Following my latest entry on Images & Words, I have decided to blog a little about Pessoa's favourite café-restaurant Martinho da Arcada, one of Lisbon's oldest cafés – dating to 1778. It is mostly known as a literature café given that famous writers used to hang around, especially Fernando Pessoa, who wrote much of his precious stuff at Martinho da Arcada that is under the XVIII century arches of Praça do Comercio, where several Portuguese ministries are located.
In its way, Martinho is one of the city's most famous restaurants, not only because of its age but also its association to Portugal's beloved poet, Fernando Pessoa, whose photos hang on the wall, just above the table and chair he used to compose some of his most famous works.
In 2009, Portugal commemorated the 120th birth anniversary of the poet Fernando Pessoa, who wrote under dozens of names, one of them being Bernardo Soares.
I am very fond of travelling and I presume so are many of you...the following write by Pessoa is particularly beautiful, don't you agree?
"Travel? One need only exist to travel. I go from day to day, as from station to station, in the train of my body or my destiny, leaning out over the street and squares, over the faces and gestures, always equal and always different, just like scenery. If I imagine, I see. What more do I do when I travel? Only extreme weakness of the imagination justifies having to travel to feel. 'Any road, this very road leading out of Entepfuhl, will take us to the end of the world.' But the end of the world, since it was consummated by being circled, is the same Entepfuhl from which we started. The end of the world, like the beginning, is in fact our concept of the world. It's in us that the scenery has scenery. So that if I imagine it. I create it; if I create it, it exists; if it exists, then I see it like any other scenery. So why travel? In Madrid, Berlin, Persia, China, and the two poles, where would I be but in myself, and in my particular type of sensations? Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveller. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.
This is interesting. There's a certain romance to the idea of sitting in a restaurant and writing beautiful poetry, don't you think? Your pictures are beautiful. Again, you've made me wish I were there.
ReplyDeleteI think so, too. Most probably, muses like those ambiences.... Glad to know you liked the photos...
ReplyDeleteGreat entry and I agree completely!
ReplyDeleteI do agree too. Nice idea to expand your I&W post with this rich page. Thank you :)
ReplyDeletewow, thank u 4 introducing me to this great poet, Belita; i love the way he saw life at an angle different than the rest of us -- that our imagination is our world and who needs to travel. So, here i am this travel fan who travels via your page and i do love the pics BTW, and mayb i need to imagine more.
ReplyDeleteThis was a wonderful entry; gracias muchisimo!
Why do u suppose he wrote under dozens of Names?
ReplyDeleteWell, here we have ME as an example -- blogging and changing ids and therefore my poet's name changes , LOL :) i don't think that was the case with this man... :)
So much has been speculated about the reason but Pessoa himself had once unveiled that when he was a child he was fond of simulation. Having been a solitary child, he invented mates to play with, out of which one was called Chevalier de Pas. Even though, many people who have been researching on Pessoa are of the opinion that his heteronyms might have been a kind of masks. As a curiosity, his family name, Pessoa, is rooted in the Latin word persona that means 'mask'. Behind the mask, the poet conceiled his personality to reveal multiple aspects of the reality.
ReplyDeleteThis is incredible!! I wonder if his poetry differed according to each persona he embodied? :)
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a student in Spain, I once took train to Lisbon with classmates. I wrote a short story about that trip, and published in Taiwan in Chinese. The first line was: The wind in Lisbon is gentle like the cello string...(I can't translate all of them nicely in English). At the end, the story proclaim that Lisbon is a sad poet...
ReplyDeleteSophie, I have never thought Lisbon might be compared to a sad poet... Now reading your words, I wonder you had got that image after listening to fado songs.... I am not from Lisbon and as I wonder through it, Lisbon often sounds to me as if it were a rhapsody....
ReplyDeleteThat story was a personal experience of me and Lisbon. "sad poet" was the feelings I had with him...
ReplyDeleteI was about 19 years old, everything seemed beautifully melancholic to me. :)
Thanks for sharing that very interesting place with a great history....
ReplyDeleteEnjoyed this piece a lot. Ty belita xx
ReplyDeleteNice place. I'm beginning to enjoy Night to Train to Lisbon now that he's got on the train at last.
ReplyDelete