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Authors: Fernando Pessoa
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Caeiro’s pardon) a veritable master, but the real “intellectual magic” of his enterprise resides in the logic of his psychological alchemies. We are all under the spell of Pessoa’s own explanations of who he was, or wasn’t. He left us not just inspired lines and not just inspired characters that recite inspired lines but a vast inspired system of logically interconnected ideas materialized in a literature of interconnected “Pessoa’s”
(pessoa
means “person” in Portuguese)—a cosmography not just of his multiplied self but of Western thought and philosophy as embodied by those various selves. Such, at least, was Pessoa’s ideal for his system, whose mechanics were perhaps his greatest poetic achievement
.
Pessoa had a definite plan for the book ofCaeiro he never published. In fact he had various plans, but the final and most elaborate one called for a substantial introduction by Ricardo Reis, to be followed by Caeiro’s complete poems
(The Keeper of Sheep, The Shepherd in Love,
and
Uncollected Poems)
with accompanying notes by Reis, a horoscope for the time of Caeiro’s birth (cast by Fernando Pessoa), and—finishing off the volume—Alvaro de Campos’s
Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro.
Most of Reis’s piecemeal but seemingly endless introduction probably dates from the late igios, though passages for it continued to be produced in the twenties. Had it ever been assembled, it would have amounted to a treatise concerned less with presenting Caeiro’s poetry than with explaining
and defending paganism (as shown by excerpts from it found further on in this volume). Campos’s twenty-five or so
Notes,
left in a similar state of expanding disorder, were mostly if not all written in the
1930s,
by which time Fernando Pessoa had taken the final step on his path of ironic self-effacement, declaring that he too was one of Caeiro’s “disciples”
Thomas Crosse, a translator and essayist who was responsible for taking Portuguese culture to the Anglo-American world, had the special mission of promoting the work of Alberto Caeiro. He was supposed to produce an English version of Caeiro’s poetry but never got beyond his “Translator’s Preface
.”
Pessoa spent considerably less ink on prefatory and critical texts to promote Ricardo Reis and Alvaro de Campos, though the latter was rather good at promoting himself, through his polemical articles and letters that appeared in the Portuguese press. I. I. Crosse, whose piece on Campos’s rhythmical skills is published here, was presumably the brother of Thomas. I. I. also wrote an essay titled “Caeiro and the Pagan Revolution.” Both brothers wrote exclusively in English. (Yet a third brother, A. A. Crosse, competed for cash prizes in the puzzle and word games featured in various English newspapers.) Pessoa, whose only full brother died in infancy, was fond of providing brothers for his heteronyms, and it is Frederico Reis who offers us a sympathetic account of brother Ricardo’s “sad Epicureanism.” Frederico also authored a pamphlet (as of this writing still unpublished) about the so-called Lisbon School of poetry, explaining that it was Portugal’s only truly cosmopolitan movement. The protagonists of the school were—not surprisingly—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos
.
Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro
Álvaro de Campos
I met my master Caeiro under exceptional circumstances, as are all of life’s circumstances, especially those which in themselves are insignificant but which have outstanding consequences.
After completing, in Scotland, almost three quarters of my course in naval engineering, I went on a voyage to the Orient. On my return, I disembarked at Marseilles, unable to bear the thought of more sailing, and came by land to Lisbon. One day a cousin of mine took me on a trip to the Ribatejo,* where he knew one of Caeiro’s cousins, with whom he had some business dealings. It was in the house of that
(pessoa
means “person” in Portuguese)—a cosmography not just of his multiplied self but of Western thought and philosophy as embodied by those various selves. Such, at least, was Pessoa’s ideal for his system, whose mechanics were perhaps his greatest poetic achievement
.
Pessoa had a definite plan for the book ofCaeiro he never published. In fact he had various plans, but the final and most elaborate one called for a substantial introduction by Ricardo Reis, to be followed by Caeiro’s complete poems
(The Keeper of Sheep, The Shepherd in Love,
and
Uncollected Poems)
with accompanying notes by Reis, a horoscope for the time of Caeiro’s birth (cast by Fernando Pessoa), and—finishing off the volume—Alvaro de Campos’s
Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro.
Most of Reis’s piecemeal but seemingly endless introduction probably dates from the late igios, though passages for it continued to be produced in the twenties. Had it ever been assembled, it would have amounted to a treatise concerned less with presenting Caeiro’s poetry than with explaining
and defending paganism (as shown by excerpts from it found further on in this volume). Campos’s twenty-five or so
Notes,
left in a similar state of expanding disorder, were mostly if not all written in the
1930s,
by which time Fernando Pessoa had taken the final step on his path of ironic self-effacement, declaring that he too was one of Caeiro’s “disciples”
Thomas Crosse, a translator and essayist who was responsible for taking Portuguese culture to the Anglo-American world, had the special mission of promoting the work of Alberto Caeiro. He was supposed to produce an English version of Caeiro’s poetry but never got beyond his “Translator’s Preface
.”
Pessoa spent considerably less ink on prefatory and critical texts to promote Ricardo Reis and Alvaro de Campos, though the latter was rather good at promoting himself, through his polemical articles and letters that appeared in the Portuguese press. I. I. Crosse, whose piece on Campos’s rhythmical skills is published here, was presumably the brother of Thomas. I. I. also wrote an essay titled “Caeiro and the Pagan Revolution.” Both brothers wrote exclusively in English. (Yet a third brother, A. A. Crosse, competed for cash prizes in the puzzle and word games featured in various English newspapers.) Pessoa, whose only full brother died in infancy, was fond of providing brothers for his heteronyms, and it is Frederico Reis who offers us a sympathetic account of brother Ricardo’s “sad Epicureanism.” Frederico also authored a pamphlet (as of this writing still unpublished) about the so-called Lisbon School of poetry, explaining that it was Portugal’s only truly cosmopolitan movement. The protagonists of the school were—not surprisingly—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos
.
Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro
Álvaro de Campos
I met my master Caeiro under exceptional circumstances, as are all of life’s circumstances, especially those which in themselves are insignificant but which have outstanding consequences.
After completing, in Scotland, almost three quarters of my course in naval engineering, I went on a voyage to the Orient. On my return, I disembarked at Marseilles, unable to bear the thought of more sailing, and came by land to Lisbon. One day a cousin of mine took me on a trip to the Ribatejo,* where he knew one of Caeiro’s cousins, with whom he had some business dealings. It was in the house of that
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