文章基本信息

Extract from Tabacaria - 'The Tobacconist's' - poem

Fernando Pessoa

I have dreamt more than Napoleon achieved.

I have clasped to my hypothetical heart more humanities than Christ,

I have in secret fashioned philosophies that no Kant ever wrote. But I am, and perhaps for ever will be, the one who belongs in a garret,

Even though I live elsewhere;

I'll always be the one who wasn't born for that;

I'll always be tbe one who was gifted;

I'll always be the one who waited for someone to open the door in a wall wher

And who sang the song of infinity in a chicken coop,

And heard the voice of God in a blocked-up well.

Believe in myself? No, nor in anything else ...

Let Nature Flour over my burning head

Her sun, her rain, the wind that tugs at my hair,

And as for the rest, let it come if it has to come, or let it stay put.

Cardiac slaves of the stars,

We conquered the whole world before we rose from our beds;

But when we awaken everything is opaque,

When we get up everything is alien;

We go out and the world is all the earth

Plus the solar system and the Milky Way and the unnamed boundlessness.

Alvaro de Campos