Much as he dominated Portuguese poetry through the early years of the twentieth century, the celebrated Fernando Pessoa (1888- 1935) dominates the early selections of this 280-page anthology.
He does so firstly through the work of three of his alter egos – more properly, heteronyms, as he called them - and finally with a selection from his work written under his actual name, Fernando Pessoa.
Because he wanted to air different styles of poetry and different facets of putative poetic personalities, Pessoa invented other poets, wrote the poems and even gave the poets their own charming biographies.
The book begins with the work of his heteronym Alberto Caeiro, whose poems are rooted in the countryside. There follows the work of Ricardo Reis, who drew from Greek and Roman sources. Then we have the verses of Álvaro de Campos, a naval engineer who has travelled the world but concludes: “Im beginning to know myself./ I don’t exist.”
Alvaro de Campos’ poem Oporto-Style Tripe is delightfully rueful, to coin a phrase, exploring disappointment about a meal which points to deeper anxieties, not necessarily those of the gourmand. The telling mention of love underlines this, although the reader hardly needs it, having got the message already.
I know this many times over,/ But if I asked for love, why did they bring me/Oporto-style tripe that was cold?
Pessoa also invented several dozen lesser known poets or heteronyms who wrote in Portuguese, English and French. As well as Portuguese, he wrote some of his own poems in English (he spent nine years of his childhood in Durban, South Africa.)
Richard Zenith is fascinating on the poet in his illuminating introduction. “He broadly divided poets into bleeders, whose writing is an overflow of what they intensely feel, and crutch poets like himself, who write to compensate for what they lack in feeling.”
In the poem This, written under his actual name, Pessoa is agent provocateur, reflecting on the question of just how authentic, if at all, poetic emotion may be in a poem, when you take away the scaffolding.
They say I lie or feign/In all I write. Not true. It’s simply that I feel/ By way of imagination. The heart I never use.
Among the most sensual work in the anthology is that of Sophia de Mello Breyner who celebrates Crete with gusto. Although it is entirely possible that she has lived on the island, you sense a tourist, eager to use her time to the utmost, to get in touch with ancient Greece, not someone flaunting a showy foreknowledge of the place.
The Minotaur begins simply:
In Crete/Where the Minotaur reigns/ I swam in the sea.
A few lines on and the poet writes:
No drug entranced me hid me protected me/ I drank only retsina and poured on the ground the god’s portion
On the other hand, existential angst has set in for the poet Jorge Sena at his half century. Maybe he needs a fortnight in Crete.
At fifty I’m a confused being,/ not like at twenty, thirty, or forty,/but profoundly confused. I don’t know/ If I love life or cannot stand it. (At Fifty…)
Born in 1965 in Madeira, José Tolentino Mendonça spent his early years in Angola. His first book of poetry was published in 1990, the year he was ordained a priest. Mendonça has something of that level, introspective vision of Thomas Kinsella.
Those who notice me say I’m poor/ I exist like a tree/ Behind and ahead of me lies the eternal night/ I vacillate, doubt, slip/ And I know: more often than not love is born from error (It’s Time to Be Clear.)
Eugenio de Andrade’s Counterpoint is a lyrical poem about the loss of love which betrays a trace of the work of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, a cited influence on the poet.
I hear it still far off, the snow./ It will come one day with the light of November, but first it will have passed through your lips.
Mário Cesariny (1923-2006) was a founder of the Portuguese Surrealist movement and he published essays on surrealism. His Poem is one of the most profound works in the book and translated beautifully, with cool elegance.
Light occurs through the process/ of eliminating shadows/ Shadows are what exist/they have their own exhaustive life/not on this or that side of the light/ but at its very core
Dedalus, the publishers, are to be commended for drawing attention to this great swathe of work from Portugal, some of whose exemplars paid a price for their public opposition to the dictatorial regime of António de Oliveira Salazar, who was prime minister between 1932 and 1968.
Provocative, profound, sensual, questioning, and sometimes impishly surreal, we are the better for these Portuguese voices. www.dedaluspress.com
Paddy Kehoe
