标题: Fernando Pessoa-selected sonnets(1918) [打印本页] 作者: mu 时间: 2006-6-5 20:46 标题: Fernando Pessoa-selected sonnets(1918)
I
Whether we write or speak or do but look
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or book,
Our soul from us is infinitely far.
However much we give our thoughts the will
To be our soul and gesture it abroad,
Our hearts are incommunicable still.
In what we show ourselves we are ignored.
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others' dreams.
II
If that apparentt part of life's delight
Our tingled flesh-sense circumscribes were seen
By aught save reflex and co-carnal sight,
Joy, flesh and life might prove but a gross screen.
Haply Truth's body is no eyable being,
Is the choked vision of blindfolded eyes.
Wherefrom what comes to thought's sense of life? Nought.
All is either the irrational world we see
Or some aught-else whose being-unknown doth rot
Its use for our thought's use. Whence taketh me
A qualm-like ache of life, a body-deep
Soul-hate of what we seek and what we weep.
VIII
How many masks wear we, and undermasks,
Upon our countenance of soul, and when,
If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks,
Knows it the last mask off and the face plain?
The true mask feels no inside to the mask
But looks out of the mask by co-masked eyes.
Whatever conciousness begins the task
The task's accepted use to sleepness ties.
Like a child frighted by its mirrored faces,
Our souls, that children are, being thought-losing,
Foist otherness upon their seen grimaces
And get a whole world on their forgot causing;
And, when a thought would unmask our soul's masking,
Itself goes not unmasked to the unmasking.
Plus:
Autopsychography
The poet is a faker
Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.
And those who read his words
Will feel in what he wrote
Neither of the pains he has
But just the one they don’t.
And so around its track
This thing called the heart winds,
A little clockwork train
To entertain our minds.
Fernando Pessoa (himself)
from THE 35 SONNETS,published in 1918
Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) - pseudonyms Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis
BIOGRAPHY
Pessoa-The most celebrated Portuguese poet, who had a major role in the development of modernism in his country. Pessoa was a member of the Modernist group Orpheu; he was its greatest representative. Pessoa's use of "heteronyms", literary alter egos, who support and criticize each other's works was also unconventional. During his career as a writer Pessoa was virtually unknown and he published little of his vast body of work. Most of his life Pessoa lived in a furnished room in Lisbon, where he died in obscurity.
more biography here
Chinese translation here作者: 怀抱花朵的孩子 时间: 2006-6-6 01:04
Fernando Pessoa (himself)
What do you mean by this sentence? You mean poem is translated by himself?
When I found Fernando Pessoa is a Portuguese poet, I feel very hard to read his poems in English even translated by himself.
I hate reading translation now especially which translated from English poems. When I come across poems in other language which I can't understand, I'll flip through the translations and throw it away!
[ 本帖最后由 怀抱花朵的孩子 于 2006-6-6 11:33 编辑 ]作者: mu 时间: 2006-6-6 18:56
these are not translation,they were just written in English!Autopsychography was written by himself.
And Pessoa himself was deemed to be the most talented English-writing poet in the 20th century by most western critics,includes Harold Broom.
