Fernando Pessoa - Alberto Caeiro

Fernando Pessoa downtown in Lisbon.











Explanation about Alberto Caeiro birth in a letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, and the original Poem II from the "Sheep Keeper".


Lisbon. 93 years ago inside house, over a piece of furniture…


THE SHEEP KEEPER

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…

8-3-1914
© 1914, Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa)
From: Poesia
Publisher: Assírio & Alvim, Lisbon, 2001

© Translation: 2006, Richard Zenith
From: A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems
Publisher: Penguin, New York, 2006