On Fernando Pessoa or Alberto Caeiro

No. They are not pseudonyms but heteronyms, as he wished to call them. More than seventy such pseudo... sorry.. heteronyms were used by Fernando Pessoa, a Portugese writer and poet, born in Lisbon in 1888. Three such heteronyms are famous, Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis. Of these one group of poems by Alberto Caeiro was translated by David Scanlon and published by The Foolish Poet Press in 1918. It was a happy shock to me to see a poem like this:

"The amazing reality of things
Is my discovery every single day.
Every single thing is what it is,
And it is difficult to explain to anyone how much it delights me,
And how much this is enough for me.
Just exist to be complete..."

These are the opening lines of his poem, The Amazing Reality of Things. Another super shocker from Alberto Caeiro -

'Live, you say, in the present;
Live only in the present.
But I do not want the present, I want the reality;
I want the things that exist, not the time that measures them.'

Really the personality which wrote these lines should be extraordinary or is it the 'really ordinary'? He was deep into many subjects. Schooled early in Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth and others, he was also interested in French symbolism and also influenced by modernists like W B Yeats, James Joyce, T S Eliot and others. In politics he used to style himself as liberal within conservatism and anti-reactionary. And he used to call his type of nationalism as 'mystic, cosmopolitan, liberal and anti-catholic. And he was openly against communism, socialism, fascism and Catholicism. He was ardent in astrology and wanted to write about the system of astrology under a heteronym. He has even analyzed many great men's natal charts. Last but not least, he even predicted the time of his own death. He alone could have penned these lines -

"I have no ambitions or desires.
To be a poet is not an ambition.
It is my way to stand alone"

Fernando Pessoa passed away in 1935 leaving behind a big trunk of manuscripts. Unusual and fresh to read are his lines, so do I feel.
Srirangam Mohanarangan

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