What’s in me is mostly tired –

Not this or that,

Not at all or anything.

Tiredness like that, himself,

Tired.

The subtlety of useless sensations,

The violent passions for nothing,

The intense love for someone who’s supposed to,

All these things –

Those and what’s missing in them forever -;

All of this is exhausting.

This tiredness,

Tired.

There is no doubt who love the infinite,

There is no doubt who desires the impossible,

There are definitely those who do not want anything.

Three types of idealistic, and I none of them:

Because I love infinitely the finite,

Because I wish impossibly possible,

Because I want everything, or a little more, if it can be,

Or even if it can’t be…

And the result?

For them life lived or dreamed,

For them the dream dreamed or lived,

For them the average between everything and nothing, that is, this…

For me only one big, one deep,

And, oh with what happiness infecundo, tiredness,

A supremíssimo weariness,

Íssimo, íssimo, íssimo,

Tired…

9-10-1934

Poetry of álvaro de Campos. Fernando Pessoa. Lisbon: Attica, 1944 (Imp. 1993)

A kind of memory that tells us

that what we’re now striving for

was once nearer and truer

and attached to us with infinite tenderness.

Here all is distance,

there it was breath.

After the first home

the second one seems draughty and

strangely sexed.

– Rainer Maria Rilke – Duino Elegies

Ph : Katia Chausheva