The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A companion volume to Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro
Álvaro de Campos is one of the most influential heteronyms created by Portugal’s great modernist writer Fernando Pessoa. According to Pessoa, Campos was born in Tavira (Algarve) in 1890 and studied mechanical engineering in Glasgow, although he never managed to complete his degree. In his own day, Campos was celebrated—and slandered—for his vociferous poetry imbued with a Whitman-inspired free verse, his praise of the rise of technology, and his polemical views that appeared in manifestos, interviews, and essays. Here in Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari’s translations are the complete poems of Campos. This edition is based on the Portuguese Tinta-da-china edition and includes an illuminating introduction about Campos by the Portuguese editors Jerónimo Pizarro and Antonio Cardiello, facsimiles of original manuscripts, and a generous selection of Campos’s prose texts.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pessoa (1888–1935), Portugal's best-known modernist writer, left two trunks filled with thousands of unpublished writings. This impressive collection features works written under his heteronym, Álvaro de Campos, including facsimiles of his original manuscripts and a selection of the writer's prose. Whitman-inspired free verse abounds: "Life is so very unheraldic!/ So lacking in thrones and everyday pinchbeck!/ So essentially hollow, so self-evidently naked,/ Drown me, O noise of action, in the roar of your oceans!" Elsewhere, Pessoa writes, "Ah, dusk, nightfall, the coming on of lights in the big cities,/ And the mysterious hand muffling the hubbub,/ And the weariness of everything in us that turns us away/ From a precise, active sense of Life!/ Every street is a canal in a Venice of tediums/ And how mysterious the unanimous depths of the streets." Pessoa addresses the ecstatic quality of his verse: "My poem-leaps, my poem-skips, my poem-pure-ecstasies,/ My attack-of-hysteria-poems,/ My poems that draw the carriage of my nerves.// I stumble forward into inspiration,/ Barely able to breathe, thrilled just being-able-to-stand,/ And my poems are me unable to explode with life." These pages do, indeed, explode with life, introducing audiences to a powerful and virtuosic mind.
