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Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) - a poet who lived most of his life in a furnished room in Lisbon, Portugal, and who died in obscurity there - has in recent years gained international recognition as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Pessoa was as much a creator of personas as he was of poetry, prose, and criticism. He wrote under numerous "heteronyms," or literary alter egos, and invented fully fleshed biographies for all of them. In the voices of these heteronyms, who supported and criticized each other's work in the margins of his drafts and in the literary journals of the time, Pessoa ranged widely over the possibilities of language. His poetry contains echoes of symbolist verse, Portuguese folk song, and futurist manifesto; it evokes both the breathtaking minimalism of the theory of relativity and the revolutionary exuberance of Leaves of Grass.… (more)
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Where There Are Roses
We Plant Doubt
Where there are roses we plant doubt.
Most of the meaning we glean is our own,
And forever not knowing, we ponder.
Foreign to us, capacious nature
Unrolls fields, open flowers, ripens
Fruits, and
I'll only be right, if anyone is right,
When death at last confounds my mind
And I no longer see,
For we cannot find and should not find
The remote and profound explanation
For why it is we live.
from the Odes
What she does with laundry
Perhaps I would lose
My surfeit of fates.
This particular volume boasts a fifty page introduction to Pessoa's verse, his construction of heteronmyns, separate literary identities along with biographies to purse different methods of verse. It sounds
The author-in-itself Pessoa lived an odd life, largely alone, often drunk, staring out windows with a cigarette and a scrap of a paper awaiting inspiration. There is a mocking sensibility to these poems. The disdain is a source of humor, a rare source apparently. It is fascinating to consider the range exhibited here. I look forward to further explorations into the verse as well as prose of this enigmatic soul.