Canto X
Salted sea, how much of your salt
Is tears of Portugal!
On the journey, how many mothers wept,
How many children prayed in vain!
How many brides remained unmarried
That you might be ours, oh sea!
Was it worth it? Everything's worth
If the soul is not small.
Who wants to go beyond the Bojador
Must pass beyond pain.
God to the sea danger and the abyss gave
But in him is the mirror of the sky.
Speaking of Fernando Pessoa's talking about one of the greatest Portuguese poets of the twentieth century. Is speaking of the man of restless personality that led him to create several heteronyms, with personal lives and different styles of writing. It is also to speaking of the Message which describes the epic of a small country planted near the sea.
The first time we discussed the poems of Fernando Pessoa we are forced to think. Yes, to think, reflect and discuss the meaning of what he writes. Not an easy read and to enter the skin of the personalities he created, there's something of ourselves that needs to be put aside. We can not approach it from our point of view, we have to keep your mind open, pass a sort of sponge in our reasoning because what is to come, is beyond us. And we need help, need some guidance and here we are dependent on the valuable help of our masters. I even believe that its to violent for a person so young to read it. Don't get me wrong, but understand some of the poems of heteronyms are a painful process, it's scary experience. It requires an intellectual effort for which we are not weel prepared on such a young age. To read him, you need to lived. You must have the soul of old man.
Fernando Pessoa must have realized this himself, the various selves that lodged in his mind might be too much for ordinary mortals, so that created some of whose poetry is more accessible, almost simple. He always speaks of his loneliness in fact been a genius would be a heavy burden and must been lonely. Painful, and perhaps thats why we have to suffer to understand.
The message however, is a trip to Portugal, for its heroes, its joys and sorrows is a modern narrative of a dreamed country and maybe failed. Not in the sense of a lost identity, but in the sense of high expectations that hwere not met. This is a mandatory reading because it speaks of a nation, there's a parallel to the work of Camões, the Lusíadas, but without the excitement. It's the dream of finding a country shattered by the mist. Everything is uncertain and ultimate / everything is scattered, nothing is whole / Oh Portugal, you are now fog.
Read this magnificent work, but to understand him you have to read the biography of the man, to vision complete portray of the various fragmented personalities in order to absorb the words he used as his whill. Good read.
