Verses 1-4
Filipe, a viewer, asked me to recite the 8th poem of this epic, but I have opted to record it in its entirety albeit in parts... Here is the text I am reading from: [ Ссылка ] Here is the introduction written by Ricardo Reis aka Alberto Caeiro aka Fernando Pessoa:
"Alberto Caeiro da Silva was born in Lisbon on April 16, 1889, and died of tuberculosis in the same city on (...), 1915. He spent nearly all his life in a village in Ribatejo; and only returned to the city of his birth in his final months. In Ribatejo he wrote nearly all his poems, those of the book entitled The Keeper of Flocks, those of the incomplete book, The Amorous Shepherd, and some of his first which I myself, having inherited them for the purposes of publication with the rest, gathered together under the designation graciously suggested by Álvaro de Campos: Detached Poems. His final poems, beginning with the one numbered (...), were written in the last period of the author’s life, after he had returned to Lisbon. The task befalls me briefly to establish a distinction. Some of these poems reveal, by reason of the perturbation caused by illness, something new and rather foreign — in nature and direction — to the general character of his work.
Caeiro’s life cannot be narrated: there is nothing in it to be told. His poems were the life within him. In all else there was neither incident nor story. Even the brief, fruitless, and absurd episode which gave rise to the poems of The Amorous Shepherd was not an incident but rather, so to speak, a forgetting.
Caeiro’s work represents the absolute essence of paganism, fully reconstructed. The Greeks and the Romans, who lived in the midst of paganism and therefore did not think about it, would have been incapable of such a thing. Yet Caeiro’s oeuvre and its paganism were never thought through, nor were they even felt. They came from something within us deeper than feeling or reason. To say any more would be to explain, which serves no end; to affirm any less would be to lie. Every oeuvre speaks for itself with its own voice in the language that shapes both work and voice. “If you have to ask, you will never know.” There is nothing to explain. Imagine attempting to explain to someone a language he did not speak.
Ignorant of life and nearly so of letters, practically without companionship or culture, Caeiro created his work through a deep and imperceptible progress, like that which drives the logical development of civilizations through unconscious humanity’s conscious mind. His was a progress of sensation, of ways of feeling, and an intimate evolution of thought derived from these progressive sensations. Through some superhuman intuition, as one founding a religion (yet the mantle of “religious” does not suit him — witness his repudiation of all religion and metaphysics), this man described the world without thinking about it, and created a concept of the universe — a concept thoroughly resistant to exegesis.
When first confronted with the enterprise of publishing these poems, I thought I would write a long and discursive critical study of Caeiro’s work, its nature and natural destiny. But I found I could make no satisfactory study.
It weighs heavily upon me, but reason has compelled me to preface the work of my Master with a few, null words. Beyond what I have already written, I can write nothing else useful or necessary, that had not been heartfully said in Ode (...) of Book I of my works, where I weep for the man who was for me (as he will come to be for a great many others) the unveiler of Reality, or, as he himself said, “the Argonaut of true sensations” — the great Liberator, he who restores us, singing, to the luminous nothing we are; who draws us away from death and from life, and leaves us among simple which, while they last, are ignorant of life and death; who frees us from hope and despair, so that we might neither seek groundless consolation nor find pointless sadness; so that we might live unthinking alongside him, fellow guests of the objective necessity of the Universe.
I give you his work, whose editing was entrusted to me by the ineluctable hazard of the world. I give it to you, and I say:
O rejoice, all you weeping
In History, our worst disease!
Great Pan is reborn!"
