All language subtitles for Conversa.Acabada.1981.DVDRip.x264.Bipolar

Into another may death dismember me,
to be left

As the nothing of nothing,
or nothing of all;

I end at last this hollow conscience,
Of existence all that is left.

I hear a whistling and heated tumult
Of shadow-intentions and of impulses

Brimming from conscience's chalice
To flow over life...

...only a feeling
Of desiring eternal peace.

Vague ambition of shutting one's eyes
Vague hope not to open them again.

Weary yearning to live no longer;

My exhausted brain neither laments
Nor is able to lament.

Disorderly
Ideas mingled in my ancient being

Emerge from it, to disappear
With no clues to the understanding.

Dazzled already, vain, incoherent
Bitter, vague disorganizations

That no sufferings permit.

Come then oh Death!
I hear your footsteps!

Your bosom
Must be soft and your heartbeat

A strange and hazy melody
Transporting into sleep and beyond.

Nothing passes now,

Nothing, nothing...

Go away, Life!

Ah, the horror of dying!

And meeting the mystery face to face
Powerless to avoid it, powerless...

Lisbon, 30th November 1935
Hospital of St. Louis

Look Daisy: when I die you're to
tell my friends there in London,

although you may not feel it,

that you're hiding
the great sorrow of my death.

You'll go from London to York,
where you were born

(so you say...
for I believe nothing you tell me),

and tell that poor boy
who gave me so many happy hours,

although you may not know it,
that I've died...

even he, whom I thought I loved so,
won't be bothered at all.

Then go and give
the news to that strange Cecily

who believed that I'd be great...

Damn life and those that live it!

THE OTHER ONE

about Fernando Pessoa
and Mário de Sá-Carneiro

At the top of the first page
can be read July 25 - 1907,

and at the bottom of the second,
also headed by the date July 25,

is the conclusion: no more.

At nineteen, Fernando Pessoa
was keeping a diary in English.

Not surprising.

In Durban, where his stepfather
was Consul,

he had spent his youth:
West St. Convent and the High School.

He returned to Lisbon to study
at the University.

He leaves the course a year later
during a prolonged strike:

The agitated times of Lisbon 1910,
the end of monarchy and the republic.

Mário de Sá-Carneiro,
two years younger,

had also study only a few months
at Coimbra University.

He perhaps wasn't even interested
in which he was going to study.

At that time Mário de Sá-Carneiro

was a young man,
well-dressed always,

son of an indulgent father
who took him to Paris every year

and enabled him to keep up to date
with French literature;

At nineteen, Sá-Carneiro begins
acquiring friends, literary projects,

goes to theatres and
frequents cafés.

Tall, with extravagant gestures,
he was then quite handsome

but, with the years,
and an increasing girth,

he came to be called, and to call
himself, "the great bear".

In 1912 he meets Fernando Pessoa,

who is then dividing his life
between his literary pursuits,

since the establishment
of the Íbis printing-office

to the creation of "Águia" magazine,

and earning his living from
foreign commercial correspondence.

They meet in 1912,

little after Sá-Carneiro's first
short-stories book was published,

13th October, 1912
a little before Sá-Carneiro's
decision to "go and study" in Paris.

This departure, moreover,
was announced in the society columns:

On yesterday's express to Paris
proceeded Mr. Mário de Sá-Carneiro,

one of the most brilliant young men
of his generation.

Many of Sá-Carneiro's friends
turned out to bid him farewell:

General Sá-Carneiro
and Captain Carlos de Sá-Carneiro,

grandfather and father
of our friend,

Messrs. Mário Duarte, Fernando
Pessoa, Ponce de Leão, the actors...

In Paris he becomes a passionate
sightseer of the "great city".

He associates with artists, goes to
shows, frequents cafés, and writes.

Paris, 16th November 1912
But already he is invited by the fear
of himself and of the future.

He writes to Fernando Pessoa:

I'm suffering because I feel it's
almost time for play to finish

and for me to go back into class.

I've lived this last few days
in constant agony,

even coming to the point
of crying all night.

Most painful of all is that the
others can't understand my misery

because, in short, I drew up the
following table the other day:

I am in Paris
- I am totally bored

I've got money
- I'm extremely unhappy

I can do what I like
- I'm suffering a great deal

I haven't any worries
- My desolation is limitless

I have no regrets...

In the "disappearing" in my letter
there was a revolver at the temples;

but there was something else besides.
I find two ways of disappearing;

one easy and brutal - deep water,
the report of a pistol;

the other smooth and difficult:
the suffocation of every ideal,

the despoiling of all that is
beautiful or precious in us.

Ah! how often I have a violent desire
to achieve this "disappearance"!

But how? How?

When I meditate for hours on suicide,

what results is a painful regret of
having inevitably to die one day

without having killed myself.

(However, I'm sure that won't be
my end. As I say in Incest:

"My friends can set their minds
at rest.")

...That S-C liked me very much;
"also who doesn't like you?"

A glimpse of sun.
Went on to Mayer's office,

from there to the Third District
to get Mário's marriage certificate.

Twice to Lavado's office; he wasn't
there either time. Did nothing.

Finished letter to Sá-Carneiro,
and one, for Mother,

long and bitter,
of which I will make a copy.

I sent two poems
to Sá-Carneiro,

Arm with no Body and
The Voice of God.

Lavado office (Rua da Prata)
at 5 p.m. Nothing to do.

At home all night.
Slept in the evening.

Awake from midnight to 4 a.m. writing
various pieces on Oscar Wilde,

education, the aristocracy theory.

Read W.W. Jacobs until I fell asleep
to quieten my stimulated mind.

This morning I got a postcard
from Álvaro Pinto.

I feel very anaemic and exhausted,
although highly excited.

25.3.1913 Haven't looked
at this diary for days.

Don't remember this day.

27.3.1913 To the "Theatre" to
get some cash for the tramway.

Left at 8.30.

Only Boavida and Camarinha there.
At home at night.

Slept heavily from 10 till morning,

but a sad sleep, full of dreams,
physically painful.

Omitted due to delay
and forgetfulness.

My dear Fernando,
Here comes another poem.

I did it, let's see, in three hours,
at this café, amid noise,

with a retired soldier, quite senile,
beside me, who talks to himself.

I think it really beautiful,
I am amazed at having done it.

What's happening to me at the
moment is very interesting.

How is it that suddenly I can
intermix such a different art?...

...for the first time I find myself
composing outwards from within.

Before feeling these lines,
I had a foreboding of them,

they weighted heavy within me...

I foresee a great interval,
I rave every colour,

I live in purple and die in sound...

Alcohol

Neither opium nor morphine.

What burnt me was alcohol
More rare and penetrating:

I am delirious for myself alone

Morning so strong it darken my skies.

Dispersion

(A Sunday in Paris
Reminds me of the vanished person

Who felt with emotion
Sundays in Paris:

For a Sunday is family,
Is well-being, is simplicity,

And those who look at beauty
Have neither well-being nor family).

(A Sunday in Paris
Reminds me of the vanished person

Who felt with emotion
Sundays in Paris:

For a Sunday is family,
Is well-being, is simplicity,

And those who look at beauty
Have neither well-being nor family).

The poor youth of yearning...
You, yes, you were someone!

And it was for that also
That you drowned in yearnings.

And it was for that also
That you drowned in yearnings.

And it was for that also
That you drowned in yearnings.

While Fernando Pessoa, prejudiced
and wary of the symbolists,

with the patriotic fervour of a
recently-naturalized Portuguese,

sought a Lusitanian direction
for the "new poetry"

(he was then the critic
of Águia),

Sá-Carneiro was naturally finding

the links of the chain
that fastened him to European art:

Baudelaire; Rimbaud; Mallarmé

Meanwhile, my dear,
strange and inconceivable

are many of the admirable sonnets
by Mallarmé.

Impressionism, decadence,
futurism, cubism.

'Boredom is the malaise
resulting from the disintegration

within the psyche between intentions,
constellated in terms of value,

and the space of time
in which they are inserted.'

1913 was, for Sá-Carneiro, the most
satisfactory for him as a writer.

Dispersion, yes, while still in Paris
with passionate interest in the city

and, immediately after his return
to Lisbon on holiday in June 1913,

after meeting his friends again,
especially Fernando Pessoa,

the short stories
The Time Embalmer,

Mystery, I Myself the Other,

and Lucio's Confession
which he finishes in September.

For God's sake, and thinking
of your Eternal Salvation

see if it would be possible
to turn up here tomorrow, the 31st,

anytime,
in the morning or in the afternoon.

Tomorrow I'll have the
dispersed proofs of Dispersion.

Which, if you don't lend a hand,

will certainly appear as a positive
stream of misprint!

So, gird on one more crown of thorns
St. Fernando (proof-reading person).

To which talented souls
are condemned!

Warmest wishes, Sá-Carneiro.

Under the experienced eye of Pessoa
emerges the edition of Dispersion,

Sá-Carneiro's first volume of poetry
which will go on sale in 1914.

This year also sees the publication
of Lucio's Confession.

Sá-Carneiro creates in fiction
the "other" which is inside him

and which he had already sensed.

At the beginning of the novella,

the narrator meets the person
who is to become his greatest

- almost inseparable
and insufferable - friend.

"...in this way
we were obscurely two,

neither of us knowing exactly
if the other wasn't himself,

if the uncertain other person
would live..."

Fernando Pessoa
In the Forest of Alienation

'Having spent ten years in prison
for a crime I didn't commit

and for which
I offered no defence;

dead as regards life and dreams,

unable to hope for anything now
and wanting nothing,

I am at last making my confession:
that is, demonstrating my innocence.

Perhaps you won't, of course you
won't, believe me. It hardly matters.

I have no stake in yelling that
I didn't kill Ricardo de Loureiro.'

Lúcio will meet Ricardo at a party
given by an American woman,

a millionairess avid for exotic
and a voluptuous exhibitionism,

in a morbid and spectacular setting.

"The lights shone more densely,
sharply, more penetrating,

streaming down now from the dome

and the curtain rose on an
indeterminate Asiatic temple...

To the sound of sultry,
harsh and distant music,

she appeared, the redhead...
And began to dance..."

'Oh, how to convey her silent,
humid, crystal-cool steps;

the surge of her undulating flesh;
the alcohol of her gilded lips -

the harmony diffused
in her movements;

the diffracted horizon that her
whirling aroused, hazily...'

'The doors opened and lost, hatless,

we found ourselves in the street,
on fire, perplexed...

The cool night air cut into us
and woke us up,

and as if we had come out of a dream
the three of us had in common,

we anxiously looked at each other,
in dumb amazement...'

Today the sky is monotonous like
the idea of never making port.

The fine rain is vacant...

The Time savours of having been...

Nothing in the way of beds
for ships!

Absorbed in its own distraction,
your gaze is a senseless curse...

In one and the same night,

Fernando Pessoa gave birth to the
first of his great heteronyms:

Alberto Caeiro, the "master".

8th March, 1914
He wrote more than 30 poems,

and after those, he wrote "Slanting
Rain" signed by Fernando Pessoa.

I have never kept sheep,
But it is as if I have kept them.

My soul is like a shepherd,
Acquainted with wind and with sun

And, led by the Season's hand,
Follows and gazes.

At evening,
leaning on the windowsill,

Knowing aslant
of the fields opposite,

I read the book of Cesário Verde
Until my eyes smart.

What sorrow I feel for him! A peasant
In the city, a prisoner set free.

But his manner of looking
at houses...

"Essential constitution of things"...

"Essential meaning
of the Universe"...

All this is false,
all this means nothing.

It's incredible that one might thing
of such things.

It's like thinking of causes
and ends.

When the beginning of morning
is breaking

And through the trees

A vague lustrous gold

Gradually smothers the darkness.

My sky-blue gaze
Is calm as sunlit water.

It is thus blue and calm for
It neither question nor is amazed...

Alberto Caeiro

My dream of an infinite port
crosses this landscapes

And the colour of flowers is
transparent as sails of great ships

That cast off from the quay dragging
in the water for shade

The outlines in the sun of
those ancient trees.

And the shopkeeper smiles among
the memories of my childhood...

And the music ceases like a wall
come tumbling down

The ball rolls over the precipice
of my interrupted dreams,

And atop a blue horse, the maestro,
yellow jockey turning black,

Says his thanks, laying his baton
on the fugue of a wall

And bows with a smile,
a white ball on his head,

White ball that disappears
down his back...

Fernando Pessoa

Alberto Caeiro
On an exceedingly clear day

When one wished one had worked hard

So as to have done
with work that day,

I glimpsed,
like a road between trees,

What might be the Great Secret,

That Great Mystery
of which the false poets speak.

I saw that there is no Nature,
That Nature does not exist,

That there are hills,
valleys, plains,

That there are trees, flowers, grass,

That there are rivers and stones,

But that there is no whole
to which this belongs,

That a real and true totality
Is a disease of our ideas.

Nature is parts without a whole.

This is perhaps the mystery
they speak of.

It was this, that without
thinking or stopping,

I judged correctly must be the truth

That people try to find
and do not find

And that I alone, because I did not
set out to find it, found.

Fernando Pessoa

I took the Tagus, in such a way
That I forget I am looking,

And suddenly this hits me
In collision with the musing -

What is being-river, and flowing?
What is me watching me-being-it?

Of a sudden, I feel little;
Empty, the moment, the place,

Everything is suddenly hollow -
Even my act of thinking.

Everything - I and the world about -

Remains more than exterior.

Everything loses being, remaining,
And disappears from my thought.

I remain unable to link
Being, idea, named soul

To me, to earth and to heaven...

And suddenly I find God.

12th June, 1914
Two other heteronyms emerge:
Ricardo Reis, poet of classical odes,

and Álvaro de Campos,
poet of the free odes of futurism.

Come sit down with me, Lydia,
by the riverside,

Peacefully let us watch its course
and learn

That life passes,
and that we are not holding hands.

(Let us hold hands).

Then let us, grown-up children,

Consider that life
passes and waits not,

Nothing
leaves and never returns,

Goes on its way to a far-off sea,
close to Fate, further than the gods.

You will be sweet to my memory
remembering you like this

by the river,

Sorrowful pagan girl with
flowers in her lap.

Ricardo Reis

In the painful LIGHT of the great
electric lamps of the factory

I am feverish and write...

European hours, productive, jammed in
Between machinery and useful tasks!

Large cities come to a halt in cafés,
oasis of noisy uselessness

Where rumblings and motions of the
Useful are crystallized and hurry

And the wheels, and the cogwheels
and the bearings of the Progressive!

Oh factories, oh laboratories,
Oh music halls, oh Lunar Parks.

Oh battleships, oh bridges,
Oh, floating docks -

In my turbulent and fiery mind
I have you as with a lovely woman,

Completely, as one as a lovely
woman one does not love,

Met by chance and oh so interesting.

Come on! and the rails and the
engine-rooms and Europe!

Come on and hurrah for all-me and
everything, engines working, whoa!

Leaping over everything
with everything! Hoop-la!

Oh, to be everyone and everything!

London
Álvaro de Campos

Ricardo Reis

No better destiny than self knowledge

Can the one who enjoys
his mind enjoy.

Preferable to know
One is nothing, than be ignorant:

Nothing inside nothing.

If there is not in me the power
that overcomes

the three Fates and the mausoleums
of the future,

May the gods already grant me
The power to know it;

And beauty, uncreatable by my craft,
I might enjoy as external and given,

Repeated in my passive eyes,
Lakes that death dries up.

Álvaro de Campos
Alone, on the desert quay,
this summer morning,

I look over to the bar, towards the
Indefinite, and am pleased to see,

Small, black and clear,
a steamer coming in.

It comes from afar, distinct,
classic, in its own way.

I look at the steamer from afar,
with a great independence of soul,

And within me a wheel begins
to turn, slowly.

The whole of maritime life!
everything in maritime life!

All this fine seduction insinuates
itself into my blood

And indeterminately
I brood over voyages.

Oh, the lines of distant coasts,
flattened by the horizon!

Oh, the capes, the islands,
the sandy shores!

The maritime solitudes like certain
moments in the Pacific.

The waters call me.
The tides call me.

The distances call me,
lifting a corporeal voice.

All maritime epochs
felt in the past, calling.

You, my English sailor friend
Jim Barns, you it was

Who taught me that age-old
English cry

That so poisonously sums up
For complex souls like mine

The waters' confused calling,

The unknown and implicit voice
of all that is the sea,

Of shipwreck, distant voyages,
and perilous crossings.

I hear you from here, now,
and wake up at any thing.

The wind shudders. Morning rises.
The heat expands.

I feel my cheeks grow red.
My conscious eyes dilate.

The ecstasy in me arises,
increases, advances,

And with a blind tumultuous roar

The lively turning of the wheel
is emphasized.

Broken keels, ships to the bottom,
blood on the seas!

The decks running with blood,
fragments of bodies!

Fingers chopped off on the bulwarks!
Children's heads, here, there!

People with eyes out of sockets,
screaming, howling!

I heed only the sea, the prize,
the sack!

I feel beating me, beating within me,
just the veins of my temples.

The sensation in my eyes is drops
of hot blood!

Oh pirates, pirates, pirates!
Pirates, love me and hate me!

Mingle me with you, pirates!

Your fury, your cruelty,
how they speak to the blood

Of that woman's body which once was
mine and whose rut survives!

It would be interesting to hang
sons in view of their mothers

(Yet I feel I'm their mothers),

To bury alive on desert isles
children of four years old,

Taking their parents in boats
there to see

(But I tremble for a son I don't have
who is sleeping peacefully at home).

I incite a cold craving
for maritime crimes,

But my imagination will not keep
me company.

Pass, slow steamer, pass,
do not stay...

Pass from me, from my sight,
Leave the depths of my heart.

Get lost in the Distance,
in the Distance, God's own mist,

Get lost, follow your destiny
and leave me...

Who am I to weep and question?
Who am I to talk to you and love you?

Who am I to be perturbed
at seeing you?

It leaves the quay, the sun grows
bright, rising golden,

The roofs of the quays
buildings gleam,

All this side of the city shines...

Go, leave me, become
First the ship in midstream,

standing out so clearly,

Then the ship on the way to the bar,
small and black,

Then vague dot on the horizon
(oh my anguish!),

Ever more blurred on the horizon...

Then nothing, but I and my sadness,
And the great city now in full sun,

And the present and naked time
like a quay without ships,

And the slow turn of the crane,
that, like a compass rotating,

Traces a semicircle
of I know not what emotion

In the affected silence of my soul...

Letter to Casais Monteiro 1935
It was the triumphal day of my life,
I shall never have another like it.

I started with a title:
The Keeper of Sheep.

And then someone appeared in me

whom I immediately
called Alberto Caeiro.

Forgive the absurd phrase:
my master had appeared in me.

This sensation was such that, after
the thirty-odd poems were written,

I immediately took more paper
and wrote, straight off as well,

the six poems that make up
Slanting Rain by Fernando Pessoa.

Immediately and totally...

It was the return of Pessoa -
Alberto Caeiro to Pessoa by himself.

Or, rather, it was Pessoa's reaction
to his inexistence as Alberto Caeiro.

Once Caeiro had appeared, I then set
about finding him some disciples.

I wrested the latent Ricardo Reis
from his false paganism,

found cut and adapted
his name to him,

for I was then already seeing him.

In a flash, and in opposite
derivation to that of Ricardo Reis,

a new individual appeared to me,
impetuously.

In one go, and at the typewriter,
with neither break nor correction,

the Triumphal Ode
by Álvaro de Campos emerged -

the Ode with that name and the
man with the name he has.

How do I write in the name
of those three?...

Caeiro out of pure inspiration
not knowing that I would write.

Ricardo Reis after abstract
deliberation, realized in an ode.

Campos when I feel a sudden impulse
to write and don't know what...

Be that as it may, my friend,
split yourself into two as you will,

feel outside yourself as you wish,
what's certain is that

the one who is capable of writing
those pages, if he does not feel,

is a genius at knowing how to feel
that which you tell me

you are more and more exiled from.

At each new line of yours I read
I feel my pride increasing:

my pride in being the one
whose work is closest to yours

- near like the Earth to the Sun -

in counting you among my most
intimate friends and, in short:

because you like what I write.
This is no declaration of love:

but all this, all this sumptuousness
and your nobility of soul

make me as much your friend
as I can be to anyone:

filling me with tenderness, liking,
as with my father,

to lean my head on your arm
and to have you here, near me,

as I'd like to have my father,
my nurse, or any object,

any beloved animal of my childhood!

I just ask you to excuse the way
I express myself-

but the only one which expresses
my total sincerity.

Illusions of glory, "of amazement"
no longer exist in me.

I don't mean that my work
aspires to great heights,

or know if it will reach them.
But I'm sure they are heavily gilded.

(perhaps with fake gold, but gilded
anyway) with many-coloured lights,

and spangles revolving,

multi-coloured smoke, aromas,
make-up, lakes,

naked dancers, Parisian actresses,
restaurant dining-rooms...

In Paris again, Sá-Carneiro writes
to Fernando Pessoa on 3rd June 1914

asking him to send him the money from
the sale of the copies of Beginning

which he must pay off in full.

Thinking the request detestable,

he asks Pessoa to "tear
this letter from your soul"

However, constant requests
for money follow,

obliging Pessoa to find it.

The reason is simple: his father,
formerly with him in Paris,

had left for Africa and would only
later be able to send him money.

It is a restless time for him.

Ghastly! Quite ghastly!
...I can't stay here.

I'm waiting for some money, and then
I'm off. To Lisbon, where else!

Am I staying in Barcelona? Ah-hah!...

But there's going to be a great
mess-up in my life.

That's the word...

This war!... It's weird how
everything has gone wrong for me!

A complete disgrace.

Last echoes from Barcelona!

I leave tomorrow at daybreak...

His aunt's departure for Switzerland
having left him homeless,

Pessoa settled into a small
attic-room above the Alentejan Dairy.

'Such was his financial
and emotional misfortune,

that we will find him
in the dismal garret of a dairy

at 12, Rua Almirante Barroso,

in temporary accommodation thanks to
the veneration of an illiterate man

who used to follow
the Brasileira set,

drinking in the poet's words...'

'The illiterate man, Mr. Sengo,

only met Pessoa 18 months after
his aunt had gone to Switzerland.

Mr. Sengo did not frequent the
Brasileira nor was part of the group.

He rented a room to Fernando Pessoa
and never lent him anything

(except, perhaps, writing paper).'

I'll wait for you from 5.30 - 6.30
in the Brasileira do Chiado.

It had to be! It hasn't been my day.

It began with a bad penny,
and ended with you not turning up!

To hell with you! What a bore!

But I beg you to be tomorrow between
10.45 and 11.00 at the Montanha.

For God's sake turn up.
I've got proofs!

Your great friend and grateful-
-brother-in-Mystery, M. S-C.

We are incapable of revolt
and agitation.

We did carry out a revolution, but to
implant the same thing as before.

We stained that revolution with our
softness towards the defeated...

Portugal needs rabble-rousers.

Those that we have had, or have
wanted to have, have failed us.

How could it not be so, seeing
that they come from our race?

The few figures who have from time
to time emerged in our political life

with appreciably disturbing qualities
soon made a mess of things

and betray their mission.

What is the first they do?

They organize a party.

They fall into order
through ancestral fate.

We, the young ones, shall work to
disturb souls, to disorient minds.

Let us cultivate mental
disintegration like a prize flower.

Let us build a Portuguese anarchy.

Let us be scrupulous about
the morbid and the corrupting.

And our mission, just by being
the most civilized and modern,

will also be moral and patriotic.

A hackney-carriage is more beautiful
than the Victoria of Samothrace.

If there is one main conclusion to be
drawn from the magazine we founded,

about the success and the fate
of poetic works, it's the following:

that any author, insofar as he is
great and original at the same time,

has always had to create
the aesthetic sense

by which he is to be appreciated;

for what belongs to himself

he must not only clear,

but often open up his own route;

a case of Hannibal crossing the Alps.

The Sailor, static drama.

I saw no boat through the window...

I wanted to see one and I spoke
to you of it to avoid pain...

Tell us now what it was you
dreamed on the seashore.

I dreamed about a sailor who may have
been shipwrecked on a distant island.

There were a few palm trees and
indistinct birds flew among them.

I didn't see if they ever perched.

Since escaping from the shipwreck,
the sailor had been living there.

As he had no means of returning
to his homeland,

and remembering it caused him pain,

he set about dreaming of a homeland
he had never had;

he began making another homeland his,
another kind of country

with other kinds of landscapes,
and other people.

All the time he constructed this
false homeland, dreaming always,

by day in the scanty shade
of the large palm trees,

the pointed edges outlined
on the sandy, warm ground;

at night, stretched out on his back
on the beach, unmindful of the stars.

Oh to have had a tree that speckled
on my outstretched hands

the shadow of a dream like that!

Let her talk...Don't interrupt her...

She knows words that the sirens
taught her...

I am falling asleep so I can hear
her... Tell, my sister, tell...

My heart aches at not having been you
while dreaming on the seashore.

For years and years, day by day,

the sailor raised his new homeland
in a continual dream.

Go on speaking, my sister, go on.
Don't stop telling us,

and take no notice
of the shining day.

It never shines for whoever rests his
head on the bosom of dreamed hours...

Don't wring your hands.

It makes the sound
of a furtive snake.

Speak some more to us of your dream.

It is so real that it has no meaning.

Just to think of listening to you
makes music play in my soul...

Yes, I shall tell you more of him.

I even need to tell it to you.

As I tell it, it's to myself
as well that I tell it...

There are three listening.

Three, no...

I don't know...

I don't know how many...

Everything was different
to what he had had...

neither the country

nor the people,

nor his own past appeared
as they had been...

Do you insist that I continue?
It is so painful to speak of this!

Now, because I talk of this to you

I would prefer to be telling
you of other dreams...

Go on, although you may
not know why

The more I listen to you,

the less I belong to myself

Would it really be good.
If you were to continue?

Ought any story to have an end?

In any case speak...

It matters so little what we do
or do not say...

We keep vigil in the hours that pass.

Our occupation is as useless as Life.

One day, when it had rained heavily,

and the horizon was more blurred,

the sailor became tired
of dreaming...

He then wanted to recall
his real homeland,

but he saw
that he remembered nothing,

that it did not exist for him...

Between April and July 1915,

the second number of Orpheu
comes out.

Collaboration between the poseur
and futurist Santa-Rita Pintor,

the mental-patient Ângelo de Lima,

the disquieting
prosewriter Raul Leal,

the feminist Violante de Cysneiros,
pseudonym of Cortes Rodrigues.

Pessoa-Álvaro de Campos
and Sá-Carneiro

wrote the explosive
and almost pornographic

Maritime Ode, and Manucure.

The success and scandal exceeded
that of the first number.

Manucure
by Sá-Carneiro
In the sensation of buffing
my nails,

Sudden inexplicable sensation
of tenderness,

I include everything in Me - piously.

Meanwhile here I am alone in the Cafá

Oh futuristic beauty of merchandise!

Sackcloth for parcels
How I'd like to toga myself in You!

Wood for crates
How I long to sink my teeth in You!

And the nails, the ropes,
the hoops...

But above all,
how they sparklingly dance

To my eyes audacious with beauty,
The inscriptions of all these parcels

- Black, red, blue or green -

Cries of current, Commerce & Industry
In cosmopolitan transit:

FRAGILE! FRAGILE!

843 - AG LISBON

It's in the air that everything
undulates!

It's there that everything exists!

With the break-up of his family
(a stepmother he does not accept,

and his dependence on a distant
paternal economic protection)

and the panic
of stagnating in Lisbon,

Sá-Carneiro rushes back to Paris

confiding only to Pessoa
the real reason for his flight.

My friend, pay great attention to
this, otherwise unimportant, letter

which won't give you any bother.
Rest easy then.

About problems in my private life

I don't want to know a thing,
whatever had happened.

I don't want to know a thing,
not a thing!...

Above all, what gives me the shivers
is the mirrorless idea

of inevitably dropping anchor again
in the Martinho.

I don't know why but that café

always had the feel of a place
where one goes and ends one's life:

strange refuge, perhaps,
for those with no more illusions,

who have nothing but a penny
to pay for their coffees everyday.

Yesterday I sent you a postcard
complaining about your silence.

Forgive me.
If you knew how I need your letters!

It's just that you are, in all truth,
my only chum.

And far away, I feel it more keenly
and far away, having your letters,

this friendship seems to me
perhaps closer, more intimate.

My life will proceed,

on the surface of rivers
that are sometimes sidestreets

and sometimes blind alleys...

Hotel de Nice, Paris 1915

My dear friend: This morning
I received your wonderful letter.

I'm angry at your supposing you could
bore me with your mental crisis.

Bu besides the honour of having
those pages in my hands,

how beautiful, great,
luminous and disturbing,

even artistic...
It's the novelist in me speaking...

is everything my dear Fernando Pessoa
tells me about himself.

Shall I tell you about my impression?
Up until reading those pages today,

I've never understood the mysterious
words in I Myself the Other:

"Shall I have become a nation?"

My position is much more terrible;

For me beauty is enough, even
fundamentally mistaken beauty.

Outstandingly resonant and brilliant
beauty, of infinite mirrors

convulsed with a thousand colours -
a lot of varnish and a lot of gold:

theatre of magic and apotheoses
with wheels of fire and naked bodies.

Fear and sleepwalking, sardonic
nonsense guffawing across everything.

This was the aim of my work.
I think I've achieved it at times.

But at other times...

The amazing reality of things
Is my everyday discovery.

Each thing is what it is,

And it's hard to explain how this
delights me, and is enough for me.

Enough to exist in order to be
complete.

I have written many poems.
I will write many more, of course.

Each poem of mine says this,
And all my poems are different.

Because each thing that exists
is a way of saying this.

Sá-Carneiro enthusiastically

outlines the "definitive" summary
of Orpheu 3,

yet a fortnight later,
13th September,

he announces in despair;

"Unfortunately we have
to give up Orpheu"

and explains that the mere appearance
of N° 3 under his responsibility,

or even his mere collaboration,
would unduly show his father

(who, much put out, had paid the bill
for N°. 2) his "insubordination".

Then, systematically, he continues
shouting in his letters to Pessoa:

don't let the booksellers go!
while asking him for critiques,

alterations, or opinions on the poems

that he carries on writing for
Indications of Gold.

Other anxieties develop
and get worse.

Tearing to pieces for Sá-Carneiro.
Inner siege for Pessoa.

Once more I'm the victim
of all conceivable crises,

but now it's an all-out attack.
By a tragic coincidence,

crises of various types
have descended on me.

My psyche...

...is in a state of siege.

My intellectual crisis has returned,
the one I told you about,

but this time in a more complex form,

because, although revived
under the old conditions,

new factors have come
to completely muddle it up.

I'm in a frenzy and an intellectual
agony that you can scarcely imagine.

I'm not sufficiently lucid
to tell you things...

I had to translate
theosophical books.

I knew nothing about the subject.
Now I know the essence of the system.

It shook me to a point
that I'd consider impossible,

as regards any religious system.

The vast nature of this
philosophy-religion;

the notion of strength, of mastery,
of greater-than-superhuman knowledge

that the theosophical works distil,
disturbed me a great deal...

Theosophy terrorizes me by its
mystery and occult vastness,

it revolts me by its essential
humanitarianism and apostolism,

it attracts me for being so like
a "transcendental paganism",

this is the name I give to the way
of thinking I had achieve,

it repulses me by being so like
Christianity, which I don't accept.

It's the horror and attraction of the
abyss affected in the soul's beyond.

A metaphysical terror,
my dear Sá-Carneiro!...

I want so much, but there's no way.
The tombola spins ever more wildly.

Above all I can't stay still.
It's a fever, a fever.

When I go to F. da Costa's house
I always tear the fringes of the rug

and the other day
I broke one of his ashtrays.

Tedium in my soul, in my body,
and what's worse! in the intestines.

Pimples on my forehead and neck.

All this caused by my impossible
and incurable state of soul.

An immense desire to get drunk,
but in my bones.

Without literature,

extravagant things, memories surely,
come into focus:

last night, a chicken of a blue grass
roasting on the spit;

and circular pieces of embroidery,
hiding something revolting.

The embroidery was white and pink
and the bastards moved, they moved!

Where it'll all end I don't know.

What was of interest in me once
is now waste-paper.

I'm fed up! fed up! fed up!

I deserved to have had a nightcap
put on each night

- honestly, dear chap...

The lamps have been lit, night falls,
life is replaced.

No matter how,
it's necessary to go on living.

My soul burns, as physically
as if it were a hand.

I am in everyone's way
and they jostle me.

My farm in the country, would that
there were less than a train,

and the decision to leave,
between me and you.

So I stay, I stay...

I'm the one
who always wants to leave.

And always stays, always stays.

Until death will I stay,
even if I go, stay, stay, stay...

O night, make me human,
fraternal and solicitous.

I'd so like to touch life, to be
me - but to be able to touch it...

There's no way: ever more lost is
The skill of knowing how to seize it.

To live at home like everyone else.
To be quite mad in my books -

But get to the end of the month with
My expenses religiously paid up.

Not to be afraid to follow girls and
Invite them to have me inside them -

To open windows in my Ivory Tower,
In a word, and have no more scenes.

To have the strength
to break the threads

of this gear that's out of mesh,

Not to send telegrams to my father.
Not to loiter about Paris, as I do...

My poor friend: I am mad.
There can be no doubt about it now.

If I tell you the contrary in an
edifying letter - don't believe it.

Sá-Carneiro is mad. Madness that can
be let out on the streets, of course.

But madness. Like Ângelo de Lima
without the shouting.

Literature, sensationalism
- all over. Just the loony-bin now.

I have to be so careful in front
of people or else I drop bricks.

I make a lemon of myself, get stuck
for words and drop my napkin.

It's ghastly.
For I'm perfectly aware of all this.

I'm cracking up, cracking up! I can't
feel terra firme beneath my feet.

It's as if I'm ploughing fog.

My coloured ribbons, my bows,
my plumes, my filigree!

So much rapture lost,
so many caresses squandered!

The dubious masker, the liar
who passed incognito through life;

The sham King-moon,
the falsely amazed;

Right deep down
the stringent coward...

Instead of Page, presumptuous fool...

His snow-white soul,
revulsion at vomit...

His spirit sung as if untamed
A homosexual and hasty lackey...

Nerveless, desireless, the milksop...

(His heart
perhaps moved by strings...)

In spite of his yells to the Ideal,

The degraded,
the gross, the disloyal,

The bloated one
belching astral Empire,

The impotent Wizard,
the Corpulent Sphinx...

On your own?

I'm alone.

I don't like to be alone. Do you?

- Am I disturbing you?
- No, not at all.

- May I seat with you.
- Of course.

You don't look like a Frenchman,
what are you doing in Paris?

I...

Why are you nervous? Are you hot?

I'd love another glass of champagne.

If you're a poet,

you need inspiration.

Yes, you're right.
I feel at home with you.

My dreams are making
a mockery of me.

And my nerves, the bastards, no one
to make them let go of the trapeze.

There are great transverse
loathing over my life.

I don't even know what this means
but it's exactly what it feels like.

Less and less can I stop being me

- and day by day
it causes me more pain.

If, at least, these pillars,
opposite me, were sudden to walk...

Please, don't forget to tell me
what you think about this.

Send me a pretty and sombre name
for an English woman.

Lady Helena something
(Helena in English is Ellen I think)

Don't forget.

This Helena is the woman
he fell in love with in Paris...

Hold me.

I'd like to be a woman to spread out
Beside my friends in cafés,

I'd like to be a woman to spread
Powder on my face, in cafés.

What are you saying?

I'd like to be a woman
not to have to think of life.

And knows lots of old gents
whom I could ask for money.

I'd like to be a woman to spend the
whole day long talking of fashion

and making up gossip
- highly amused.

What are you saying?
Are you listening to me?

Shut up, you can't understand
a thing that I'm saying.

I'd like to be a woman
to caress my breasts

and excite them in the mirror
before going to bed -

I'd like to be a woman
so this confusion suited me.

That frankly, in a man,
could never be excused.

To have lots of lovers, to deceive
them every one, even the favourite.

As I'd like to deceive my fair-haired
lover, the slimmest,

With a fat and ugly boy,
with extravagant manners...

I'd like to be a woman to excite
those who looked at me,

I'd like to be a woman to be able
to say no...

I'm leaving. Shall we meet tomorrow?

Paris, March 5th 1916.

My dear friend:

It's about something of crucial,
but crucial importance to me.

I won't go into details and excuse
me using as few words as possible.

As soon as you get this letter

go and find my old nurse at 78,
3rd floor Praça dos Restauradores.

(She is alone on my house in Lisbon,
as my father's wife is in L.Marques)

Show her the letter
I enclose for her,

read it and take care of everything.

Pawn the chain for the best price.

I'm asking you to give
to Mr. Fernando Pessoa,

that gold chain left
by my mother.

He will take care of everything...

My poor little boy!

Forgive me for everything.
I humbly beg you on my knees.

I received today the 160 francs.

I sincerely thank you for everything.

My dear Sá-Carneiro:

I'm writing to you today
out of emotional necessity,

an anxious longing to talk to you.
I've really nothing to tell you.

Only this - that today I'm at the
bottom of a bottomless depression.

The absurd phrase
says it all for me.

I'm in one of those days
when I never had a future.

Only an immovable present
with a wall of anguish all round.

The bank of the other side
of the river,

while it is that one,
is never the one this side.

That's the inmost reason
for all my suffering.

There are boats for many ports,

but none for life not to hurt,
nor disembarkation for one to forget.

All this happened a long while ago,
but my grief is older still.

Today, 14th March,
at ten past nine at night,

my life savours of this.

In the garden that I glimpse through
the silent windows of my seclusion,

they have thrown all the swings
right over the branches;

they're coiled up real high,

so not even the idea of truant me
can have a swing to forget the time.

Like the mourner in Sailor, my eyes
smart from having thought of crying.

Life hurts me bit by bit.
Nibbling away through crevices.

All this is in very small type in a
book with the binding coming apart.

If I don't post this letter today,
tomorrow on re-reading it

I might delay it by copying some of
it into the Book of Restlessness.

But that won't rob it of my sincerity
nor of its painful inevitability.

These are the latest news.

There's also
the state of war with Germany,

but even before that
the pain made one suffer.

On the other side of life,

these must be the subtitles
of a casual caricature.

Madness must bring about abandon
from that which one suffers,

a shrewd enjoyment of the shakings of
the soul, not so different from them.

What colour...

...would feeling be?

Fondest regards, and ever yours.

I don't know where this will end,
perhaps the gears won't smash me up?

But it's so lovely to talk rubbish:

"Let's carpet Life against
us and against the world..."

Saving a miracle, next Monday
the 3rd (or the evening before)

Mário de Sá-Carneiro will take
a strong dose of strychnine

and disappear from this earth.

That's how it stands.

But I'm finding it very hard
to write this letter

because of the ridiculousness I've
always found in "farewell letters".

It's not worth grieving for me,
my dear Fernando...

Today I'll live my last happy day.

Today I'll live my last happy day.

I'm very glad. There are a thousand
years between me and tomorrow.

What amazes me is the stillness
of things...that I see more clearly

in greater relief because
I shall shortly be leaving them.

But let's not get all literary.
By the same post (or tomorrow)

I shall send registered my book
of verses for you to look after

and which you can make use
of as you think fit.

You can have the poems published
in a collection, in magazine, etc.

Add the one: "When I die
let them beat on tin cans".

Look, even Up There, tell me "gossip"
talk to me of sensationalism...

Goodbye.

If I don't manage to arrange
a sufficient dose of strychnine,

I'll throw myself in front of the
Underground. Don't be angry with me.

It's today that I die

by throwing myself
under the Underground.

Yesterday I sent you my notebook
of poems but unstamped.

Please, do what you can
to pay the fine if it gets there.

If not, it doesn't matter much

as you've got all my poems
in my letters.

Go and tell my grandfather
the news of my death

and go and see my nurse.

Tell her that I'm thinking of her
and that I send her a great big kiss.

Tell my grandfather too
that I embrace him warmly.

Goodbye. Your poor
Mário de Sá-Carneiro.

My last letters of no avail

- things are getting worse
all the time.

But there was a measure of hope.
Until Saturday.

What's going on?

Why are you so disturbed?

I prepared everything
for my "death".

I wrote you a last letter
and another to my father.

Then I went to leave the pen.

A frantic Miss So-and-So
was looking for me...

- It's not fair. I love you.
- That has nothing to do with it.

It was 4 o'clock...

She had detailed her sister
to go to the North-South station

and she'd been to the Portuguese
Consulate which she'd just left...

At this point, who should appear,
when one least expects it?

ORPHEU, my friend, ORPHEU!

The Consuls laughed at her...
She shouldn't pay any attention

they knew very well who I was...
a certain magazine by madmen

of which I'd been the leader, etc...
and that I was deranged,

doped with cocaine and other drugs.

I think: Portuguese Consulate.

And do you know what
they say to me, those idiots?

They knew you very well.

They say I shouldn't worry
about what you say or do.

They said you belong
to an irreputable crowd.

All of you were fools or maniacs...

What is ORPHEU?

What have you done?

- What have you done?
- Nothing.

She was very pleased to find me -

it upset me - and went to find some
money seeing that I had none...

Before that, I caused another scene:
I wanted to break a glass on my face.

She snatched my hand away in time.
Even so, I split my lip...

Write. Laugh! but deep down be sorry,

very sorry for your
Mário de Sá-Carneiro.

Write immediately! WRITE.

Ah, might you always forget the hours
While polishing your nails -

Intolerant of flaxen morbidness

While in the mirror
you tidied yourself...

She with the doubtful bracelet
She with the jade rings and deceits

The dissolute, the dangerous

Deflowered at seven years old

Your past - secret of the grave.
You yourself almost overlook it-

Engrossed by the mist
You will enmesh him so thickly.

At vacant times, meanwhile,
A certain smile would come over you

Which instead of enchantment
Brought fear.

It's horrid; sorcery in italics.

Why is it that I had to find someone

I set out to find someone, although
on other summits, like me?

I know nothing.
Have pity on me.

Lucio's Confession,
foreboding a tragic end:

the friend, the "other", killing
an invented wife, kills himself

in order that the I, in despair,
may survive.

My friend, although in a state of
great agitation, opened the letter,

read it quickly and, crumpling it up,
threw it down...

Then, he twisted my arm violently.
Everything around me swayed.

I felt body and soul disperse into
the whirling all around me...

I was afraid I'd fallen into
the hands of a madman.

Let's go and see!

Let's go and see!

It's time to dispel the ghosts!

She's all yours!

All yours!

You must believe me...

As if my soul, acquiring a sex,
materialized in order to possess you.

She's mine! all mine!
I sought her just for you...

But I won't allow you to separate us.
You'll see...you'll see!...

With these incoherent, impossible
words he was furiously dragging me

towards his wife's suite
which was on the second floor.

Oh how dreadful!

As if by witchcraft it was not Marta
lying by the window

but my friend, it was Ricardo...

And, yes, at my feet! the
still-smoking revolver had fallen!

Marta had disappeared, silently
evaporated, like a snuffed-out flame.

Terrified, I let out a strident,
rending scream

and overcome with fear,
my eyes out on stalks, my hair on end

I threw myself in a crazy rush along
corridors and through drawing-rooms.

But the servants ran to help.

26th April, 1916

Only my egoism can save me.
But I'm so afraid of absence,

- to lose everything,
it wasn't worth kicking out.

Crazy! Crazy! Crazy! Pity me.

So many spills. And humiliations.

What have I done with my poor Pride?
Look at my horoscope.

Now, more than ever, is the moment.
I'm not afraid...

Add to these two serious reasons...

I'm not going through one
of my serious mental crises...

of various kinds at the same time...

On the 26th he came into
my office as usual,

after talking for a minute he said
- Araújo I need you round at my place

at 8 o'clock sharp, without fail.

So I went...

Then he said:

"I've just taken five flasks
of arseniate of strychnine,

please stay".

I ran downstairs for some milk
and told the servant to go up with it

while I went to the police station
to find a doctor and also a car,

to take him to the hospital
all this was quickly done...

Sá-Carneiro was in agony,
congested by horrible spasms,

all contorted, his hands clasped,

moments later he expired;

it was twenty past eight;

there was nothing
that could save him;

then the room was sealed off
by police order

and I went to the station
to give particulars.

At 11 o'clock,
we went into the room again,

the superintendent,
two constables and me.

Rigor mortis set in immediately,

Some three, four hours later,

he was dressed and combed;

horrible, his eyes out of their
sockets, mouth open,

hands closed over his belly,
legs slightly apart;

soon after dying he took
on a greenish colour

which gradually
grew more pronounced.

After all these things that I had
the courage to witness,

the door was locked once more...
...Only on the 28th at 8 o'clock

was he put in a coffin and this
because of my many complaints,

otherwise he'd still be on the bed
on the 29th.

When I went into the room
I withdrew in fright,

during the night the corpse had
swollen so that his suit had split,

black blood was coming from his
mouse, nose, eyes, ears,

and added to this an
unbearable smell of decomposing.

I had the men with the coffin go in
but it was no good, it was too small,

another came (the biggest they had)
even so it was still difficult.

Previously I had asked the landlady
For a sheet to serve as a shroud...

He was completely covered in blood

and was put thus in the shroud.

The coffin lid screwed down
and straps passed round it

for fear of it bursting
during the night.

Those whom the Gods love die young,
so ancient wisdom has it.

And certainly the imagination,
which pictures new worlds,

and art, which simulates them,
are the distinguishing marks

of that divine love...

This one died young because the Gods
loved him very much...

But for Sá-Carneiro, an artistic
and also an innovative genius,

to the indifference that surrounds
geniuses was added the ridicule

that pursues innovators,
prophets like Cassandra,

of truths that are taken for lies.

But if the country had been another,
the fate would not have differed.

Today, more than ever before,
any privilege is a punishment...

Glory belongs to gladiators
and mimics.

Any uncouth soldier

that the guards compel to be emperor
has the supreme decision.

Nothing is born great
that is not born accursed,

nor starts off nobly
that does not dwindle while growing.

If it is so, so let it be!
The Gods wished it thus.

How we were just one, talking!
We were like a dialogue in a soul.

I don't know if you sleep...

...quietly

I know that I miss you,
I'm one on my own.

It's as if one waited eternally
for your certain, familiar life.

There below, in the Arcada Café -
Almost at the end of this (...)

Neither king nor law,
neither peace nor war,

Defines with profile and being
This dull gleam of land

Which is Portugal sorrowing -

Lack-lustre brilliance, never burning
That a will-of-the-wisp may confine.

No one knows the things he wants,
No one knows the soul that he has,

Nor what is evil nor what is good

(What distant longing weeps at hand?)

All is uncertain and terminal,

All is dispersed,
nothing is integral.

Translation
by Juliet Perkins

Subtitles by
MEDIA RECORDING