"Nothing Simpler"
John Pilling, PN Review 185, vol. 35, no. 3, pp. 64-65 (January-February, 2009)

This is the voice of Alberto Caeiro, to all intents and purposes in propria persona:

If, after my death, they want to write my biography,
There’s nothing simpler.
There are only two dates – that of my birth and of my death.
Between one and the other all days are mine.

Ricardo Reis gives the two dates that matter (1889-1915); Alvaro de Campos offers some sense of the days in between spent in 'Ribatejo, a rural area outside of Lisbon'. The notes and appendix to The Book of Disquiet (2001; the Richard Zenith translation) say that 'Alberto Caeiro da Silva was born in Lisbon on 16 April 1889', that he 'lived most of his life with an old aunt in the country', and that he died of tuberculosis. But you would never get this far without discovering that all these dates and figures (except the Richard Zenith whose name looks so very unlikely you might just possibly have paused to wonder) are imaginary, and attributable ultimately to the poet Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa the man, for the record, was born in Durban on 13 June 1888. He lived in Lisbon from 1905, hardly ever left the city thereafter, and died there on 30 November 1935. Nothing so 'Romantic' or 'Bohemian' as tuberculosis hastened his end, but cirrhosis of the liver and other complications caused by a different kind of consumption: alcohol. We are in the world, an oddly real world in its way, of the 'heteronyms', of whom Campos and Reis are the most important, after Caeiro (Caeiro is their 'master', 'the only sincere poet in the world' in the estimate of the former).

Before them – writing under his own name (largely in English) – and also after them – also under his own name but as only one ‘heteronym’ among many – came and went the still, but obviously troubled, centre occasionally obliged to think of himself as himself, albeit with a whole host of other skins he could inhabit out of a welter of compensatory needs. One of them, a 'Thomas Crosse' (described here as 'little known'), was the figure Pessoa would have liked to be able to thank for having 'gathered together into one [!]' the complete poems of Caeiro, only to find in the event that neither of them, that none of them, could accomplish what Michael Lee Rattigan has achieved on their behalf. Complete, as it turns out, means 'The Keeper of Flocks' (49 poems), 'The Shepherd in Love' (8 poems), some 'Fragments' (3 one-liners) and more than 70 'Detached Poems'. Multum in parvo in short, as presumably either Caeiro or Crosse would have said in their own defence, had it proved possible for Pessoa to keep either of them active long enough to make the necessary moves.

It was on a day of 'exultation' (a 'dia triunfal'), 8 March 1914, that Pessoa first wrote a Caeiro poem and began to see how this projected progenitor could not only co-exist with, but also 'teach', the other heteronymic figures he had either already created or was to go on to create. Yet the role of teacher was one among many that Caeiro disavowed, given that he had no syllabus, self-imposed or otherwise, to impart to any pupils he might have. No timetable either, apparently, since Pessoa was still writing as Caeiro as late as 1930, five years before his own death, and this in spite of the fact that Caeiro had 'died' in 1915, very close to the 'dia triunfal'. In real life, though the phrase seems faintly absurd in the circumstances, this was also very close to the suicide in Paris in April 1916 of Pessoa's friend and fellow-poet Mario de Sá-Careneiro (whose 'Ultimo Sonéto' is dated December 1915, the very month of Caeiro’s demise). It was between 1915 and 1919 that Pessoa wrote most of Caeiro's 'Detached Poems' – thereby making them effectively 'posthumous' poems (as João Gaspar Simões has pointed out) – although by assigning them to dates of composition between 1913 and 1915 Pessoa characteristically muddied the waters beyond hope of immediate retrieval. With Caeiro, of all the 'heteronyms', avoiding vertigo is something of an achievement, best accomplished perhaps by accepting Caeiro’s dictum of 'things as things, without philosophy' as the only useful course of action, the only 'philosophy' that will get you anywhere. With this compilation to hand it is now at least possible to see 'things as things' for what they are, indeed, as 'complete', or as complete as anyone could possibly expect them to be.

Caeiro has thus far been known for the sequence (though it contains nothing really sequential) often translated as 'The Keeper of Sheep'. Pessoa may have developed the background idea for this from the Christian story of a good shepherd travelling far afield to look after lost causes which, as it were, consent to be found. But Caeiro, ever resourceful within areas that even his non-philosophy cannot render limitless, always travels without portfolio, if only for the duration of the poem celebrating the fact. Whether he experiences more joy or more pain in the process is a moot point, since even though it is by getting lost that he finds himself, the transvaluation of the values involved is so total that all distinctions tend to recede or to blur, if never quite to disappear. With Caeiro as 'The Shepherd in Love', perhaps predictably, there are more losses than gains (at least the way loss and gain are usually understood), which was true for Pessoa also, as can be seen from his Cartas de amor (Ediçoes Atica 1978). But most interesting in this gathering together are the 'Detached Poems', which are neither quite lost nor quite found, but which here at least are for the first time attached in their very detachment, and can be seen to be broadly similar in spirit to the poems more securely tied down under rubrics. The last of these 'Detached Poems' is especially poignant, prefixed as it is by a headnote which reads: '(dictated by the poet on the day of his death)':

It might be the last day of my life.
I greeted the sun, raising my right hand,
But I didn’t greet it so as to say good-bye.
My gesture was to show that I still enjoyed seeing it, no more.

This is obviously one way to say 'good-bye' when raising your hand to write is no longer an option, and it is effectively the culmination of the 'posthumous' tendency identified by Simões. But the phantasmal proclivities of Pessoa, and the 'things as things' position of Caeiro, leave even this projected death-bed something of a contested force-field. What is clear, even with a 'gesture' that may by 'no more' than what it is said to be, is that, for all the troubles besetting Caeiro (some of them, as he’d be the first to admit, pretty much of his own making), he is not the type of poet to make moan, not given to posturing or to extravagance of any kind, and – very characteristic, this – not about to put up with having a motive attributed to him which he hasn’t himself either proposed, or explored, or actually authorised. The word 'say' (dizer) in this epitaph seems very apt, since Caeiro is typically found in either language, English or Portuguese, talking, telling whoever will listen what is the case, what is not the case, and (often) that what is not the case, or is still, the case, under the sign of 'things are things'.

Presumably 'Thomas Crosse' – whoever he was or whoever Pessoa imagined him to be – did not intend that we should go through The Complete Poems of Caeiro in order, and in full, since to do so would surely be to lose patience with a position which keeps telling you that it is not a position, and then assumes you haven't been listening, and then again tells you that this new position isn’t a position either. Only, in other words, by taking one poem at a time, and seeing it as that thing rather than some other thing, are you likely to see the world from Caeiro's perspective. At which point you really would need to look at something else for a while, until whatever was on your mind became too oppressive in its own right. Reading Caeiro is, as perhaps Caeiro was to Pessoa, a kind of therapy which, taken as per instructions, probably will enable you to derive benefit from the teacher with nothing to teach you (nothing, that is, that he has not already taught you before, which is much the same as saying, 'the nothing that I am not teaching you now').

The wrap-around to this exceptionally handsome book, which is limited to only 300 copies for sale, reminds us that 'To exist is enough to be complete'. This is certainly what Caeiro would have said of it if he had been sent The Complete Poems for review. The translator, who is also the enabler, cannot be congratulated… enough, I wanted to say, until the wrap-around caught my eye. Would it be… too much to hope that Michael Lee Rattigan might do something similar for Reis, Campos and – if only to keep all the heteronyms as happy as they expect to be – even the one calling itself Fernando Pessoa? I hope not. Not too much to hope I mean, no more, no less, nothing simpler anyway.