Cruel Love Duel

   How many masks wear we, and undermasks, 
   Upon our countenance of soul, and when, 
   If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks, 
   Knows it the last mask off and the face plain? 

in Fernando Pessoa's Sonnet VIII, 35 English Sonnets


Though Pessoa took off every mask
And found but more masking of the soul,
He probably forgot one item in such task:
A Dorian mirror that we must face
Naked and unsure,
Vulnerable as the clinical eyes of Love
Reveal the masks and the masquerade
Our lifes have been.

Then our biological self kicks in:
We either freeze, pretend death, 
And believe in rebirth,
Or we flee the scene,
Or fight against the image obscene. 

Under Repairs - An Upgrade

PORTUGUESE

LISBON

Eduardo Lourenço is perhaps Portugal’s most distinguished literary critic. Pessoa is “an exception, being a great writer,” he said the other afternoon. “But he had a way of being that is distinctly Portuguese.” He paused to find the right words. “It has to do with everything and nothing — that we Portuguese can have everything, but still feel we have nothing.”

Portugal, he explained, had discovered half the world by the 16th century but still felt itself a failure for having not discovered the rest. The national mind-set, Mr. Lourenço said, is “a combination of megalomania and humility.”

“Also Pessoa was a loner,” he went on, “one of the great poets to express absolute loneliness — some of his poems are so sad they are difficult to read, which is very Portuguese. Listen to fado.” He was referring to the music that here connotes “saudade,” a nearly untranslatable word meaning homesickness but also something more, something, he suggested, like paradise lost.

in Michael Kimmelman's article for the NYT, Portugal Holds on to Words Few Can Grasp.