[HN Gopher] The Politics of Fernando Pessoa
___________________________________________________________________
The Politics of Fernando Pessoa
Author : apollinaire
Score : 52 points
Date : 2021-07-08 05:45 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (newleftreview.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (newleftreview.org)
| anonydsfsfs wrote:
| > In 1926 Pessoa published, anonymously in a republican
| newspaper, a bizarre interview he fabricated with a fictitious
| Italian antifascist who pronounces Mussolini a madman, and then
| goes on to declare that fascism is only a ruse. The world is
| 'directed by special forces', whose nature he declines to
| elaborate. The document is a mishmash of genuine antifascist
| sentiments held by Pessoa and an irrepressibly crankish streak of
| his own. When the Italian embassy wrote to complain that
| Angioletti did not exist, Pessoa happily forged another letter as
| Angioletti maintaining that he did
|
| This is hilarious, not just because it's trolling fascists but
| because it's completely consistent with Pessoa's belief that
| fictional characters can be just as "real" as real people.
| Reminds me of this passage from Book of Disquiet:
|
| > No one, I suppose, genuinely admits the real existence of
| another person. We may concede that the person is alive and that
| he thinks and feels as we do, but there will always be an unnamed
| element of difference, a materialized inequality. There are
| figures from the past and living images from books that are more
| real to us than the incarnate indifferences that talk to us over
| shop counters, or happen to glance at us in the trams, or brush
| against us in the dead happenstance of the streets. Most people
| are no more for us than scenery, generally the invisible scenery
| of a street we know by heart.
|
| > I feel more kinship and intimacy with certain characters
| described in books and certain images I've seen in prints than I
| feel with many so-called real people, who are of that
| metaphysical insignificance known as flesh and blood. And 'flesh
| and blood' in fact describes them rather well: they're like
| chunks of meat displayed in the window of a butcher's, dead
| things bleeding as if they were alive, shanks and cutlets of
| Destiny.
|
| > I'm not ashamed of feeling this way, as I've discovered that's
| how everyone feels. What seems to lie behind people's mutual
| contempt and indifference, such that they can kill each other
| like assassins who don't really feel they're killing, or like
| soldiers who don't think about what they're doing, is that no one
| pays heed to the apparently abstruse fact that other people are
| also living souls.
| taylorius wrote:
| That turgid, wall-of-text article is the absolute antithesis of
| Pessoa's beautiful, philoso-dream writings.
| brunorsini wrote:
| As a Brazilian-American I often think Fernando Pessoa is the #1
| thing one misses out on by not speaking Portuguese.
|
| These things are highly subjective but he's easily my favorite
| 20th century poet. So creative, incredibly deep, yet so
| accessible. But as these things go, there's always a loss of
| fidelity in translation, particularly to non-Romance languages.
|
| If anyone wants to tap straight into Pessoa's world with two
| flawless poems, you can't go wrong with "Tabacaria" (Tobacco Shop
| --
| https://www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/pessoa/TobaccoShop.htm...)
| and "Poema em Linha Reta" (Poem in a Straight Line --
| https://thenewloud.tumblr.com/post/11328170683/poem-in-a-str...).
|
| "If only I could eat chocolate / with as much truth as you do!"
| cardosof wrote:
| A thousand times this. Poema em Linha Reta was one of those
| things that opened my eyes about human nature when I met the
| author as a teenager.
| mykowebhn wrote:
| I'm currently learning European Portuguese, and I can't wait to
| be able to read Pessoa in the original.
|
| Also, I had no idea pessoa meant person. TIL!
| chem83 wrote:
| Love that you're picking up a new language, but that sentence
| sounded oddly specific. It's akin to saying I'm learning
| Australian or British English as opposed to just English.
| Yes, there are vocab and sometimes grammatical differences
| (e.g. I lost the key vs I've lost the key), but it's 99% the
| same language.
| jdmoreira wrote:
| Everyone in Portugal has to study some of his work when we are
| about 17 or so. For your average 17th year old this is of course
| an absolute waste of time but I did have enough sensibilities at
| the time to appreciate it and maybe it's time I revisit. I
| remember Alvaro de Campos being my favorite but I think I would
| gravitate more towards Alberto Caeiro nowadays. Anyway I wonder
| how his work translates to English... I don't want to be snobbish
| but I think a lot would be lost.
| taylorius wrote:
| I have The book of disquiet, and a collected works in English.
| I love them, though I can't comment on their accuracy,
| translation-wise. I must say I'd never thought of them as
| having a political message.
| pmohun wrote:
| Excited to see Fernando Pessoa on HN. He's easily my favorite
| poet. The Book of Disquiet is under appreciated and I've
| recommended it to many friends.
| tcgv wrote:
| For those who never heard of him the intro from wikipedia does a
| good job summarizing his style, which the article goes into more
| depth:
|
| "Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name,
| for he created approximately seventy-five others, of which three
| stand out, Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis. He
| did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that they did not
| capture their true independent intellectual life and instead
| called them heteronyms. These imaginary figures sometimes held
| unpopular or extreme views."
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Pessoa
| greenie_beans wrote:
| Or just open up the book of disquiet without any context about
| the author. It's better that way.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-07-09 23:01 UTC)