WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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When will you come, O Hidden One
Portuguese dream of every age,
To make me more than the faint breath
Of an ardent God-created yearning?
Ah, when at last will you,
Returning, turn my hope into love?
In the aftermath of the death of his father (by tuberculosis) and in the face of losing his mother to another country and a second husband, Fernando Pessoa, age seven, wrote a shrewd, little poem to his mother.
Here I am in Portugal,
In the lands where I was born.
However much I love them,
I love you even more.
What makes this poem most unusual, according to Richard Zenith, is its “love of homeland”…its “mysterious, innate nationalism.”
It’s a poem that, as we’ll hear, might well have served as epigraph to the poet’s only published book of poems, Mensagem, or Message, where what is national is personal, political, mythical, and universal. Mensagem won a literary prize awarded December 31, 1934, by the National Office of Propaganda. Pessoa would die eleven months later, on November 30, 1935. He was forty-seven.
Mensagem presents Pessoa’s vision of a spiritual nationalism – one in which Portugal is conceived universally, as a real place and a mythical idea. It is praised and disparaged by both the political Left and the Right. Which might speak to its great worth – can a nationalistic book of poems actually offer a shared ideological message? Would any ears hear?
Today, we explore the in-between, from Durban, South Africa to Lisbon, Portugal – the beginning and the end of the greatest Portuguese poet of the last 450 years.
Throughout we’ll hear poems (or fragments of poems) from Pessoa and his three major heteronyms – the master, Alberto Caeiro, the sensualist, Alvaro de Campos, and the classicist, Ricardo Reis.
Richard Zenith’s new book is the monumental Pessoa: A Biography, published this year by Liveright. His translations of Pessoa’s poems have appeared in the volumes A Little Larger than the Universe and Fernando Pessoa & Co.
We’ll begin with Pessoa’s most well-known, and probably most widely translated poem, “Autopsychography,” dated April 1, 1931.
The poet is a feigner
Who’s so good at his act
He even feigns the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.
And those who read his words
Will feel in his writing
Neither of the pains he has
But just the one they’re missing.
And so around its track
This thing called the heart winds,
A little clockwork train
To entertain our minds.
Jazz great Ornette Coleman provides our soundscape.
We open with “Turnaround” from Sound Grammar – recorded live in Germany in 2005 – where the “band plays together literally as one, no matter what’s happening…As all these sounds blend together, they become, in their order to one another, grammar. And each member finds a unique place in the conversation in this ordered sonic universe.” (Thom Jurek)
GUEST
Richard Zenith is an acclaimed translator and literary critic. His translations include Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems, which won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. The recipient of Portugal’s Pessoa Prize, Zenith lives in Lisbon, Portugal.
RELATED
Presenting Pessoa: 1915 – Part One (Richard Zenith)
MUSIC
Ornette Coleman and Joachim Kühn
“Turnaround” – Sound Grammar
“Once Only” – Sound Grammar
“Written Word” – Complete Science Fiction Sessions
“Somewhere” – Joachim Kühn – Melodic Ornette Coleman
“Food Stamps on the Moon” – Joachim Kühn – Melodic Ornette Coleman
“Law Years” – Complete Science Fiction Sessions
“Tears that Cry” – Joachim Kühn – Melodic Ornette Coleman
“Focus on Sanity” – The Shape of Jazz to Come
“Love Is Not Generous, Sex Belongs to Woman” – Joachim Kühn – Melodic Ornette Coleman
“European Echoes” – At the Golden Circle Vol. 1
“Waiting for You” – Sound Grammar
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young
