My poor friend, I have no compassion to offer you.
Compassion requires effort, especially the genuine sort, and on rainy days.
I mean: it requires effort to feel on rainy days.
Let us feel the rain and leave psychology for another kind of sky.
Some sexual problem, then?
But after the age of fifteen that’s indecent.
Preoccupation with the opposite sex (let’s assume) and their psychology—
But that’s ridiculous, boy.
The opposite sex exists to be sought after, not discussed.
The problem exists in order to be resolved, and not as a source of worry.
To worry is to be impotent.
And you should be less frank about yourself.
Do you know “La Colère de Samson”?
“La femme, enfant malade et douze fois impure.”
But that’s not it.
Don’t pester me, don’t force me to feel sorry for you!
Look: everything is literature.
Everything comes to us from outside, like the rain.
Most of us are pages that read like something out of a novel.
Translations, my friend.
Do you know why you are so sad? It’s because of Plato,
Who you’ve never read.
Your Petrarchan sonnet, another writer you’ve not read, came out all wrong.
And that’s how life is too.
Roll up your civilized shirt sleeves
And dig in exact fields!
Better that than have other people’s souls.
We are merely the ghosts of ghosts,
And today’s landscape is of little help.
Everything is geographically external.
The rain falls according to a natural law
And humanity loves because it has heard others speak of love.
from The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos
Fernando Pessoa
translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari
© Pessoa, Fernando. The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos. Edited and introduced by Jerónimo Pizarro and Antonio Cardiello. Translated from Portuguese with a biographical note by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari. New York: New Directions (forthcoming in July 2023).
Read the original in Portuguese
Listen to the original read by Patricio Ferrari:
Álvaro de Campos was one of the three major heteronyms created by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who gave each heteronym (there were nearly 140 fictitious authors) a thorough biography, which included a set of signatures, an astrological chart, literary influences, and philosophical idiosyncrasies. Campos, according to his creator, was born in 1890, studied mechanical engineering and shipbuilding in Glasgow. He subsequently traveled to Ireland and the Near East, then worked in Newcastle-on-Tyne and Barrow-on-Furness (sic) before returning to Lisbon, where he lived until Pessoa’s death in 1935. Campos’s earlier poems are often a futurist celebration of the modern machine age, and his style owes much of its energy and ebullience to Marinetti and Whitman, as well as Blake and Nietzsche. However, this particular poem, written in the summer of 1930, belongs to a later phase, full of sour pessimism, and a sense of the futility of life. Alongside that pessimism, though, there is humor. Here, the impatient speaker addresses someone who clearly fails to come up to his standards, who doesn’t recognize the quote from Alfred de Vigny (nor did we!), has never read Plato or Petrarch, and who is, in adolescent fashion, still preoccupied with discussing the opposite sex (“let’s assume”). Why worry about anything when “most of us are pages that read like something out of a novel. / Translations, my friend,” when we are “merely the ghosts of ghosts.” He is like a very brusque agony aunt, and this is all the compassion he can offer us.
Translating Campos into English is deceptively simple, but if there is a difficulty it lies in reproducing that very conversational style, which is also full of oddities like “custa sentir em dias de chuva” [it requires effort to feel on rainy days] or “arregace as mangas da camisa civilizada / E cave terras exactas” [Roll up your civilized shirt sleeves / And dig in exact fields!]. It’s often so tempting when translating to impose a meaning—we are interpreters after all, eager to understand what the writer means—but it’s also vital to respect ambiguity and opacity. Equally important is getting the tone right and ventriloquizing the voice of the poet (and Pessoa’s three heteronyms are distinct and formally different), in this case capturing that rather weary, snarky, superior tone, behind which lurks the sense that we are all in the same boat, in the same rather bad attempt at a Petrarchan sonnet.
Translating Campos into English is deceptively simple, but if there is a difficulty it lies in reproducing that very conversational style, which is also full of oddities like “custa sentir em dias de chuva” [it requires effort to feel on rainy days] or “arregace as mangas da camisa civilizada / E cave terras exactas” [Roll up your civilized shirt sleeves / And dig in exact fields!]. It’s often so tempting when translating to impose a meaning—we are interpreters after all, eager to understand what the writer means—but it’s also vital to respect ambiguity and opacity. Equally important is getting the tone right and ventriloquizing the voice of the poet (and Pessoa’s three heteronyms are distinct and formally different), in this case capturing that rather weary, snarky, superior tone, behind which lurks the sense that we are all in the same boat, in the same rather bad attempt at a Petrarchan sonnet.
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), a Portuguese poet, fiction writer, literary critic, and translator, is one of the most significant literary figures of the twentieth century. After almost a decade in Durban, South Africa (1895–1905), he returned to his native Lisbon at the age of seventeen, where he went on to create one of the most extraordinarily varied bodies of literary works in the history of Western literature. By the time of his passing at the age of 47, Pessoa had—according to the editors in Eu Sou Uma Antologia (I am an Anthology) edited by Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari (Tinta da china, 2013)—created nearly 140 fictional alter egos, or heteronyms as he later called them, and for whom he is now celebrated—writing poetry and prose under such names as Karl P. Effield, Charles Robert Anon, Alexander Search, Jean Seul de Méluret, Vicente Guedes, Frederick Wyatt, and more. Alberto Caeiro was the central heteronym of the poetic coterie; two other major heteronyms, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos, along with Pessoa himself, considered Caeiro to be their literary “Master.” Outside Portugal, Pessoa is best known for the Livro de Desasocego [The Book of Disquiet], a fictional prose work written in Portuguese and published posthumously in 1982. A foreign correspondent for commercial houses, as well as director and contributor to several Portuguese literary magazines, Fernando Pessoa left a universal body of work in three languages (Portuguese, English, French) that continues to be edited, translated, and studied in and beyond the Iberian Peninsula. He penned his last line in English, the language of his formative years, a day before his death in the fall of 1935: “I know not what to-morrow will bring.”
Álvaro de Campos is a heteronym created by Portugal’s greatest modernist writer, Fernando Pessoa. According to Pessoa, Campos was born in Tavira, in the Algarve region of Portugal, in 1890 and studied mechanical engineering in Glasgow, Scotland, though never managed to complete his degree. Orphaned at an early age, he traveled to the Near East in his early twenties, where he became an opium addict, much like the Portuguese symbolist poet Camilo Pessanha (1867–1926). Back in Portugal, on a visit in the Ribatejo province, Campos met Alberto Caeiro, the literary master of Pessoa’s fictitious coterie. A dandy and flaneur, Álvaro de Campos read Blake, Whitman, and Nietzsche, among others. In his own day he was celebrated and criticized for his vociferous poetry imbued with Whitmanian free-verse rhythms, his praise of the rise of technology, and polemical views on industrial civilisation—also attested in manifestos, interviews, and essays. Some of his most notable works such as the “Ode Marítima” (“Maritime Ode”), “Ultimatum,” and “Tabacaria” [Tobacconist’s Shop] were published during Pessoa’s lifetime. Fernando Pessoa didn’t end Campos’s life, which meant that this heteronym would outlive his author, who died in 1935.
Margaret Jull Costa has worked as a translator for over thirty years, translating the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers, among them novelists (Javier Marías, José Saramago, and Eça de Queiroz) and poets (Fernando Pessoa, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, and Ana Luísa Amaral). Her work has brought her many prizes, among them the 2008 Pen Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Maias by Eça de Queiroz (New Directions, 2007). In 2013, she was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2014, she was awarded an OBE for services to literature; and in 2018, she was awarded the Ordem Infante D. Henrique by the Portuguese government and a Lifetime Award for Excellence in Translation by the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute, New York.
Patricio Ferrari is a polyglot poet, literary translator, and editor. Born in Merlo to Piemontesi and Calabresi immigrants, he left Argentina at the age of sixteen to attend high school and play soccer in the United States as part of the Rotary Exchange Program. His most recent translations include Verde amargo / Bitter Green by Martin Corless-Smith (with Graciela S. Guglielmone; Buenos Aires Poetry, 2022), The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos by Fernando Pessoa (with Margaret Jull Costa; New Directions, 2023), and Habla terreña (Field Talk) by Frank Stanford (with Guglielmone; Pre-Textos, 2023). His work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, Southwest Review, and Fence, among others. Since 2017, he has resided in New York City, where he is currently working on “Elsehere,” an exophonic trilogy of multilingual poetry. Additionally, he teaches the Master of Fine Arts at Sarah Lawrence College, collaborates with the Endangered Language Alliance, and hosts the World Poetry in Translation reading series.
