De Portugese dichter en schrijver Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa werd geboren in Lissabon op 13 juni 1888. Zie ook alle tags voor Fernando Pessoa op dit blog.
The Keeper Of Sheep II
My gaze is clear like a sunflower.
It is my custom to walk the roads
Looking right and left
And sometimes looking behind me,
And what I see at each moment
Is what I never saw before,
And I’m very good at noticing things.
I’m capable of feeling the same wonder
A newborn child would feel
If he noticed that he’d really and truly been born.
I feel at each moment that I’ve just been born
Into a completely new world…
I believe in the world as in a daisy,
Because I see it. But I don’t think about it,
Because to think is to not understand.
The world wasn’t made for us to think about it
(To think is to have eyes that aren’t well)
But to look at it and to be in agreement.
I have no philosophy, I have senses…
If I speak of Nature it’s not because I know what it is
But because I love it, and for that very reason,
Because those who love never know what they love
Or why they love, or what love is.
To love is eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not to think…
The Keeper Of Sheep VI
To think about God is to disobey God,
Since God wanted us not to know him,
Which is why he didn’t reveal himself to us…
Let’s be simple and calm,
Like the trees and streams,
And God will love us, making us
Us even as the trees are trees
And the streams are streams,
And will give us greenness in the spring, which is its season,
And a river to go to when we end…
And he’ll give us nothing more, since to give us more would make us less us.
Vertaald door Richard Zenith
Fernando Pessoa (13 juni 1888 – 30 november 1935)
Portret in Café Martinho Da Arcada, Lissabon