Lisbon Revisited (1926)

Nothing connects me to nothing.
I want fifty things all at the same time.
Anguished, as if in hunger for flesh,
I long for something though I know not what it is—
decidedly I am unsure...
I live turbulent in sleep and restless in dream,
sleeping fitfully, dreaming in halves.

All doors denied, both real and imagined.
All curtains drawn tight, all speculations hidden from the street.
I found the lane but not the door whose number I’d been given.

I woke up to the same life that I had slept into.
Even the armies of my dreams conceded defeat.
Even my dreams believed themselves to be what they were not.
Even the life desired wears me—even that life...

My understanding is inconstant, disconnected;
I write and rewrite through lapses of fatigue;
and my very boredom drags me off to the beach.

My anguish, a ship without rudder, leading to a destiny unknown;
I do not know which uncharted southern isles await my shipwreck;
nor what literary palms will deliver me at least a verse.

No, neither this, nor that, nor anything else do I know...
And deep inside, where I dream the dreams that I’ve dreamt,
in the last fields of my soul where I remember without reason
(the past being simply a mist of false tears),
on the roads and paths crisscrossing the forests afar
where I supposed my own very being resided,
the armies of my dreams, defeated without ever having been,
my would-be followers, torn apart by God,
flee as if laid bare, the final remains
of the ultimate illusion.

Once more I see you,
city of my youth so tragically lost...
Oh sad but joyful city, once again in you I can dream...
I? But am I the same man who lived here, and here returned,
and to here kept on returning and returning,
and to here returned once again?
Or am I all of those I’s who were here,
a series of beads, held together by a thread of memory,
a series of dreams, with me looking on?

Once more I see you,
with my heart at a distance, my soul much less so.

Once more I see you—Lisbon, my city, the Tagus and all—,
an inept passerby of both you and myself,
a stranger here as in everywhere else,
uncertain in life, erratic in soul,
a ghost wandering in the rooms of memories,
to the sounds of mice and the creaking of floorboards,
in this castle so damned, this life I must live...

Once more I see you,
a shadow traversing shadows, aglow for a moment
under a funereal light unknown,
stepping smoothly into the night, like the wake of a boat vanishing
as the sound of the water fades away...

Once more I see you,
but alas, myself, I do not!
The magical mirror in which my image reflected, cracked,
and in each fateful shard remains a fragment of me—
a fragment of you and me!...

— Álvaro de Campos (Fernando Pessoa)

Translated by Martin D'Evelin for