Selected Poems Fernando Pessoa
I see boats moving on the sea.
Their sails, like wings of what I see,
Bring me a vague inner desire to be
Who I was without knowing what it was.
These are the opening four lines of Fernando Pessoa’s short, six-line poem, I See Boats Moving, with that characteristic air of melancholy that informed some of the work of this great versifier. Some of the work, one emphasises, because Pessoa wrote and published under four different names - his own birth name, which was Fernando Pessoa, along with the pseudonyms, Alberto Caiero, Alvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis.
So not all was introspective melancholia, as he wrote in four, distinct styles to match the personae and he even invented biographies for the three heteronyms, as he called them. As it happens, he wrote the above poem, I See Boats Moving, as Pessoa.
The sentiment is not self-pitying indulgence and any reader might experience that mild sense of unfulfilment which he so skillfully evokes. The poet was born in 1888 in Lisbon, and was reared in Durban, South Africa. He wrote his early verse in English, and later in Portuguese. He died in 1935.
Selected Poems Federico García Lorca
More than any other poet and writer, Federico García Lorca - who died one year later than Pessoa - epitomised the soul of his native Andalusia. His plays and poems strive constantly for a kind of mystical expression.
Lorca was born in 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, an Andalusian village, near Granada, and was a close friend of the composer Manuel de Falla. He was later part of an artistic circle that included the film-maker, Luis Buñuel, and the artist Salvador Dalí. He wrote about primal passions, explored gypsy ballads and folkloric traditions of death and love. However, he elevated the language and voice of his poems with an almost austere grace that is not lost in translation. His long poem, Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías is regarded as one of the most powerful elegies written by a European poet in the twentieth century.
A dear friend of Lorca, Sánchez Mejías was gored to death by a bull in the course of a bull-fight. In his introduction to these Selected Poems, Christopher Maurer writes of a restrained meditation on death in the ten-page Lament, referring too to Lorca’s “angry refusal of consolation.” The poem begins with the incantatory phrase, "at five in the afternoon " a phrase that is repeated solemnly, like a bell tolling throughout.
At five in the afternoon.
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
At five in the afternoon.
The poem appeared in 1935, not long before before Lorca’s own tragic passing in August 1936. Lorca, who was gay, was shot dead after being kidnapped in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. The wherabouts of his remains remain shrouded in mystery.
Victoria Glendinning summarised his gift pithily, as recorded on the back cover of this 300-page bi-lingual selection. “He had duende…a sort of spirit-possession, an unearthly artistic energy.“
Ian Gibson’s magisterial biography, Lorca: A Life - is also highly recommended.
Paddy Kehoe
