Fernando Pessoa - Bensőmben sokan élnek

On the 130th anniversary of his birth, we pay tribute to the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa with this more complete volume than ever before, thanking the Portuguese Embassy in Budapest and the Portuguese Language Center of the Camöes Institute, which embraced our enterprise, encouraged and helped with the selection, compilation of the volume and its final form winning.

The XX. Fernando Pessoa, an outstanding figure of 19th century Portuguese and even European poetry, was born in 1888, one hundred and thirty years ago. In this way, we can also consider this current selection as an anniversary volume, which, even with restrictions, wants to bring the entirety of Pessoa's oeuvre to the Hungarian reader. After all, it contains all the poems of the volume "Message" published in the poet's only lifetime, looking at Portuguese history and the fate-changing events of the seafaring Portuguese. Like Pessoa's fellow poets, they are poems of heteronymous figures. Alberto Caeiro, who is considered a "master", wrote his entire cycle of poems entitled The Keeper of the Flocks in one afternoon in 1914. All the odes of the other heteronymous poet-partner, Ricardo Reis, and the material of the volume of their fourth partner, Álvaro de Campos, Diadalív, which has not been published. However, due to reasons of length, we can only publish a large selection of Pessoa's "own" and late Campos poems.

On the other hand, our volume follows the Portuguese poet's fate and reception in Hungary. It includes explanations from different periods of Pessoa's introduction, starting with the early translations of Ágnes Nagy Nemes and György Somlyó, the XX. through translations created in the last years of the 20th century to the present day, when members of the generation of poets who are just growing up try to translate one of Pessoa's poems into Hungarian. In this way, this volume is the most complete selection of the Portuguese poet's poems published in Hungarian to date.

Author: Fernando Pessoa