Something Fishy

All this week The Daily Poem from The Paris Review has featured work by Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. In other words, it is featuring the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935). See the sidebar below for the explanation from the Review.

On Tuesday, there were three sonnets by Álvaro de Campos. Here’s one of them:

III.
Listen, Daisy: Be sure when I die
To tell my friends in London
That you feel, even if it’s a lie,
Real grief at my death. You will go

From London to York, where you were born (so you say…
not that I believe anything you say),
To tell that poor young lad
Who gave me so many happy hours,

Of which you know nothing, that I died …
Even he, whom I thought I loved so much,
Won’t give a damn … Then go and share

The news with that strange creature Cecily,
Who believed I would one day be great …
Oh, to hell with life and everyone in it!

– Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa Patricio Ferrari From issue no. 239 (Spring 2022)

When we were in Lisbon, we made the obligatory visit to the café where Pessoa was a regular. I remember a rather good bookstore close by.

I love the throwaway style of this poem – as if just tossed off in a burst of disillusionment and frustrated disappointment with life and relationships. A mini rant by someone contemplating death – or being merely melodramatic – structured as a farewell that dives into bitterness, suspicion, self-pity, and despair.

It begins with a mock request (“even if it’s a lie”) and ends in an explosion of nihilism (“Oh, to hell with life and everyone in it!”).

It’s theatrical romantic bitterness and self-dramatization, mixed with accusations, cynicism, and self-pity. What’s not to like?

In fourteen lines, the poem moves from sarcasm to sadness to bitterness, and pulls us into a world of disenchantment and distrust. A scorched-earth rejection of past hopes, loves, and relationships.

Álvaro de Campos is the emotionally volatile Pessoa heteronym. He’s a Glasgow-trained naval engineer by background, a self-styled modernist man of the world – with a sharp intellect and something of a drama queen.

Pessoa explained that he created heteronyms who could debate, argue, and embody different aspects of himself. Campos represents the emotive, sensation‑driven side, marked by yearning, anger, and disillusionment. Pessoa didn’t just draw on different aspects of his personality; he created a whole arsenal of fully formed alter egos – with biographies, astrological charts, the lot. He called them heteronyms, and they related to each other, argued, and conversed.

More Fish and Poets on a Trip

Coincidentally, I’ve been reading George Stonier and other writers found in John Lehmann’s Penguin New Writing series from the 1940s.

Stonier (1903 – 1985) was a versatile Australian-born journalist, translator, critic, novelist, and radio playwright, as well as literary editor of the New Statesman.

He too wrote under a whole raft of names.

As William Whitebait, he was the film critic. As Fanfarlo, he wrote a series of Blitz memoir pieces for Penguin New Writing, later published as Shaving Through the Blitz (1943). As Joseph Gurnard, he wrote satirical pieces. He also made competition contributions under a whole shoal of other names – most of them fishy: A. Plaice, B. Sole, C. Urchin, Fred Oyster, and staying with the aquatic, Tommy Tadpole.

As Joseph Gurnard, Stonier wrote what sounds like a hilarious, good-natured send-up of the poets of the era.

(The gurnard, by the way, is a species of bottom-dwelling fish also known as sea robins and croakers. The things you learn.)

Poets’ Excursion features a poetic “band of brothers” with thinly disguised names – Stephen Spendlove, Louis MacNoose, and Don Layman  among others –  on a trip from the wastelands of rats alley into a splendid modern English landscape.

In East Coker, they visit the local vicar, the Rev. J. Alfred Prufrock. “‘A cruel April,’ he began pleasantly. ‘Had we lunched?’”

I have it on order and can’t wait to read it.

While I’m waiting, I can read Stonier writing as Fanfarlo (not a fish), also in Penguin New Writing: Shaving Through the Blitz.