A review by raoul_g
Poems of Fernando Pessoa by Fernando Pessoa

3.0

Most of the poems in this collection couldn't really convince me. The language in the English translation is a bit wooden and the grammatical structure is often not very intelligible. This might well have to do with the fact that these poems are translated from Portuguese. The themes and subjects of the poems could only sometimes grab my attention.
Still, a few of the poems really stood out and struck me as hauntingly beautiful. Among them are the Poems from the Keeper of Sheep, I Dream - Fathomless and two others I'm gonna share with you. Here, maybe my favorite poem:

Great Mysteries Inhabit

Great mysteries inhabit
The threshold of my being,
On its sill hop and sit
Great sparrows that watch, avid,
My late crossing to seeing.

There are birds full of abyss,
Like the ones in dream. Dare
I sound and think what is?
My soul's cataclysm, this
Threshold - my soul now there.

Then I wake from the dream mystery
And rejoice in the light - till it grows
Into day and for me sad horror
Seeing the threshold is terror
And each step is a cross.

(2.10.33)

And another one talking about no-thing, and the (non)existence paradox :

There Are Diseases

There are diseases worse, yes, than diseases,
Aches that don't ache even in one's soul
And yet, that are more aching than the others.
There are dreamed anguishes that are more real
Than the ones life brings us, there are sensations
Felt only by imagining
Which are more ours than our own life is.
There's so often a thing which, not existing,
Does exist lingeringly
And lingeringly is ours and us...
Above the cloudy green of the broad river
The white circumflexes of the gulls...
Above the soul the useless fluttering -
What never was, nor could be, and is everything.

Give me some more wine, because life is nothing.
(19.11.35)