Every time I sit down to write about my recent trip to Lisbon, I fall into a rabbit hole of swirling lines of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry and prose. Pessoa, who was born in Lisbon in 1888 and who died in 1935 at the age of 47, is perhaps the greatest figure of modern Portuguese literature.
I’ve been looking back at my photographs of Lisbon and thinking about the city I walked in three months ago, the last place I was before coming home to this perpetual quarantine. Museums and shops had already closed down due to the pandemic. So we walked and walked for three days, wandering through the neighborhoods, or bairros, of Lisbon, trying to get a sense of the city through its façades, its hills, its colors, and its alleys. We walked around the neighborhoods of Alfama, Baixa and Chiado, Belém, Bairro Alto and the Parque das Nações. The text of a short book titled Lisbon: What the Tourist Should See was found among Pessoa’s effects posthumously. Written in English likely in 1925, it is a glimpse of the city through his eyes. I’ll excerpt here from Pessoa’s Lisbon passages about the historic parts of the city.
Baixa
“We now reach the largest of Lisbon squares, the Praça do Commercio… It is a vast space, perfectly square, lined on three sides by buildings of a uniform type, with high stone arches… The fourth, or South, side of the square is formed by the Tagus itself, very wide in this part and always full of shipping. In the centre of the square stands the bronze equestrian statue of King José I, a splendid sculpture by Joaquim Machado de Castro, cast in Portugal, in a single piece, in 1774.”
The Santa Justa Elevator “is one of the ‘sights’ of Lisbon and always compels great admiration from tourists from everywhere… The elevator is all built in iron, but it is extremely distinctive, light and safe. There are two lifts, worked by electricity.”
“We find São Pedro de Alcântara, an esplanade from which one of the finest views of a great part of the city can be obtained. From here may be seen the several hills of the eastern side of Lisbon… a good deal of the lower city, and, beyond that, the broad, calm river…”
Bairro Alto
Alfama
“Alfama, the old fishermen’s quarter, which still retains a great part of its ancient aspect. The tourist who can spend a few days in Lisbon should not omit to visit this quarter; he will get a notion no other place can give him of what Lisbon was like in the past. Everything will evoke that past here – the architecture, the type of streets, the arches and stairways, the wooden balconies, the very habits of the people who live there a life full of noise, of talk, of songs…”
“The castled Tower of Belém appears, a magnificent specimen of sixteenth century military architecture, in the romantic-gothic-moorish style… the river grows more narrow, soon to widen again, forming one of the largest natural harbours in the world with ample anchorage for the greatest of fleets. Then, on the left, the masses of houses cluster brightly over the hills. That is Lisbon…”
“The Tower of Belém, seen from the outside, is a magnificent stone-jewel, and it is with astonishment and a growing appreciation that the stranger beholds its peculiar beauty. It is lace, and fine lace at that, in its delicate stonework which glimmers white afar, striking at once the sight of those on board ships entering the river.”
Belém
We also visited Parque das Nações, a newer part of the city that didn’t exist when Pessoa was alive. Located in the northeast on the Tagus river, it was developed for the 1998 Lisbon World Exposition. We saw the oceanarium, Vasco da Gama Tower, and Vasco da Gama Bridge (the longest bridge in the EU), all from a cable car.
Something unusual about Lisbon, though, was that Pessoa appeared to author it as himself. He typically wrote under the name of an imagined character, or a heteronym. Pessoa’s heteronyms are different than pen names; they are fully realized characters with their own backstories, orientations, and styles of writing. Pessoa had over seventy heteronyms, but wrote most frequently as four alternative personas.
I’ll share here poems by two of Pessoa’s main heteronyms as two works to think about feelings of place. These resonate with me as I think back to visiting a new city at the confusing and uncertain beginnings of a global pandemic. The following poem is by Alberto Caeiro. He is unencumbered by finding deeper meaning in things. Caeiro takes the world for what it is and enjoys it for its surface value.
Beyond the bend in the road
Beyond the bend in the road
there may be a well, a castle.
There may be simply more road.
I neither know nor ask.
As long as I’m on the road before the bend
I simply look at the road before the bend,
since I can see only the road before the bend.
It would do no good to look elsewhere
or at what I can’t see.
Let’s just concentrate on where we are.
There’s beauty enough in being here, not elsewhere.
If anyone’s there beyond the bend in the road,
let them worry about what’s beyond the bend in the road.
That is the road, to them.
If we arrive there when we arrive we’ll know.
Now we only know that we’re not there.
Here there’s only the road before the bend, and before the bend
there’s the road with no bend at all.
Para além da curva da estrada
Para além da curva da estrada
Talvez haja um poço, e talvez um castelo,
E talvez apenas a continuação da estrada.
Não sei nem pergunto.
Enquanto vou na estrada antes da curva
Só olho para a estrada antes da curva,
Porque não posso ver senão a estrada antes da curva.
De nada me serviria estar olhando para outro lado
E para aquilo que não vejo.
Importemo-nos apenas com o lugar onde estamos.
Há beleza bastante em estar aqui e não noutra parte qualquer.
Se há alguém para além da curva da estrada,
Esses que se preocupem com o que há para além da curva da estrada.
Essa é que é a estrada para eles.
Se nós tivermos que chegar lá, quando lá chegarmos saberemos.
Por ora só sabemos que lá não estamos.
Aqui há só a estrada antes da curva, e antes da curva
Há a estrada sem curva nenhuma.
The following poem was written by Álvaro de Campos. Unlike Caeiro, Campus feels intense emotions as he moves through the world. He wants to experience life to the fullest but harbors a nostalgic emptiness.
Written in a book abandoned along the way
I am returning from down Beja-way.
I am on my way to Lisbon proper.
I bring back nothing and I will find nothing awaiting me.
I can already tell how tired I’ll be when I find nothing there.
The saudade I feel is not for anything in the past or in the future.
In this book I leave inscribed an image for a failed scheme:
I was like herbs that go unharvested.
Escrito num livro abandonado em viagem
Venho dos lados de Beja.
Vou para o meio de Lisboa.
Não trago nada e não acharei nada.
Tenho o cansaço antecipado do que não acharei,
E a saudade que sinto não é nem no passado nem no futuro.
Deixo escrita neste livro a imagem do meu desígnio morto:
Fui como ervas, e não me arrancaram.
Are you like Caiero, happy to encounter whatever occurs as you move through life, or like Campo, disappointed knowing life will never live up to expectations? Or perhaps like Pessoa, we are all different characters at the same time. Which voice comes out when we write, when we speak?
LISBON, PORTUGAL
Written in a book abandoned along the way
Escrito num livro abandonado em viagem: http://arquivopessoa.net/textos/167
Poesias de Álvaro de Campos. Fernando Pessoa. Lisboa: Ática, 1944 (imp. 1993). 1ª publ. in Presença, nº10. Coimbra: Mar. 1928.
English translation by George Monteiro, Pessoa Plural: 8 (O./Fall 2015), 625.
Beyond the bend in the road
Para além da curva da estrada: http://arquivopessoa.net/textos/2666
“Poemas Inconjuntos.” Poemas Completos de Alberto Caeiro. Fernando Pessoa. Lisboa: Presença, 1994. 129.
English translation by A.S. Kline, 2018