Shatered Words

It was certainly an endless nightmare trying for the very first time to bring some poetry alive in English, specially considering my notorious lack of control on the language, and adding the "poem" surrealist nature, mixing concepts impressions and sounds, in a sort of spell of the soul...
Indulgence is what I ask of the readers for such a pretentious attempt !...:sarcastic:

Another option would be to provide us with some poetry in your first language, and then also an English translation. Of course we might need some pronunciation tips. Poetry does seem to be the most difficult thing to translate. Or did you write the above in English to begin with?

I was into poetry long before philosophy. Do you like Eliot, Yeats, Keats? Has Pessoa been well-translated into English? I find most translations of poetry disappointing. Marlowe did Ovid well. Pound did some Italians well. I say this without having read the originals. So I can't talk of accuracy but only of the poetic talent of translators. My last stretch as a poet was writing lyrics for a en experimental rock band I fronted in younger crazier days. But song lyrics must be simpler than written poetry to work well, yes?

"You're biting off your lips, and chewing on your tongue. Too young. High strung."

The Book of Disquiet

Heteronym: Bernardo Soares, Auxiliary book-keeper in Lisbon and a perfectionist without a real life. He lived in a small apartment in the Rua dos Douradores, and all he had in life was "a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming". One afternoon he was allowed to leave the office earlier to run a personal errand right there in Lisbon; the errand being completed early, he found that given the different hours Lisbon was a strange town he was unfamiliar with, and went back to the office, to the surprise of his colleagues. (Where a portuguese original quote exists, the translation into english was informal.)

• Whether or not they exist, we're slaves to the gods.
  
  • "A Factless Autobiography", number 21, (Trans. Richard Zenith, Penguin Classics edition)
    
  
  
  

• ... And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination. I fear this nothingness that could be something else, and I fear it as nothing and as something else simultaneously, as if gross horror and non-existence could coincide there, as if my coffin could entrap the eternal breathing of a bodily soul, as if immortality could be tormented by confinement. The idea of hell, which only a satanic soul could have invented seems to me to have derived from this sort of confusion - a mixture of two different fears that contradict and contaminate each other.
  
  • "A Factless Autobiography", number 168, (Trans. Richard Zenith, Penguin Classics edition)
    
  
  
  

• I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 40)
    
  
  
  

• Every day things happen in the world that cannot be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they're mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion. Such is the law by which things that can't be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.
  
  • "A Factless Autobiography", number 424, (Trans. Richard Zenith, Penguin Classics edition)
    
  
  
  

• Having touched Christ's feet is not an excuse for punctuation mistakes.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p 229)
    
  
  
  

• Strength without agility is a mere mass.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p 229)
    
  
  
  

• There are those that even God exploits, and they are prophets and saints in the vacuousness of the world.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 45)
    
  
  
  

• I come closer to my desk as to a bulwark against life.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 45)
    
  
  
  

• We are two abysses -- a well staring at the sky.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 48)
    
  
  
  

• A tedium that includes only the anticipation of more tedium; the regret, now, of tomorrow regretting having regretted today.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 50)
    
  
  
  

• • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 50)
    
  
  
  

• We become sphynxes, though fake, up to the point we no longer know who we are.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 52)
    
  
  
  

• Fraternity has subtleties.
  
  • Original: A fraternidade tem subtilezas.
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 53)
    
  
  
  

• I believe that saying a thing is to keep its virtues and take away its terror.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 55)
    
  
  
  

• I have now so many fundamental thoughts, so many really metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write more, not to think more, but allow the fever of saying to make me sleepy, and fondle, with closed eyes, as if to a cat, all that I could have said.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 56)
    
  
  
  

• I'm all those things, even though I don't want to, in the confuse depth of my fatal sensibility.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 58)
    
  
  
  

• I sleep and I unsleep. On the other side of me, beyond where I lie down, the silence of the house touches infinity. I hear time falling, drop by drop, and no falling drop is heard falling.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 59)
    
  
  
  

• The house clock, place certain there at the bottom of things, strikes the half hour dry and null. All is so much, all is so deep, all is so dark and cold!
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 60)
    
  
  
  

• I pass times, I pass silences, formless worlds pass me by.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 60)
    
  
  
  

• Everything was asleep as if the universe was a mistake.
  
  • Original: Dormia tudo como se o universo fosse um erro.
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 60)
    
  
  
  

• Not pleasure, not glory, not power: freedom, only freedom.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 62)
    
  
  
  

• Changing from the ghosts of faith to the spectres of reason is just changing cells.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 62)
    
  
  
  

• Thing thrown to a corner, rag fallen on the road, my ignoble being feigns itself in front of life.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 64)
    
  
  
  

• It was just a moment, and I saw myself. Then I no longer could say what I was.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 66)
    
  
  
  

• As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 68)
    
  
  
  

• There's a tiredness of abstract inteligence, and it's the most horrible of tirednesses. It doesn't weight on you like the tiredness of the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It's a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 69)
    
  
  
  

• Then a overflowing desire comes to me, absurd, of a sort of satanism before Satan, in that one day [...] an escape out of God can be found and the deepest of us stops, I don't know how, to be a part of being or not being.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "Os Grandes Trechos", s/n. Translated from the Portuguese Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p.
    
  
  
  

• To stagnate in the sun, goldenly, like an obscure lake surrounded by flowers.
  
  • Original: Estagnar ao sol, douradamente, como um lago obscuro rodeado de flores.
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 70)
    
  • Note: About a strictly intellectual life.
    
  
  
  

• For I am the size of what I see / not my height's size.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Attributed to the Caeiro alter ego, in "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 71)
    
  
  
  

• In order to understand, I destroyed myself.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 73)
    
  
  
  

• Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 73)
    
  
  
  

• Yes, talking to people makes me sleepy.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 73)
    
  
  
  

• The idea of any social obligation [...] just the idea of it embarasses my thoughts for a day, and sometimes it's since the day before that I worry, and don't sleep well, and the real affair, when it happens, is absolutely insignificant and justifies nothing; and the case repeats itself and I never learn to learn.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 73)
    
  
  
  

• The beauty of a naked body is felt only by the dressed races.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 75)
    
  
  
  

• What is a disease is wishing with an equal intensity what is needed and what is desirable, and suffer for not being perfect as you would suffer for not having bread. The romantic error is this wanting the moon as if there was a way to get it.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 77)
    
  
  
  

• I take with me the conscience of defeat as a victory banner.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 79)
    
  
  
  

• It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 86)
    
  
  
  

• Blessed are those who never entrust their life to no one.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 86)
    
  
  
  

• Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 88)
    
  
  
  

• I reread? I lied! I don't dare to reread. I cannot reread. What's the point, for me, in rereading?
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 88)
    
  
  
  

• Civilization consists in giving something an unfitting name, then dream about the result. And indeed the false name and the real dream create a new reality. The object really becomes another, because we turned it into another one. We manufacture realities.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 89)
    
  
  
  

• The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is intelligence's oldest tax.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 91)
    
  
  
  

• A sort of anteneurosis of what I will be when I will not longer be freezes my body and soul. A kind of remembrance of my future death makes me shudder from the inside.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 91)
    
  
  
  

• What, I believe, produces in me the deep feeling, in which I live, of incongruity with others, is that most think with sensitivity, while I feel with thought.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 93)
    
  
  
  

• You breathe better when you're rich.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 95)
    
  
  
  

• I never go to where's a risk. I'm frightened of dangers down to boredom.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 96)
    
  
  
  

• Some sensations are sleeps that take up all the extent of the mind like a fog, don't let us think, don't let us act, don't let us be clearly.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 98)
    
  
  
  

• My joy is as painful as my pain.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 100)
    
  
  
  

• Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 100)
    
  
  
  

• My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 101)
    
  
  
  

• My life is as if you've hit me with it.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 101)
    
  
  
  

• If we knew the truth, we'd see it; all else is system and outskirts.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 106)
    
  
  
  

• They bring me faith like a closed package in someone else's plate. They want me to accept it so that I don't open it.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 106)
    
  
  
  

• The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 110)
    
  
  
  

• I never meant to be but a dreamer.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 110)
    
  
  
  

• There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 111)
    
  
  
  

• I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 118)
    
  
  
  

• The supreme empire is that of the Emperor who renounces all normal life, that of other men, and in who the care of supremacy doesn't weigh like a load of jewels.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 121)
    
  
  
  

• I will be what I want. But I will have to want what I'll be. Success is in having success, not conditions for success.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 122)
    
  
  
  

• To act is to rest.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 122)
    
  
  
  

• All problemas are unsolvable. The essence of the existence of a problem is that there is no solution. Looking for a fact means there is no fact. To think is not to know how to be.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 123)
    
  
  
  

• His livid face is a bewildered false green. I notice it, between the chest's hard air, with the fraternity of knowing I will also be so.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 124)
    
  
  
  

• We never love someone. We just love the idea we have of someone. It's a concept of ours - summing up, ourselves - that we love.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 125)
    
  
  
  

• To write is to forget. Literature is the pleasantest way of ignoring life.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". (Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 128)
    
  
  
  

• Being pleased with what they give you is proper of slaves. Asking for more is proper of children. Conquering more is proper of fools.
  
  • Original:
    
  • A Factless Autobiography. Richard Zenith Edition. 2006. p. 133.
    
  • Note: [X]: text missing in the manuscript.
    
  
  
  

• To be understood is to prostitute yourself.
  
  • Original:
    
  • A Factless Autobiography. Richard Zenith Edition. 2006. p. 136.
    
  
  
  

• I search and can't find myself. I belong in chrysanthemum time, sharp in calla lily elongations. God made my soul into an ornamental thing.
  
  • Original:
    
  • A Factless Autobiography. Richard Zenith Edition. 2006. p. 140.
    
  
  
  

• 'Any road', said Carlyle, 'even this road to Entepfuhl, will take you to the end of the world'. But the Entepfuhl road, if taken in its entirety, and to the end, goes back to Entepfuhl; so Entepfuhl, where we already were, is that very end of the world we were seeking.
  
  • Original:
    
  • A Factless Autobiography. Richard Zenith Edition. 2006. p. 142.
    
  
  
  

• It's been a long time since I've been me.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 143
    
  
  
  

• Inside the henhouse from where he will be taken to be killed, the **** sings hymns to liberty because he was given two perches.
  
  • Original:
    
  • A Factless Autobiography. Richard Zenith Edition. 2006. p. 144.
    
  
  
  

• What's most worthless about dreams is that everybody has them.
  
  • Original:
    
  • A Factless Autobiography. Richard Zenith Edition. 2006. p. 145.
    
  
  
  

• The end is low, like all quantitative ends, personal or not, and it can be attained and verified.
  
  • Original:
    
  • A Factless Autobiography. Richard Zenith Edition. 2006. p. 149.
    
  
  
  

• The perfect man of pagans was the perfection of the man there is; the perfect man of christians, the perfection of the man there isn't; the buddhists' perfect man, the perfection of not existing a man.
  
  • Original:
    
  • A Factless Autobiography. Richard Zenith Edition. 2006. p. 150.
    
  
  
  

• Nature is the difference between the soul and God.
  
  • Original:
    
  • A Factless Autobiography. Richard Zenith Edition. 2006. p. 150.
    
  
  
  

• There is no safe standard to tell man from animals.
  
  • Original:
    
  • A Factless Autobiography. Richard Zenith Edition. 2006. p. 150.
    
  
  
  

• Irony is the first hint that consciousness became conscious.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 151
    
  
  
  

• Who am I to myself? Just a feeling of mine.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 156
    
  
  
  

• I will necessarily say what it seems to me, given that I'm me.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 162
    
  
  
  

• Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 163
    
  
  
  

• Action men are the unvoluntary slaves of wise men.
  
  • "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 163
    
  
  
  

• To narrate is to create, for living is just being lived.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 163
    
  
  
  

• I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 164
    
  
  
  

• The slope takes you to the windmill, but effort takes you nowhere.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 171
    
  
  
  

• Destiny gave me only two things: a few accounting books and the gift of dreaming.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 171
    
  
  
  

• In today's life, the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. The right to live and triumph is now conquered almost by the same means by which you conquer internment in an asylum: the inability to think, amorality and hiperexcitation.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 173
    
  
  
  

• What is art but the denial of life?
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 174
    
  
  
  

• Common man, no matter how hard life is to him, at least has the fortune of not thinking it.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 181
    
  
  
  

• To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 181
    
  
  
  

• I sometimes think, with a sad delight, that if one day, in a future I no longer belong to, these sentences, that I write, last with praise, I will at last have the people who understand me, those mine, the true family to be born in and be loved. [...] I will only be understood in effigy, when affection no longer repays the dead the unaffection that was, when living.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 182
    
  
  
  

• Enthusiasm is rude.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 200
    
  
  
  

• My God, my God, who am I attending to? How many am I? Who is me? What is this interval between me and me?
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 201
    
  
  
  

• Being a retired major looks like an ideal thing to me. What a pity you couldn't eternally have been just a retired major.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 218
    
  
  
  

• My curiosity sister of larks.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 219
    
  
  
  

• If a man can only write well when drunk, I'll tell him: get drunk. And if he tells me that his liver suffers with it, I'll answer: what's your liver? It's a dead thing that lives as long as you live, and the poems you'll write will live without a as long as.
  
  • Original:
    
  • English note by the hand of the poet in the same paper sheet: Your poems are of interest to mankind; your liver isn't. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you.
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 229
    
  
  
  

• My homeland is the portuguese language.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 230
    
  
  
  

• Art consists in making others feel what we feel.
  
  • Original:
    
  • "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 231
    
  
  
  

• Art lies because it's social.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 232
    
  
  
  

• Tedium is the lack of a mithology. To whom has no beliefs, even doubt is impossible, even skepticism has no strength to suspect.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p.
    
  
  
  

• Smell is a strange sight. It evokes sentimental landscapes through a sudden sketching of the subconscious.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 238
    
  
  
  

• Deceiving himself well is the first quality of the statesman.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 241
    
  
  
  

• It's certain that, when hearing from any of those people the story of their sexual marathons, a vague suspicion pervades us, at about the seventh deflowering.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 243
    
  
  
  

• Liberty is the possibility of isolation.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 246
    
  
  
  

• If you cannot live alone, you were born a slave.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 246
    
  
  
  

• And let our despite go to those who work and fight and our hate to those who hope and trust.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 248
    
  
  
  

• We adore perfection because we can't have it; it would disgust us if we had it. Perfect is inhuman, because human is imperfect.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 249
    
  
  
  

• If I had written King Lear, I would regret it all my life afterwards. Because that work is so big, that its defects show as huge, its monstrous defects, things even minimal in between some scenes and their possible perfection. It's not the sun with spots; it's a broken greek statue.
  
  • Original: Se eu tivesse escrito o Rei Lear
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 250
    
  
  
  

• For valuing your own suffering sets on it the gold of a sun of pride. Suffering a lot can originate the illusion of being the Chosen of Pain.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 253
    
  
  
  

• All is absurd.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 255
    
  
  
  

• The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 258
    
  
  
  

• What would happen to the world if we were human?
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 259
    
  
  
  

• Who doesn't feel commands. He who only thinks what is required in order to win, wins.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 260
    
  
  
  

• Sailing is necessary, living is not necessary.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, pps. 133, 262
    
  • Note: This has been attributed to Pessoa. Indeed, it is from Plutarch's "Parallel Lives", about Pompeus, when demanding that soldiers board the ships, when they were afraid of dying at sea.
    
  
  
  

• All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what everybody does.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 265
    
  
  
  

• I'm upset by the happiness of all these men who don't know they're unhappy. [...] Because of that, though, I love them all. Dear vegetables!
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 266
    
  
  
  

• For the moment being, given that we live in society, the only duty of superior men is to reduce to a minimum their participation in the tribe's life. Not to read newspapers, or read them only to know about whatever unimportant and curious is going on. / [...] The supreme honorable state for a superior man is in not knowing who is the Head of State of his country, or if he lives under a monarchy or a republic. / All his attitude must be setting his soul so that the passing of things, of events doesn't bother him. If he doesn't do it he will have to take an interest in others in order to take care of himself.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 267
    
  
  
  

• Wasting time has an esthetics to it.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 267
    
  
  
  

• I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd; or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 271
    
  • Note: a possible play on Tertullian's: "credo quia absurdum" (I believe because it's absurd), "credo quia impossibilis est" (I believe because it's impossible).
    
  
  
  

• It's in an inland sea that the river of my life ended.
  
  • Original: Foi num mar interior que o rio da minha vida findou.
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 271
    
  
  
  

• Every gesture is a revolutionary act.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 274
    
  
  
  

• Knowing not to have illusions is absolutely necessary in order to have dreams.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 276
    
  
  
  

• Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 279
    
  
  
  

• And the supreme glory of all this, my love, is to think that maybe this isn't true, neither may I believe it true. // And when lying starts giving us pleasure, let's speak the truth so that we lie to it.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 280
    
  
  
  

• My head and the universe ache me.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 280
    
  
  
  

• Yet I have no stylistic nobility. My head aches because my head aches. The universe aches me because my head aches.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 280
    
  
  
  

• Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 282
    
  
  
  

• I don't believe in the landscape.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 286
    
  
  
  

• I say it because I don't believe.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 286
    
  
  
  

• When I write, I solemnly visit myself.
  
  • Original: Quando escrevo, visito-me solenemente.
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 287
    
  
  
  

• Life is a thread that someone entangled.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 287
    
  
  
  

• They were two and beautiful and wanted to be something else; love delayed itself to them in the tedium of the future, and regret of what would happen to be was already being the daughter of the love they hadn't had.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 288
    
  
  
  

• Only sterility is noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is elevated and perverse and absurd.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 289
    
  
  
  

• I exempt you of being present in my idea of you.
  
  • Original: Dispenso-a de comparecer na minha ideia de si.
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 290
    
  
  
  

• That's not my love; that's just your life.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 290
    
  
  
  

• And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 320
    
  
  
  

• There is no happiness without knowledge. But knowledge of happiness is unhappy; for knowing ourselves happy is knowing ourselves passing through happiness, and having to, immediatly at once, leave it behind. To know is to kill, in happiness as in everything. Not to know, though, is not to exist.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 328
    
  
  
  

• I don't write in Portuguese. I write myself.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 353
    
  
  
  

• To travel? In order to travel it's enough to be. [...] Why travel? In Madrid, in Berlin, in Persia, in China, at the Poles both, where would I be but in myself, and in the sort and kind of my sensations? // Life is what we make of it. Travels are travellers. What we see is not what we see but what we are.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 360
    
  
  
  

• I'd like to be in the country so that I'd could like being in the city.
  
  • Original: Gostava de estar no campo para poder gostar de estar na cidade.
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 367
    
  
  
  

• Man shouldn't be able to see his own face. That's what's most terrible. Nature gave him the possibility of not seeing it, as well as the incapacity of not seeing his own eyes.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 371
    
  
  
  

• In any spirit that isn't deformed there is the belief in God. In any spirit that is not deformed there isn't the belief in a particular God.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 375
    
  
  
  

• I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner reality.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "A Factless Autobiography". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 376
    
  
  
  

• Humanitarianim is rude.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "Os Grandes Trechos". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p.
    
  
  
  

• Property isn't theft: it's nothing.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "Os Grandes Trechos". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p.
    
  
  
  

• To have defined and sure opinions, fixed and known instincts, passions and character -- all that is the horror of turning our soul into a fact, materialize it and make it external.
  
  • Original:
    
  • Source: "Os Grandes Trechos". Richard Zenith Edition, Lisbon, 2006, p. 413
    
  
  
  

Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Poe, Tolstoy, Kafka, Pessoa, are central...

Why did death horrify him?

It was certainly an endless nightmare trying for the very first time to bring some poetry alive in English, specially considering my notorious lack of control on the language, and adding the "poem" surrealist nature, mixing concepts impressions and sounds, in a sort of spell of the soul...
Indulgence is what I ask of the readers for such a pretentious attempt !...:sarcastic:

GReat quotes! Yes, he seems quite good. I think Dostoevsky is first class. Have you read The Possessed/Demons? So brilliant. Also C & P, and N from D, and the Gambler, the Brothers, ETernal Husband. Yeah, D is a genius of the first water. Also think Kafka is great. Tolstoy is great in Anna K. Didn't like his What Is Art? much, but he was grinding an axe, and I don't much like the nasty side of Nietzsche either. Baudelaire is someone I tried to read in translation, but the trans wasn't good, or didn't seem good. I saw some decent translations of Apollonaire that intrigued me. Of course I've enjoyed my share of Poe.

Do you like Nabokov? He's filthy, but quite the writer. What about Bukowski or H. Miller?

---------- Post added 04-10-2010 at 11:57 PM ----------



I'll venture a guess. I'm not afraid of death as death, but only of death as the end of life. Death as the loss of something beautiful, that is in itself painless. ?

i would say you definitely succeeded...and i would guess poetry and jokes are the two hardest things to master in another language.

Why did death horrify him?

They all are great indeed...but speaking in C. Baudelaire try to get "Les fleurs du mal" and "Mon coeur mis a nu", I find them a challenge worth taking...from Miller I read Tropic of cancer long time ago...a very vivid book.
How about Saramago have you heard on him ? Heavy stuff from the "lefty" yet brilliant old fox...but still of course, there is some space left for Terry Prachett books and other light readings.
.