Álvaro de Campos was born in Tavira, on the fifteenth of October, 1890 (at 1:30 p.m., Ferreira Gomes tells me; and it's true confirmed by a horoscope made of this hour). As you know, he is a naval engineer (in Glasgow), but now lives here in Lisbon, not working. ... Álvaro de Campos is tall (1.75 meters tall, two centimeters more than I), thin, with a tendency to a slight stoop. ...all (the Heteronyms) are cleanshave ... Campos between fair and swarthy, a vaguely Jewish Portuguese type, hair therefore smooth and normally parted on the side, monocled. ... Álvaro de Campos had a high-school education; he later went to Scotland to study engineering, first mechanical, then naval. On some holiday he went to Orient, from which «Opium Eater» is derived. An uncle, also a priest, from the Beira, taught him Latin...

(Fernando Pessoa, from a Letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, January 13, 1935) ( )*

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Yes, I am I, I myself, just what I turned out to be after all. A sort of acessory or leftlover, The foggy suburbs of my sicere emotion, It's me here inside of me, it's me. What i was, what I wasn't -- that's all me, What I want, what I didn't, all all of that gets to be me What I loved, what I stopped loving -- it's all become the same sad yearning in me. And at the same time, the impression, a bit inconsenquential, Like a dream made of mixed realities, Of facing myself left behind on a seat in a trolley, To be acidentally met buy someone who'd site down on top of me

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I'm me, and what the hell can I do about it!... (from poem #481) I who am , in the end, a continual dialogue, A loud incomprehensible voice from the tower in the depths of      night When the untouched bells sound indistinctly With the pain of knowing there's life to live tomorrow.

 

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I, the solemn investigator of useles things (from poem #445) I've always seen the world independently of myself.

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If I could only put up with myself and the selves inside me. (from poem #516) I love and animate everything , give humanity to everything, To men and stones, souls and machines, enlarging my own personality by doing so. I belong to everything so as always to belong a bit more to myself, And my ambition would be to carry the universe in my arms Like a child being kissed by its nurse. (from poem #517)

From «Poems of Fernando Pessoa», translated and edited by Edwin Honig And Susan M. Brown, City Lights

Read Álvaro de Campos Poetry}

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