Time's Passage, by Fernando Pessoa (writing as Álvaro de Campos)

[vexed-vitality.livejournal.com]

For some reason today I remembered some phrases from this poem and thought I'd find the source and share them:

"Everything passes, all in a marching file inside me,
And in me every city of the world buzzes . . .

My courthouse heart, my marketplace heart, my stock exchange
heart, my bank counter heart,
My heart the rendezvous of all humanity,
My park bench, hostelry, boardinghouse, jail cell heart
("Aqui estuvo Manuel antes de ser ejecutado"),
My heart that's a club, hall, auditorium, doormat, ticket booth,
gangway,
Bridge, turnstile, outing, march, journey, auction, fair, festival,
My service window heart,
My parcel post heart,
My letter, luggage, remittance, delivery, heart
My margin, border, summary, index heart:
Hey-ya, hey-ya, hey-ya, my bazaar of a heart.

All dawns are the dawn and are life.
All auroras shine in the same place:
Infinity . . .
Every joy of every bird comes from the same throat,
Every shiver of every leaf from the same tree,
And everyone who gets up early to go to work
Goes from the same house to the same factory by the same road

Roll, huge ball, anthill of consciousnesses, earth,
Roll dawned and dusked, sun-scorched and nocturnal,
Roll in abstract space, in the dimly lit night really
Roll and. . . . .

I feel in my head the speed of the earth's spinning,
And all nations and all persons spin inside me,
Centrifugal yearning, the lust to travel through space to the stars
Beats its fists against the inside of my brain,
Pokes blindfolded needles throughout my body's consciousness,
Makes me get up a thousand times to go to the Abstract,
The Undiscoverable, the There without limits,
The invisible Goal, all the points I'm not at, all at the same time.

Ah! to be neither still nor in motion,
Neither lying down nor standing up,
Neither asleep nor awake,
Neither here nor anywhere else,
To solve the equation of this prolix restlessness,
To know where to be that I could be in all parts,
To know where to lie down that I could stroll on all streets,
To know where. . . . ."

from "Time's Passage" in Fernando Pessoa and Co., pp. 148-49, by Fernando Pessoa, translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (the whole poem runs to 22 1/2 pages)

Comments

[vexed-vitality.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[vexed-vitality.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Every now and then I'll try and dig out some gem to display. They're never hard to find in Pessoa. Btw I corrected a typo: "antil" should be "anthill."

[http://users.livejournal.com/_steelphoenix_/]

I keep coming back to this, through the day... it's got a wonderfully profound beauty.

[vibekiil.livejournal.com]

I've never read any Pessoa before...

I think you just changed my life a bit. Thank you :)

[vexed-vitality.livejournal.com]

Awesome! And you're very welcome. If you want to get into Pessoa, his best single work is The Book of Disquiet, which is poetically charged prose, in Richard Zenith's translation. Good collections of poetry include A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, and Pessoa and Co. As a Barnes and Noble employee I know most stores carry The Book of Disquiet, at least, but get it wherever. And it WILL change your life!

[vibekiil.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I will buy some Pessoa asap :)

He really struck a chord. I can't just how, or what it is about his words. But they struck rather in the same way that Mayakovsky did - though off the top of my head I can't really think of similarites between them...

*off reading Pessoa and figuring out if he and Mayakovsky are kindred spirits*

[morriganviviane.livejournal.com]

Fernando Pessoa, particularly in the guise of Alvaro de Campos, is amazing. If you haven't read The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, you must.