[lit-ideas] Re: Pessoa, Yiddish dogs, and summer check-ins
- From: david ritchie <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2016 14:47:32 -0700
On Aug 17, 2016, at 12:16 PM, Lionpainter <lionpainter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I decided to purchase Fernando Pessoa (Author), Richard Zenith (Editor,
Translator) The Book of Disquiet from Amazon. I bought the hardback, but it
also is instantly in the Kindle app. (yippeee!)
Yours is a different collection to mine. I bought “Fernando Pessoa, A
Centenary Pessoa,” edited by Eugenio Lisboa and L.C. Taylor, with an
introduction of Octavio Paz. I like the drawings and photographs. Here’s the
latest bit I read, “I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with
poetic faculties…There is for me—there was—a wealth of meaning in a thing so
ridiculous as a door-key, a nail on a wall, a cat’s whiskers. There is to me a
fulness [sic] of spiritual suggestion in a fowl with its chickens strutting
across the road…”
Nothing astonishing here, but it caused me to look in the dictionary to see if
there was a meaning of “fowl” I’d not come across. Nope. Possibly a formation
that came from Pessoa’s bilingual approach to writing? But when I look up
Portuguese translations of “fowl” I find nothing that would give rise to, “a
fowl with its chickens.” Maybe I should consult the girls?
Good wishes,
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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