alive on desert isles children of four years old,

Taking their parents in boats there to see

(But I tremble for a son I don't have who is sleeping peacefully at home).

I incite a cold craving for maritime crimes,

But my imagination will not keep me company.

Pass, slow steamer, pass, do not stay...

Pass from me, from my sight, Leave the depths of my heart.

Get lost in the Distance, in the Distance, God's own mist,

Get lost, follow your destiny and leave me...

Who am I to weep and question? Who am I to talk to you and love you?

Who am I to be perturbed at seeing you?

It leaves the quay, the sun grows bright, rising golden,

The roofs of the quays buildings gleam,

All this side of the city shines...

Go, leave me, become First the ship in midstream,

standing out so clearly,

Then the ship on the way to the bar, small and black,

Then vague dot on the horizon (oh my anguish!),

Ever more blurred on the horizon...

Then nothing, but I and my sadness, And the great city now in full sun,

And the present and naked time like a quay without ships,

And the slow turn of the crane, that, like a compass rotating,

Traces a semicircle of I know not what emotion

In the affected silence of my soul...

Letter to Casais Monteiro 1935 It was the triumphal day of my life, I shall never have another like it.

I started with a title: The Keeper of Sheep.

And then someone appeared in me

whom I immediately called Alberto Caeiro.

Forgive the absurd phrase: my master had appeared in me.

This sensation was such that, after the thirty-odd poems were written,

I immediately took more paper and wrote, straight off as well,

the six poems that make up Slanting Rain by Fernando Pessoa.

Immediately and totally...

It was the return of Pessoa - Alberto Caeiro to Pessoa by himself.

Or, rather, it was Pessoa's reaction to his inexistence as Alberto Caeiro.

Once Caeiro had appeared, I then set about finding him some disciples.

I wrested the latent Ricardo Reis from his false paganism,

found cut and adapted his name to him,

for I was then already seeing him.

In a flash, and in opposite derivation to that of Ricardo Reis,

a new individual appeared to me, impetuously.

In one go, and at the typewriter, with neither break nor correction,

the Triumphal Ode by Álvaro de Campos emerged -

the Ode with that name and the man with the name he has.

How do I write in the name of those three?...

Caeiro out of pure inspiration not knowing that I would write.

Ricardo Reis after abstract deliberation, realized in an ode.

Campos when I feel a sudden impulse to write and don't know what...

Be that as it may, my friend, split yourself into two as you will,

feel outside yourself as you wish, what's certain is that

the one who is capable of writing those pages, if he does not feel,

is a genius at knowing how to feel that which you tell me

you are more and more exiled from.

At each new line of yours I read I feel my pride increasing:

my pride in being the one whose work is closest to yours

- near like the Earth to the Sun -

in counting you among my most intimate friends and, in short:

because you like what I write. This is no declaration of love:

but all this, all this sumptuousness and your nobility of soul

make me as much your friend as I can be to anyone:

filling me with tenderness, liking, as with my father,

to lean my head on your arm and to have you here, near me,

as I'd like to have my father, my nurse, or any object,

any beloved animal of my childhood!

I just ask you to excuse the way I express myself-

but the only one which expresses my total sincerity.

Illusions of glory, "of amazement" no longer exist in me.

I don't mean that my work aspires to great heights,

or know if it will reach them. But I'm sure they are heavily gilded.

(perhaps with fake gold, but gilded anyway) with many-coloured lights,

and spangles revolving,

multi-coloured smoke, aromas, make-up, lakes,

naked dancers, Parisian actresses, restaurant dining-rooms...

In Paris again, Sá-Carneiro writes to Fernando Pessoa on 3rd June 1914

asking him to send him the money from the sale of the copies of Beginning

which he must pay off in full.

Thinking the request detestable,

he asks Pessoa to "tear this letter from your soul"

However, constant requests for money follow,

obliging Pessoa to find it.

The reason is simple: his father, formerly with him in Paris,

had left for Africa and would only later be able to send him money.

It is a restless time for him.

Ghastly! Quite ghastly! ...I can't stay here.

I'm waiting for some money, and then I'm off. To Lisbon, where else!

Am I staying in Barcelona? Ah-hah!...

But there's going to be a great mess-up in my life.

That's the word...

This war!... It's weird how everything has gone wrong for me!

A complete disgrace.

Last echoes from Barcelona!

I leave tomorrow at daybreak...

His aunt's departure for Switzerland having left him homeless,

Pessoa settled into a small attic-room above the Alentejan Dairy.

'Such was his financial and emotional misfortune,

that we will find him in the dismal garret of a dairy

at 12, Rua Almirante Barroso,

in temporary accommodation thanks to the veneration of an illiterate man

who used to follow the Brasileira set,

drinking in the poet's words...'

'The illiterate man, Mr. Sengo,

only met Pessoa 18 months after his aunt had gone to Switzerland.

Mr. Sengo did not frequent the Brasileira nor was part of the group.

He rented a room to Fernando Pessoa and never lent him anything

(except, perhaps, writing paper).'

I'll wait for you from 5.30 - 6.30 in the Brasileira do Chiado.

It had to be! It hasn't been my day.

It began with a bad penny, and ended with you not turning up!

To hell with you! What a bore!

But I beg you to be tomorrow between 10.45 and 11.00 at the Montanha.

For God's sake turn up. I've got proofs!

Your great friend and grateful- -brother-in-Mystery, M. S-C.

We are incapable of revolt and agitation.

We did carry out a revolution, but to implant the same thing as before.

We stained that revolution with our softness towards the defeated...

Portugal needs rabble-rousers.

Those that we have had, or have wanted to have, have failed us.

How could it not be so, seeing that they come from our race?

The few figures who have from time to time emerged in our political life

with appreciably disturbing qualities soon made a mess of things

and betray their mission.

What is the first they do?

They organize a party.

They fall into order through ancestral fate.

We, the young ones, shall work to disturb souls, to disorient minds.

Let us cultivate mental disintegration like a prize flower.

Let us build a Portuguese anarchy.

Let us be scrupulous about the morbid and the corrupting.

And our mission, just by being the most civilized and modern,

will also be moral and patriotic.

A hackney-carriage is more beautiful than the Victoria of Samothrace.

If there is one main conclusion to be drawn from the magazine we founded,

about the success and the fate of poetic works, it's the following:

that any author, insofar as he is great and original at the same time,

has always had to create the aesthetic sense

by which he is to be appreciated;

for what belongs to himself

he must not only clear,

but often open up his own route;

a case of Hannibal crossing the Alps.

The Sailor, static drama.

I saw no boat through the window...

I wanted to see one and I spoke to you of it to avoid pain...

Tell us now what it was you dreamed on the seashore.

I dreamed about a sailor who may have been shipwrecked on a distant island.

There were a few palm trees and indistinct birds flew among them.

I didn't see if they ever perched.

Since escaping from the shipwreck, the sailor had been living there.

As he had no means of returning to his homeland,

and remembering it caused him pain,

he set about dreaming of a homeland he had never had;

he began making another homeland his, another kind of country

with other kinds of landscapes, and other people.

All the time he constructed this false homeland, dreaming always,

by day in the scanty shade of the large palm trees,

the pointed edges outlined on the sandy, warm ground;

at night, stretched out on his back on the beach, unmindful of the stars.

Oh to have had a tree that speckled on my outstretched hands

the shadow of a dream like that!

Let her talk...Don't interrupt her...

She knows words that the sirens taught her...

I am falling asleep so I can hear her... Tell, my sister, tell...

My heart aches at not having been you while dreaming on the seashore.

For years and years, day by day,

the sailor raised his new homeland in a continual dream.

Go on speaking, my sister, go on. Don't stop telling us,

and take no notice of the shining day.

It never shines for whoever rests his head on the bosom of dreamed hours...

Don't wring your hands.

It makes the sound of a furtive snake.

Speak some more to us of your dream.

It is so real that it has no meaning.

Just to think of listening to you makes music play in my soul...

Yes, I shall tell you more of him.

I even need to tell it to you.

As I tell it, it's to myself as well that I tell it...

There are three listening.

Three, no...

I don't know...

I don't know how many...

Everything was different to what he had had...

neither the country

nor the people,

nor his own past appeared as they had been...

Do you insist that I continue? It is so painful to speak of this!

Now, because I talk of this to you

I would prefer to be telling you of other dreams...

Go on, although you may not know why

The more I listen to you,

the less I belong to myself

Would it really be good. If you were to continue?

Ought any story to have an end?

In any case speak...

It matters so little what we do or do not say...

We keep vigil in the hours that pass.

Our occupation is as useless as Life.

One day, when it had rained heavily,

and the horizon was more blurred,

the sailor became tired of dreaming...

He then wanted to recall his real homeland,

but he saw that he remembered nothing,

that it did not exist for him...

Between April and July 1915,

the second number of Orpheu comes out.

Collaboration between the poseur and futurist Santa-Rita Pintor,

the mental-patient Ângelo de Lima,

the disquieting prosewriter Raul Leal,

the feminist Violante de Cysneiros, pseudonym of Cortes Rodrigues.

Pessoa-Álvaro de Campos and Sá-Carneiro

wrote the explosive and almost pornographic

Maritime Ode, and Manucure.

The success and scandal exceeded that of the first number.

Manucure by Sá-Carneiro In the sensation of buffing my nails,

Sudden inexplicable sensation of tenderness,

I include everything in Me - piously.

Meanwhile here I am alone in the Cafá

Oh futuristic beauty of merchandise!

Sackcloth for parcels How I'd like to toga myself in You!

Wood for crates How I long to sink my teeth in You!

And the nails, the ropes, the hoops...

But above all, how they sparklingly dance

To my eyes audacious with beauty, The inscriptions of all these parcels

- Black, red, blue or green -

Cries of current, Commerce & Industry In cosmopolitan transit:

FRAGILE! FRAGILE!

843 - AG LISBON

It's in the air that everything undulates!

It's there that everything exists!

With the break-up of his family (a stepmother he does not accept,

and his dependence on a distant paternal economic protection)

and the panic of stagnating in Lisbon,

Sá-Carneiro rushes back to Paris

confiding only to Pessoa the real reason for his flight.

My friend, pay great attention to this, otherwise unimportant, letter

which won't give you any bother. Rest easy then.

About problems in my private life

I don't want to know a thing, whatever had happened.

I don't want to know a thing, not a thing!...

Above all, what gives me the shivers is the mirrorless idea

of inevitably dropping anchor again in the Martinho.

I don't know why but that café

always had the feel of a place where one goes and ends one's life:

strange refuge, perhaps, for those with no more illusions,

who have nothing but a penny to pay for their coffees everyday.

Yesterday I sent you a postcard complaining about your silence.

Forgive me. If you knew how I need your letters!

It's just that you are, in all truth, my only chum.

And far away, I feel it more keenly and far away, having your letters,

this friendship seems to me perhaps closer, more intimate.

My life will proceed,

on the surface of rivers that are sometimes sidestreets

and sometimes blind alleys...

Hotel de Nice, Paris 1915

My dear friend: This morning I received your wonderful letter.

I'm angry at your supposing you could bore me with your mental crisis.

Bu besides the honour of having those pages in my hands,

how beautiful, great, luminous and disturbing,

even artistic... It's the novelist in me speaking...

is everything my dear Fernando Pessoa tells me about himself.

Shall I tell you about my impression? Up until reading those pages today,

I've never understood the mysterious words in I Myself the Other:

"Shall I have become a nation?"

My position is much more terrible;

For me beauty is enough, even fundamentally mistaken beauty.

Outstandingly resonant and brilliant beauty, of infinite mirrors

convulsed with a thousand colours - a lot of varnish and a lot of gold:

theatre of magic and apotheoses with wheels of fire and naked bodies.

Fear and sleepwalking, sardonic nonsense guffawing across everything.

This was the aim of my work. I think I've achieved it at times.

But at other times...

The amazing reality of things Is my everyday discovery.

Each thing is what it is,

And it's hard to explain how this delights me, and is enough for me.

Enough to exist in order to be complete.

I have written many poems. I will write many more, of course.

Each poem of mine says this, And all my poems are different.

Because each thing that exists is a way of saying this.

Sá-Carneiro enthusiastically

outlines the "definitive" summary of Orpheu 3,

yet a fortnight later, 13th September,

he announces in despair;

"Unfortunately we have to give up Orpheu"

and explains that the mere appearance of N° 3 under his responsibility,

or even his mere collaboration, would unduly show his father

(who, much put out, had paid the bill for N°. 2) his "insubordination".

Then, systematically, he continues shouting in his letters to Pessoa:

don't let the booksellers go! while asking him for critiques,

alterations, or opinions on the poems

that he carries on writing for Indications of Gold.

Other anxieties develop and get worse.

Tearing to pieces for Sá-Carneiro. Inner siege for Pessoa.

Once more I'm the victim of all conceivable crises,

but now it's an all-out attack. By a tragic coincidence,

crises of various types have descended on me.

My psyche...

...is in a state of siege.

My intellectual crisis has returned, the one I told you about,

but this time in a more complex form,

because, although revived under the old conditions,

new factors have come to completely muddle it up.

I'm in a frenzy and an intellectual agony that you can scarcely imagine.

I'm not sufficiently lucid to tell you things...

I had to translate theosophical books.

I knew nothing about the subject. Now I know the essence of the system.

It shook me to a point that I'd consider impossible,

as regards any religious system.

The vast nature of this philosophy-religion;

the notion of strength, of mastery, of greater-than-superhuman knowledge

that the theosophical works distil, disturbed me a great deal...

Theosophy terrorizes me by its mystery and occult vastness,

it revolts me by its essential humanitarianism and apostolism,

it attracts me for being so like a "transcendental paganism",

this is the name I give to the way of thinking I had achieve,

it repulses me by being so like Christianity, which I don't accept.

It's the horror and attraction of the abyss affected in the soul's beyond.

A metaphysical terror, my dear Sá-Carneiro!...

I want so much, but there's no way. The tombola spins ever more wildly.

Above all I can't stay still. It's a fever, a fever.

When I go to F. da Costa's house I always tear the fringes of the rug

and the other day I broke one of his ashtrays.

Tedium in my soul, in my body, and what's worse! in the intestines.

Pimples on my forehead and neck.

All this caused by my impossible and incurable state of soul.

An immense desire to get drunk, but in my bones.

Without literature,

extravagant things, memories surely, come into focus:

last night, a chicken of a blue grass roasting on the spit;

and circular pieces of embroidery, hiding something revolting.

The embroidery was white and pink and the bastards moved, they moved!

Where it'll all end I don't know.

What was of interest in me once is now waste-paper.

I'm fed up! fed up! fed up!

I deserved to have had a nightcap put on each night

- honestly, dear chap...

The lamps have been lit, night falls, life is replaced.

No matter how, it's necessary to go on living.

My soul burns, as physically as if it were a hand.

I am in everyone's way and they jostle me.

My farm in the country, would that there were less than a train,

and the decision to leave, between me and you.

So I stay, I stay...

I'm the one who always wants to leave.

And always stays, always stays.

Until death will I stay, even if I go, stay, stay, stay...

O night, make me human, fraternal and solicitous.

I'd so like to touch life, to be me - but to be able to touch it...

There's no way: ever more lost is The skill of knowing how to seize it.

To live at home like everyone else. To be quite mad in my books -

But get to the end of the month with My expenses religiously paid up.

Not to be afraid to follow girls and Invite them to have me inside them -

To open windows in my Ivory Tower, In a word, and have no more scenes.

To have the strength to break the threads

of this gear that's out of mesh,

Not to send telegrams to my father. Not to loiter about Paris, as I do...

My poor friend: I am mad. There can be no doubt about it now.

If I tell you the contrary in an edifying letter - don't believe it.

Sá-Carneiro is mad. Madness that can be let out on the streets, of course.

But madness. Like Ângelo de Lima without the shouting.

Literature, sensationalism - all over. Just the loony-bin now.

I have to be so careful in front of people or else I drop bricks.

I make a lemon of myself, get stuck for words and drop my napkin.

It's ghastly. For I'm perfectly aware of all this.

I'm cracking up, cracking up! I can't feel terra firme beneath my feet.

It's as if I'm ploughing fog.

My coloured ribbons, my bows, my plumes, my filigree!

So much rapture lost, so many caresses squandered!

The dubious masker, the liar who passed incognito through life;

The sham King-moon, the falsely amazed;

Right deep down the stringent coward...

Instead of Page, presumptuous fool...

His snow-white soul, revulsion at vomit...

His spirit sung as if untamed A homosexual and hasty lackey...

Nerveless, desireless, the milksop...

(His heart perhaps moved by strings...)

In spite of his yells to the Ideal,

The degraded, the gross, the disloyal,

The bloated one belching astral Empire,

The impotent Wizard, the Corpulent Sphinx...

On your own?

I'm alone.

I don't like to be alone. Do you?

- Am I disturbing you? - No, not at all.

- May I seat with you. - Of course.

You don't look like a Frenchman, what are you doing in Paris?

I...

Why are you nervous? Are you hot?

I'd love another glass of champagne.

If you're a poet,

you need inspiration.

Yes, you're right. I feel at home with you.

My dreams are making a mockery of me.

And my nerves, the bastards, no one to make them let go of the trapeze.

There are great transverse loathing over my life.

I don't even know what this means but it's exactly what it feels like.

Less and less can I stop being me

- and day by day it causes me more pain.

If, at least, these pillars, opposite me, were sudden to walk...

Please, don't forget to tell me what you think about this.

Send me a pretty and sombre name for an English woman.

Lady Helena something (Helena in English is Ellen I think)

Don't forget.

This Helena is the woman he fell in love with in Paris...

Hold me.

I'd like to be a woman to spread out Beside my friends in cafés,

I'd like to be a woman to spread Powder on my face, in cafés.

What are you saying?

I'd like to be a woman not to have to think of life.

And knows lots of old gents whom I could ask for money.

I'd like to be a woman to spend the whole day long talking of fashion

and making up gossip - highly amused.

What are you saying? Are you listening to me?

Shut up, you can't understand a thing that I'm saying.

I'd like to be a woman to caress my breasts

and excite them in the mirror before going to bed -

I'd like to be a woman so this confusion suited me.

That frankly, in a man, could never be excused.

To have lots of lovers, to deceive them every one, even the favourite.

As I'd like to deceive my fair-haired lover, the slimmest,

With a fat and ugly boy, with extravagant manners...

I'd like to be a woman to excite those who looked at me,

I'd like to be a woman to be able to say no...

I'm leaving. Shall we meet tomorrow?

Paris, March 5th 1916.

My dear friend:

It's about something of crucial, but crucial importance to me.

I won't go into details and excuse me using as few words as possible.

As soon as you get this letter

go and find my old nurse at 78, 3rd floor Praça dos Restauradores.

(She is alone on my house in Lisbon, as my father's wife is in L.Marques)

Show her the letter I enclose for her,

read it and take care of everything.

Pawn the chain for the best price.

I'm asking you to give to Mr. Fernando Pessoa,

that gold chain left by my mother.

He will take care of everything...

My poor little boy!

Forgive me for everything. I humbly beg you on my knees.

I received today the 160 francs.

I sincerely thank you for everything.

My dear Sá-Carneiro:

I'm writing to you today out of emotional necessity,

an anxious longing to talk to you. I've really nothing to tell you.

Only this - that today I'm at the bottom of a bottomless depression.

The absurd phrase says it all for me.

I'm in one of those days when I never had a future.

Only an immovable present with a wall of anguish all round.

The bank of the other side of the river,

while it is that one, is never the one this side.

That's the inmost reason for all my suffering.

There are boats for many ports,

but none for life not to hurt, nor disembarkation for one to forget.

All this happened a long while ago, but my grief is older still.

Today, 14th March, at ten past nine at night,

my life savours of this.

In the garden that I glimpse through the silent windows of my seclusion,

they have thrown all the swings right over the branches;

they're coiled up real high,

so not even the idea of truant me can have a swing to forget the time.

Like the mourner in Sailor, my eyes smart from having thought of crying.

Life hurts me bit by bit. Nibbling away through crevices.

All this is in very small type in a book with the binding coming apart.

If I don't post this letter today, tomorrow on re-reading it

I might delay it by copying some of it into the Book of Restlessness.

But that won't rob it of my sincerity nor of its painful inevitability.

These are the latest news.

There's also the state of war with Germany,

but even before that the pain made one suffer.

On the other side of life,

these must be the subtitles of a casual caricature.

Madness must bring about abandon from that which one suffers,

a shrewd enjoyment of the shakings of the soul, not so different from them.

What colour...

...would feeling be?

Fondest regards, and ever yours.

I don't know where this will end, perhaps the gears won't smash me up?

But it's so lovely to talk rubbish:

"Let's carpet Life against us and against the world..."

Saving a miracle, next Monday the 3rd (or the evening before)

Mário de Sá-Carneiro will take a strong dose of strychnine

and disappear from this earth.

That's how it stands.

But I'm finding it very hard to write this letter

because of the ridiculousness I've always found in "farewell letters".

It's not worth grieving for me, my dear Fernando...

Today I'll live my last happy day.

Today I'll live my last happy day.

I'm very glad. There are a thousand years between me and tomorrow.

What amazes me is the stillness of things...that I see more clearly

in greater relief because I shall shortly be leaving them.

But let's not get all literary. By the same post (or tomorrow)

I shall send registered my book of verses for you to look after

and which you can make use of as you think fit.

You can have the poems published in a collection, in magazine, etc.

Add the one: "When I die let them beat on tin cans".

Look, even Up There, tell me "gossip" talk to me of sensationalism...

Goodbye.

If I don't manage to arrange a sufficient dose of strychnine,

I'll throw myself in front of the Underground. Don't be angry with me.

It's today that I die

by throwing myself under the Underground.

Yesterday I sent you my notebook of poems but unstamped.

Please, do what you can to pay the fine if it gets there.

If not, it doesn't matter much

as you've got all my poems in my letters.

Go and tell my grandfather the news of my death

and go and see my nurse.

Tell her that I'm thinking of her and that I send her a great big kiss.

Tell my grandfather too that I embrace him warmly.

Goodbye. Your poor Mário de Sá-Carneiro.

My last letters of no avail

- things are getting worse all the time.

But there was a measure of hope. Until Saturday.

What's going on?

Why are you so disturbed?

I prepared everything for my "death".

I wrote you a last letter and another to my father.

Then I went to leave the pen.

A frantic Miss So-and-So was looking for me...

- It's not fair. I love you. - That has nothing to do with it.

It was 4 o'clock...

She had detailed her sister to go to the North-South station

and she'd been to the Portuguese Consulate which she'd just left...

At this point, who should appear, when one least expects it?

ORPHEU, my friend, ORPHEU!

The Consuls laughed at her... She shouldn't pay any attention

they knew very well who I was... a certain magazine by madmen

of which I'd been the leader, etc... and that I was deranged,

doped with cocaine and other drugs.

I think: Portuguese Consulate.

And do you know what they say to me, those idiots?

They knew you very well.

They say I shouldn't worry about what you say or do.

They said you belong to an irreputable crowd.

All of you were fools or maniacs...

What is ORPHEU?

What have you done?

- What have you done? - Nothing.

She was very pleased to find me -

it upset me - and went to find some money seeing that I had none...

Before that, I caused another scene: I wanted to break a glass on my face.

She snatched my hand away in time. Even so, I split my lip...

Write. Laugh! but deep down be sorry,

very sorry for your Mário de Sá-Carneiro.

Write immediately! WRITE.

Ah, might you always forget the hours While polishing your nails -

Intolerant of flaxen morbidness

While in the mirror you tidied yourself...

She with the doubtful bracelet She with the jade rings and deceits

The dissolute, the dangerous

Deflowered at seven years old

Your past - secret of the grave. You yourself almost overlook it-

Engrossed by the mist You will enmesh him so thickly.

At vacant times, meanwhile, A certain smile would come over you

Which instead of enchantment Brought fear.

It's horrid; sorcery in italics.

Why is it that I had to find someone

I set out to find someone, although on other summits, like me?

I know nothing. Have pity on me.

Lucio's Confession, foreboding a tragic end:

the friend, the "other", killing an invented wife, kills himself

in order that the I, in despair, may survive.

My friend, although in a state of great agitation, opened the letter,

read it quickly and, crumpling it up, threw it down...

Then, he twisted my arm violently. Everything around me swayed.

I felt body and soul disperse into the whirling all around me...

I was afraid I'd fallen into the hands of a madman.

Let's go and see!

Let's go and see!

It's time to dispel the ghosts!

She's all yours!

All yours!

You must believe me...

As if my soul, acquiring a sex, materialized in order to possess you.

She's mine! all mine! I sought her just for you...

But I won't allow you to separate us. You'll see...you'll see!...

With these incoherent, impossible words he was furiously dragging me

towards his wife's suite which was on the second floor.

Oh how dreadful!

As if by witchcraft it was not Marta lying by the window

but my friend, it was Ricardo...

And, yes, at my feet! the still-smoking revolver had fallen!

Marta had disappeared, silently evaporated, like a snuffed-out flame.

Terrified, I let out a strident, rending scream

and overcome with fear, my eyes out on stalks, my hair on end

I threw myself in a crazy rush along corridors and through drawing-rooms.

But the servants ran to help.

26th April, 1916

Only my egoism can save me. But I'm so afraid of absence,

- to lose everything, it wasn't worth kicking out.

Crazy! Crazy! Crazy! Pity me.

So many spills. And humiliations.

What have I done with my poor Pride? Look at my horoscope.

Now, more than ever, is the moment. I'm not afraid...

Add to these two serious reasons...

I'm not going through one of my serious mental crises...

of various kinds at the same time...

On the 26th he came into my office as usual,

after talking for a minute he said - Araújo I need you round at my place

at 8 o'clock sharp, without fail.

So I went...

Then he said:

"I've just taken five flasks of arseniate of strychnine,

please stay".

I ran downstairs for some milk and told the servant to go up with it

while I went to the police station to find a doctor and also a car,

to take him to the hospital all this was quickly done...

Sá-Carneiro was in agony, congested by horrible spasms,

all contorted, his hands clasped,

moments later he expired;

it was twenty past eight;

there was nothing that could save him;

then the room was sealed off by police order

and I went to the station to give particulars.

At 11 o'clock, we went into the room again,

the superintendent, two constables and me.

Rigor mortis set in immediately,

Some three, four hours later,

he was dressed and combed;

horrible, his eyes out of their sockets, mouth open,

hands closed over his belly, legs slightly apart;

soon after dying he took on a greenish colour

which gradually grew more pronounced.

After all these things that I had the courage to witness,

the door was locked once more... ...Only on the 28th at 8 o'clock

was he put in a coffin and this because of my many complaints,

otherwise he'd still be on the bed on the 29th.

When I went into the room I withdrew in fright,

during the night the corpse had swollen so that his suit had split,

black blood was coming from his mouse, nose, eyes, ears,

and added to this an unbearable smell of decomposing.

I had the men with the coffin go in but it was no good, it was too small,

another came (the biggest they had) even so it was still difficult.

Previously I had asked the landlady For a sheet to serve as a shroud...

He was completely covered in blood

and was put thus in the shroud.

The coffin lid screwed down and straps passed round it

for fear of it bursting during the night.

Those whom the Gods love die young, so ancient wisdom has it.

And certainly the imagination, which pictures new worlds,

and art, which simulates them, are the distinguishing marks

of that divine love...

This one died young because the Gods loved him very much...

But for Sá-Carneiro, an artistic and also an innovative genius,

to the indifference that surrounds geniuses was added the ridicule

that pursues innovators, prophets like Cassandra,

of truths that are taken for lies.

But if the country had been another, the fate would not have differed.

Today, more than ever before, any privilege is a punishment...

Glory belongs to gladiators and mimics.

Any uncouth soldier

that the guards compel to be emperor has the supreme decision.

Nothing is born great that is not born accursed,

nor starts off nobly that does not dwindle while growing.

If it is so, so let it be! The Gods wished it thus.

How we were just one, talking! We were like a dialogue in a soul.

I don't know if you sleep...

...quietly

I know that I miss you, I'm one on my own.

It's as if one waited eternally for your certain, familiar life.

There below, in the Arcada Café - Almost at the end of this (...)

Neither king nor law, neither peace nor war,

Defines with profile and being This dull gleam of land

Which is Portugal sorrowing -

Lack-lustre brilliance, never burning That a will-of-the-wisp may confine.

No one knows the things he wants, No one knows the soul that he has,

Nor what is evil nor what is good

(What distant longing weeps at hand?)

All is uncertain and terminal,

All is dispersed, nothing is integral.

Translation by Juliet Perkins

Subtitles by MEDIA RECORDING