Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet (1888-1935), is one of the greatest names of the European Modernism. He wrote under many different names, each one corresponding to a different persona: the heteronyms (i.e. thoroughly conceived, aesthetically and psychologically, different persons). Pessoa even wrote the biography of his main heteronyms and, being an amateur astrologer, he draw the complex astral charts of some of them, according to the imagined place, date and time of their births. For instance, Alvaro de Campos was a Ship Engineer who lived for a while in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, England. Pessoa had a close relation with the British culture. His step-father was consul in Durban, South Africa, and Pessoa lived there from an early age until he was seventeen. One of his less know heteronyms, Alexandre Search, wrote exclusively in English.
Leaning almost upon thy breast
I heard thy heart’s life – made unrest…
And thy heart’s beating has a sound
That reminds me of aught I heard long ago,
Long before this life, but what
I do not know, I do not know…
‘Twas something going round and round
Something of terrible and of strange
That even now doth shake my soul.
I strive to remember – I fail, I fail
The unmemoried memory doth shake my soul.
‘Twas something terrible and strange,
Going round and going round,
And it had a sound like thy heart’s beat…
The memory hangs on my soul’s darkness
But notion from my mind doth fleet.
I remember but this: it went round and round
And now thy heart hath such a sound.
Alexandre Search, HEART‑MUSIC
[An online archive of Pessoa's work can be found here. If you can't read Portuguese you can still find his English poems under the archive's number 7]
