On “No, you’re right, I’m wrong”

Álvaro de Campos was one of the three major heteronyms created by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who gave each heteronym (there were nearly 140 fictitious authors) a thorough biography, which included a set of signatures, an astrological chart, literary influences, and philosophical idiosyncrasies. Campos, according to him, was born in Tavira (Algarve) on October 15 (like Friedrich Nietzsche) but of 1890. He studied mechanical engineering and shipbuilding in Glasgow yet never completed the course. Campos subsequently traveled to Ireland and the Near East, then worked in Newcastle-on-Tyne and Barrow-on-Furness (sic) before returning to Lisbon, where he lived until the death of his creator in 1935. His earlier poems are often a futurist celebration of the modern machine age, and his style owes much of its energy and ebullience to Marinetti and Walt Whitman, as well as Blake and Nietzsche.

This particular poem, however, written in November 1931, belongs to a later phase—full of sour pessimism, and a sense of the futility of life. The speaker of the poem engages in a conversation in which he has absolutely no interest. We, the reader, are plonked down in the middle of this one-sided exchange and made to feel the exasperation, the ennui, in which these few lines are steeped. And we are left to ponder what kind of relationship this is, involving, as it does, both love and money. Then there is the surprise of those last two lines: “O great sun, you know nothing of this,/A joy we cannot even contemplate in the serene blue unreachable sky,” when the poem suddenly seems to take a deep breath and open out into the whole universe. So simple and so complex.

Interestingly, this monologue-like poem, unpublished during Pessoa’s lifetime, reveals what is at the core of Pessoa’s poetics, namely, the generative force of “un-fixedness”—be it an argument, a poetic creed, or any belief whatsoever: “I’m wrong in my opinion, that’s fine, I’m not deeply attached to that opinion anyway...” affirms the speaker at the end of the opening stanza. In December 1930, a little less than a year before this poem was written, Campos wrote a fragmentary note—in prose this time and also posthumous—which could serve as the motto of Pessoa’s heteronymic project: “To have opinions is to betray oneself. Not to have opinions is to exist. To have all possible opinions is to be a poet.”