Poem 24 from the New Directions The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro (Caeiro being one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms).

As an eccentricity of librarianship – I occasionally do guest cataloging on items in languages no proper cataloger is comfortable with. The rule is to err on the side of expansiveness – for example, provide multiple transliterations of an author’s name or a work’s title if there’s ever a chance people will be searching such variations. So it’s odd to me that no record I’ve found for any title by a heteronym of Pessoa’s includes mention of that heteronym as co-author or even contributor. I know nearly everyone will search Pessoa’s name so maybe the real point here is that it seems somehow disrespectful to leave those names out given how dedicated Pessoa was to the fiction of his heteronyms.

What we see of things are the things themselves.
Why would we see one thing if there were another?
Why would seeing and hearing be an illusion
If seeing and hearing are just seeing and hearing?

The essential thing is knowing how to see,
Knowing how to see without thinking,
Knowing how to see when you see,
And not thinking when you see
Nor seeing when you think.

But this (alas for those of us whose soul wears clothes!),
This requires long study,
An apprenticeship in unlearning
And a solitude within the freedom of that convent
Of which the poets say the stars are its eternal nuns
And the flowers devout penitents for a single day,
But where, after all, the stars are just stars
And the flowers are just flowers,
Which is why we see them as stars and flowers.

O que nós vemos das cousas são as cousas.
Porque veriamos nós uma cousa se houvesse outra?
Porque é que ver e ouvir seriam iludirmo-nos
Se ver e ouvir são ver e ouvir?

O essencial é saber ver,
Saber ver sem estar a pensar,
Saber ver quando se vê,
E nem pensar quando se vê
Nem ver quando se pensa.

Mas isso (tristes de nós que trazemos a alma vestida!),
Isso exige um estudo profundo,
Uma apprendizagem de desapprender
E uma sequestração na liberdade d’aquelle convento
De que os poetas dizem que as estrellas são as freiras eternas
E as flores as penitentes convictas de um só dia,
Mas onde afinal as estrellas não são senão estrellas
Nem as flores senão flores,
Sendo por isso que as vemos estrellas e flores.

Two of Fernando Pessoa’s poems written in English, from the Penguin anthology A little Larger Than the Entire Universe

Epigram
“I love my dreams,” I said, a winter morn,
To the pract ical man, and he, in scorn,
Replied: ” I am no slave of the Ideal,
But, as all men of sense, I love the Real.”
Poor fool, mistaking all this is and seems!
I love the Real when I love my dreams.
[1906]

A Temple
I have built my temple – wall and face –
Outside the idea of space,
Complex-built as a full-rigged ship;
I made its walls of my fears,
Its turrets many of weird thoughts and tears –
And that strange temple, thus unfurled
Like a death’s-head flag, that like a whip
Stinging around my soul is curled,
Is far more real than the world.
[August 1907]

From Fernando Pessoa’s The Education of the Stoic (pg 22-23):

My lack of initiative was the root cause of all my troubles – of my inability to want something before having thought about it, of my inability to commit myself, of my inability to decide in the only way one can decide: by deciding, not by thinking. I’m like Buridan’s donkey, dying at the mathematical midpoint between the water of emotion and the hay of action; if I didn’t think, I m might still die, but it wouldn’t be from thirst or hunger.

Whatever I think or feel inevitably turns into a form of inertia. Thought, which for other people is a compass to guide action, is for me its microscope, making me see whole universes to span where a footstep would have sufficed, as if Zeno’s argument about the impossibility of crossing a given space – which, being infinitely divisible, is therefore infinite – were a strange drug that had intoxicated my psychological self. And feeling, which in other people enters the will like a hand in a glove, or list a fist tin the guard of a sword, was always in me another form of thought – futile like a rage that makes us tremble so much we can’t move, or like a panic (the panic, in my case, of feeling too intensely) that freezes the frightened man in his tracks, when his fright should make him flee.

My whole life has been a battle lost on the map. Cowardice didn’t even make it to the battlefield, where perhaps it would have dissipated; it haunted the chief of staff in his office, all alone with his certainty of defeat. He didn’t dare implement his battle plan, since it was sure to be imperfect, and he didn’t dare perfect it (though it could never be truly perfect) since his convection that it would never be perfect killed all his desires to strive for perfection. Nor did it ever occur to him that his plan, though imperfect, might be closer to perfection than the enemy’s. The truth is that my real enemy, victorious over me since God, was that very idea of a perfection, marching against me at the head of all the troops of the world – in the tragic vanguard of all the world’s armed men.