Our multiple selves
Ponder this poem by Fernando Pessoa, Portugal's best-known modernist poet, in a new translation commissioned for LitHits
‘I Have More Souls Than One’
In each one of us lives a multitude; If I think or feel, I ignore Who it is that thinks or feels. I am merely the place Where feeling or thinking takes place. I have more souls than one. There are more Is than I myself. I exist all the same Indifferent to them Who I silence: I speak. Competing drives That I feel or do not feel Fight in the who I am. I ignore them. They dictate nothing To the me I know: I write. (Translated by Tom Revell, 2023. Click here for the original Portuguese text)
About the Author
Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa (1888-1935) was a Modernist poet, considered by many the national poet of Portugal. He is famous for inventing literary personas or ‘heteronyms’ with their own extensive back-stories and writing styles. More often than he wrote as himself, Pessoa wrote in the guise of one of these heteronyms—for example, ‘Ricardo Reis’ (the author of this poem) is an intellectual and a lover of good food and wine, whilst ‘Alberto Caeiro’ is a passionate expressionist.
What we love about this passage…
‘I Have More Souls than One’ speaks to us still in our present era of self-discovery and mindfulness. The poet combines a scientific approach, describing the phenomenon of the fraught inner life, with a forthright element of daring to do: ‘I exist’, ‘I speak’, ‘I am’, ‘I know’, ‘I write’.
We especially love the way it muses on the individual discontinuity we might sometimes experience, and on how to make the best of things.
To Read Alongside…
Compare ‘I Have More Souls than One’ with Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’ (especially Whitman’s idea that ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’). Ricardo Reis’ poetic sensibilities are also well-demonstrated in a similar poem entitled ‘To Be Great, Be Entire’, and could be fruitfully compared with the quite different styles and concerns of Pessoa’s other major heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro and Álvaro de Campos. Another of Portugal’s greatest authors, José Saramago, wrote a novel featuring Pessoa’s heteronym Reis as its main character (The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis), who lives a real, embodied life after Pessoa himself dies.
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LitHits helps you make time for reading by bringing you unabridged excerpts from brilliant literature that you can read on the go, anytime or any place. Our curators carefully select and frame each excerpt so that you can dive right in. We are more than a book recommendation site: we connect you with a powerful, enduring piece of literature, served directly to your mobile phone, tablet or computer.
Today's guest curator...
Tom Revell is a doctoral student in Old English poetry and a College Lecturer in medieval language and literature at the University of Oxford. He is also a translator of modern Portuguese and German poetry.
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