Thirty-Five Sonnets

About this book

Between the walls of a modest commercial office in Lisbon, and under the dim light of café lamps, Fernando Pessoa was no mere clerk translating letters, but a complete "nation" imprisoned in the body of one man. In this book, we open the wooden box in which Pessoa hid the shards of his soul, to confront "Thirty-Five Sonnets" that are no mere poems, but "internal storms" that chose the strict Shakespearean discipline to tame their existential anxiety. This work takes you to the zone of contact between truth and appearance, where Pessoa asks in eloquent English and a tormented Portuguese soul: are we true selves or mere masks behind which other masks hide? In every sonnet, you will feel the texture of alienation, the cold of solitude, and the heat of a thought that "incarnates" to become poetry. It is a journey into the "inner labyrinth" of a poet ahead of his time, who believed writing is the only way to create alternative worlds when the real world grows too narrow for us. This book is not for lovers of shallow reading, but for those who dare to stand.