A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
IN LIEU OF AN AUTHOR’S PREFACE
ALBERTO CAEIRO
from THE KEEPER OF SHEEP
from THE SHEPHERD IN LOVE
from UNCOLLECTED POEMS
RICARDO REIS
THE CHESS PLAYERS
ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS
OPIARY
TRIUMPHAL ODE
EXCERPTS FROM TWO ODES
MARITIME ODE
SALUTATION TO WALT WHITMAN
LISBON REVISITED (1923)
LISBON REVISITED (1926)
CLOUDS
ENGLISH SONG
SQUIB
CHANCE
NOTE
ALMOST
OXFORDSHIRE
AH, A SONNET...
MAGNIFICAT
ORIGINAL SIN
HOMECOMING
POEM IN A STRAIGHT LINE
LÀ-BAS, JE NE SAIS OÙ...
HOLIDAY RETREAT
FERNANDO PESSOA- HIMSELF
from SONGBOOK
ABDICATION
from SLANTING RAIN
SOME RANDOM VERSES
PASSERBY
DIARY IN THE SHADE
NON NECESSE EST
NOTHING
THE SCAFFOLD
GLOSSES
CHESS
AUTOPSYCHOGRAPHY
INITIATION
SENHOR SILVA
FREEDOM
UN SOIR À LIMA
ADVICE
AT THE TOMB OF CHRISTIAN ROSENKREUTZ
PEDROUÇOS
from MESSAGE
FROM PART TWO / PORTUGUESE SEA
FROM PART THREE / THE HIDDEN ONE
RUBA’IYAT
from FAUST
ENGLISH POEMS
POEMS OF ALEXANDER SEARCH
EPIGRAM
GOD’S WORK
THE CIRCLE
A TEMPLE
from 35 SONNETS
from THE MAD FIDDLER
THE LOST KEY
THE KING OF GAPS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A LITTLE LARGER THAN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE: SELECTED POEMS
FERNANDO PESSOA was born in Lisbon in 1888 and spent most of his childhood in Durban, South Africa. In 1905 he returned to Lisbon to enroll in college but eventually dropped out, preferring to study on his own. He made a modest living translating the foreign correspondence of various commercial firms, and wrote obsessively—in English, Portuguese, and French. He self-published several chapbooks of his English poems in 1918 and 1921, and regularly contributed his Portuguese poems to literary reviews. Mensagem, a collection of poems on patriotic themes, won a prize in a national competition in 1934. Pessoa wrote much of his greatest poetry in the guise of his three main “heteronyms”—Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis—whose fully fleshed biographies he invented, giving them different writing styles and points of view. He created dozens of other writerly personas, including the assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares, fictional author of The Book of Disquiet. Although Pessoa was acknowledged as an intellectual and a poet, his literary genius went largely unrecognized until after his death in 1935.
RICHARD ZENITH lives in Lisbon, where he works as a freelance writer, translator, and critic. His translations include Galician-Portuguese troubadour poetry, novels by António Lobo Antunes, Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and Fernando Pessoa and Co.—Selected Poems, which won the 1999 American PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
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First published in Penguin Books 2006
Translation, introduction, and notes copyright © Richard Zenith, 2006All rights reserved
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint “My gaze is clear like a sunflower,”
“I’m a keeper of sheep,” “I got off the train,” and “Autopsychography” from Fernando Pessoa & Co.,
edited and translated by Richard Zenith. Copyright © 1998 by Richard Zenith.
Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Pessoa, Fernando, 1888-1935.
A little larger than the entire universe : selected poems / Fernando Pessoa ;
edited and translated by Richard Zenith.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN : 978-1-4406-2700-2
I. Zenith, Richard. II. Title.
PQ9261.P417A6 2006
861’.141—dc22 2005056561
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Introduction: The Birth of a Nation
Old and enormous are the stars.
Old and small is the heart, and it
Holds more than all the stars, being,
Without space, greater than the vast expanse.
FROM PESSOA’S RUBA’IYAT
IN THE MANNER OF OMAR KHAYYAM
Much has been made of Fernando Pessoa’s last name, which means, in Portuguese, “person.” Famous for splitting himself into a multitude of literary alter egos he dubbed “heteronyms”—more than mere pseudonyms, since he endowed them with biographies, religious and political views, and diverse writing styles—Pessoa claimed that he, within that self-generated universe, was the least real person of all. “I’ve divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor,” explained Pessoa in a passage about the genesis and evolution of his fictional writer friends. “I subsist,” he explains further on in the same passage, “as a kind of medium of myself, but I’m less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all.” The lack of any certainty about who he is, or even if he is, stands out as a major theme in Pessoa’s poetry, and he uses the heteronyms to accentuate his ironic self-detachment. In a prose piece signed by Álvaro de Campos, a dandyish naval engineer and the most provocative of the heteronyms, we read that “Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist.”
Pessoa’s last name, in light of his existential self-doubts, is especially appreciated by the French, since personne means not only “person” but also, as in the phrase Je suis personne, “nobody.” Pessoa, however, was very definitely, or very indefinitely, somebody. And that his last name meant “person” was surely not incidental to his monomaniacal concern with his own personhood, its multiplication and its perpetuation, through his literary oeuvre. I mean that Pessoa, who may or may not have believed in God but who very much believed in destiny and in destiny’s symbols and signposts, had his name to live up to. It was, in a slight way, determining.
More determining, of course, was the cultural and family setting in which Pessoa, as a person and an artist, developed. For all his obsession with the inner life, he was keenly aware of how outer circumstances shape and define who we inwardly are. In a prose piece titled “Environment,” signed by Campos and published in 1927, he observed: “A place is what it is because of its location.
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