Clepsydra - The Poetry of Camilo Pessanha

"Nietzsche's book of aphorisms, Human, all too human. A book for free spirits, may well be considered an apt fore-description of Camilo Pessanha as a poet and as a human being. Born in Coimbra in 1867, Pessanha lived and worked in Macau from 1894 until his death, from excessive opium consumption, in 1926. During his visits to Portugal, he always contacted his good friend Ana de Castro Osório, who was responsible for the publication of Pessanha's only poetry book in 1920, Clepsydra. Associated with Symbolism, through the imagery used and the symbols that he proposes as a metaphorical reading of the world, the emergence of an underlying allegorical narrative may in fact bring his poetry into the realm of Modernism, as it conceives of human existence as a process of depersonalization. Pessanha's connections with modernist poets such as Mário de Sá-Carneiro and Fernando Pessoa are absolutely central, and his poetry enlightens much of these poets' production." (From the Introduction by H. Buescu)

Pessoa called him a "Master," adding that he "discovered for us the truth that to be a poet one needn't carry one's heart in one's hands; rather it is enough to carry in them its dreams".

This bilingual edition offers all of Camilo Pessanha's known poetry, translated in its entirety for the first time into English, in a new textual edition by one of Pessanha's most prominent scholars. Readers of English (and Portuguese) can now enjoy a work that is today regarded unanimously as one of the crowning achievements of Portuguese lyric poetry.