“The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro” by Fernando Pessoa (translated by Margaret Jull Costa)

Pessoa said of his heteronym, Caeiro, “If there is a part of my work that bears the ‘stamp of sincerity,’ that part is the work of Caeiro.” Caeiro, himself, writes in one of his first poems, “I have no ambitions or desires./ Being a poet is not my ambition./ It’s my way of being alone.” Most of Caeiro’s poems dealt with the concreteness of nature. “But if God is the flowers and the trees/ And the hills and the sun and the moonlight,/ Then I do believe in him,/ I believe in him at all hours./ And my whole life is one long prayer and mass,/ And a communion with the eyes and ears.” He also wrote obliquely about the craft of poetry. “And I, if they come and ask me what I have done,/ Will say: I looked at things, nothing more.” Many of his poems deal with the peace associated with being in the moment and the futility of humanity. In a short poem, quoted in full, he states, “A carriage passed along the road, and was gone;/ And the road wasn’t anymore beautiful, or any uglier./ So it is with human actions in the world./ We take nothing away and we add nothing; we pass and we forget;/ And the sun is always the same sun every day.” In another poem, he claims, “Nature never remembers, which is why it’s beautiful.” He is a materialist, who doesn’t search in nature for metaphors or anthropomorphic qualities. “Because everyone loves flowers for being beautiful, but I’m different./ And everyone loves the trees for being green and giving shade, but/   I don’t./ I love the flowers for being flowers, that’s all./ I love the trees for being trees, without the addition of my thoughts.” Caeiro is decidedly apolitical. “I accept injustice as I accept a stone not being round,/ And a cork tree not having been born a pine or an oak./ I cut an orange in two, and the halves, of course, were unequal./ To which half was I being unjust—I, who will eat both, given that I am going to eat them both.”

Caeiro’s oeuvre comes complete with interviews with him, conducted by Alexander Search, a British polyglot, who translated many of Caeiro’s poems into English. Search was another one of Pessoa’s heteronym creations. Search introduces Caeiro, “The poet speaks of himself and his works with a sort of lofty religiosity which, in anyone with less right to speak in such a manner, would be frankly unbearable. Caeiro always speaks in succinct, dogmatic phrases, censuring or admiring (although it’s rare for him to admire) in such absolute, despotic terms, as if he were offering not a mere opinion, but rather stating an inviolable truth.” Caeiro later interjects, “To teach is to destroy. The only worthwhile thing in anyone is what he or she doesn’t know.” In one of his last poems, Caeiro states, “If, after I die, someone should choose to write my biography,/ nothing could be simpler./ There are only two dates—that of my birth and that of my death./ Between one and the other all the days were mine.”