Lisbon Revisited

"Ó mágoa revisitada, Lisboa de outrora de hoje!
Nada me dais, nada me tirais, nada sois que eu me sinta.
Deixem-me em paz! Não tardo, que eu nunca tardo...
E enquanto tarda o Abismo e o Silêncio quero estar sozinho!"
1923/2006

"Outra vez te revejo,
Mas, ai, a mim não me revejo!
Partiu-se o espelho mágico em que me revia idêntico,
E em cada fragmento fatídico vejo só um bocado de mim -
Um bocado de ti e de mim!..."
1926/2011

Farewell, Alexander Search, 1907

"Farewell, farewell for ever!
I cannot more remain;
Far wider things our hearts do sever
Than continent or main -
Pride and distance and inaptness
To feel each other's joy, distress.

Farewell, farewell for ever!
Be it not said by thee
My heart was weaker, thy heart braver
In mutual misery.
But parted were we, be it said,
As are the living from the dead.

Farewell, farewell for ever!
Since love leaves not behind
Not even friendship, nor endeavour,
Nor sorrow wild or kind...
'Tis fit indeed those souls be parted
That cannot e'er be broken-hearted.

Farewell, farewell for ever!
'Tis time this thing were done,
When love is cold which was a fever
And vulgar as a stone,
When life from woe to woe doth flee
And change itself is misery."

Souvenir, by Alexander Search, 1904 *

“How sweetly sad it is sometimes to hear
Some old loved sound to memory recalled,
To see, as if in dreams, some old dear face,
Some landscape’s stretch, some field, some dale, some stream,
A memory so sudden, sad and pleasent,
Aught that recalls the days of happy youth.
Then spring in happy pain the tears that wait,
Those subtle tears that wait on thought, and all -
Field, stream and voice - all that we hear or see -
Goes from the sense, adorned with mem’ry’s hand
And merges slowly into dreamy light.
I wake; alas! by dreams I was betrayed.
‘Tis but a semblance that I feel and hear
Because the past, alas! cannot return.
These fields are not the fields I knew, these sounds
Are not the sounds I knew; all those are gone,
And all the past - alas! cannot return.”

*which pretty much means: Pessoa wrote this fucking awesome shit at 16.