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看起来是上文第一部分的英文来源。网址http://www.edi-tie.nl/home/djs/fernando.htm
Fernando Pessoa and me
by Derek Suchard
Years and years ago, I was visiting my beloved in Amsterdam. For no particular reason, we went one night to a little pizzeria (for the Amsterdam aficionado, it was just off the Leidseplein, but no longer exists) after having visited the Atheneum bookstore and having purchased a copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets of the Portuguese.
The book lay on the table, dominating it in fact, given the surface area. During a lull in the action, while she went to visit the facilities, a waiter came by, and without so much as an "excuse me," picked up the book.
"Sonnets of the Portuguese, eh?" he said.
"Yes," said I, always the master of a well-turned phrase.
"These are Portuguese poems?"
"No," said I. "They're by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She's English. Well, she's dead now, of course, but she was English. They called her the Portuguese because she was sick a lot and had to go to Portugal to try and get better."
"I am Portuguese," he informed me.
"Oh," I said.
"You know who is the greatest poet in English language from this century?" he asked. I paused. I was sitting in an Italian restaurant, in a Dutch city, with a Portuguese waiter who was about to tell me -- confident as I was, in the arrogance of youth, that I, long a student of English and English-language poetry, ought to know that better than he. But I couldn't resist.
"Who?" said I, pleased that my linguistic flair had not abandoned me.
"Fernando Pessoa."
I'm sure I must have grinned the same facetious grin shared by professors and teachers the world over when confronted by students whose "little knowledge" has turned dangerous and made them think they actually know something.
"Fernando Pessoa," I repeated.
"Yes," he said, mastering after a fashion my own linguistic leger de main. "Fernando Pessoa. He's Portuguese."
"So," said I. "A Portuguese poet is the best poet in English from the 20th century?"
"Yes," he replied.
At that moment, Liesbeth returned, and, probably because someone at a nearby table was in urgent need of a re-supply of garlic bread, the waiter, whose name I never did get, more's the pity, left us.
The next day, while walking downtown, we passed near the public library. Still puzzled by the conversation of the night before with the waiter, I insisted we go in and see if we could find anything by this Pessoa fellow.
I did. A Penguin paperback (no longer on their backlist, alas).
I went through it, and found that the waiter was absolutely right.
And not only was he a great poet, but a weird one, too.
For starters, he wrote in nineteen separate personas, following the heteronymic theory of art, according to which an "artist should be a synthesis of the varying personalities that go to make up his own character"* (*Fernando Pessoa, Sixty Portuguese Poems F.E.G. Quintanilha, editor, University of Wales Press 1973). Not all of the personas wrote poetry: some, including his own Pessoa self, wrote other things, including metaphysics, logic, short stories, etc.
By his works shall ye know him, however, and as founding secretary and sole member of the Fernando Pessoa Revival Society, I humbly present extracts from two works. Both are taken from the 1971 edition of Pessoa: Selected Poems, University of Texas Press, A.A. Parker, editor.
More will follow over time.
Stations of the Cross
by Fernando Pessoa
I come from afar and bear in my profile,
If only in remote and misty form,
The profile of another being, at variance
With the base and human silhouette now mine.
Perhaps in former times I was, not Boabdil,
But merely his last look from the road
At the face of the Granada he was leaving,
A cold silhouette beneath the unbroken blue...
What I am now is that imperial longing
For what I once saw of myself in the distance...
I am myself the loss I suffered...
And on this road which leads to Otherness
Bloom in slender wayside glory
The sunflowers of the empire dead in me...
From Sporadic Poems
by Alberto Caeiro
Yesterday the preacher of personal truths
Talked to me once more.
He talked about the sufferings of the working classes
(No the individuals who suffer -- the ones who really suffer.
He said how unjust it is that some should have money
While others are hungry; but did he mean hungry for food
Or only hungry for someone else's dessert?
He talked about anything that could make him angry.
How happy the man must be who can think of other people's unhappiness!
And how stupid not to know that their unhappiness is for them,
and cannot be cured from outside,
for suffering isn't like running out of ink or having a trunk that isn't bound with iron!
There is injustice, the same as there is death.
I wouldn't walk a single step to change
What's known as the injustice of the world.
If I walked a thousands steps for that
They would only be a thousand steps.
I accept injustice as I accept that stones may not be round
And that cork-trees weren't born to be pines or oaks. |
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