Anybody heard of Roberto Vecchioni? Not a lot of music moves me anymore, but his “Le lettere d’amore,” about Fernando Pessoa, brings a lump to my throat every time. It did even before I knew the lyrics, which you’ll find translated below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf-IBqrMJHY
Love Letters
Translated by: Francesco Ciabattoni
Fernando Pessoa asked for his glasses and fell asleep
and those who wrote for him left him alone, finally alone.
Thus the oblique rain of Lisbon abandoned him
and he finally ceased to fake papers, to hurt papers.
He ceased to hide behind so many names,
forgetful of Ophelia, seeking a meaning that does not exist
and eventually asking her, “I’m sorry I left your hands
but I had to just write, write, write about me.
Love letters are just ridiculous
Love letters would not be love letters if they were not ridiculous
I too used to write love letters,
I too was ridiculous:
love letters, when there is love, are necessarily ridiculous.”
And he built a delusional universe without love,
where all things are tired of living and a wide open pain
but it escaped his mind that the meaning of the stars is not the same as a man’s
and he saw himself in the pain of that useless shine, that faraway shine.
And too late did he realize that in that tobacco shop
there was more life than in all of his poetry;
and that instead of tormenting himself with an absurd world
it would be enough to touch a woman’s body, reciprocate a look.
And write about love, write about love, even if it’s ridiculous;
even as you look at her, even as you’re losing her, what matters is writing.
And not be afraid, never be afraid of being ridiculous:
only those who never wrote love letters are truly ridiculous.
Love letters, love letters of an invisible love;
love letters I had begun, perhaps without realizing;
love letters I had imagined made me laugh
I wish I was still in time to write you some.
The translator, a professor of medieval Italian literature at Georgetown, writes:
“With a shade of bitterness and self-effacement, Vecchioni rewrites Fernando Pessoa’s poem with the same title. “All love letters are ridiculous, but only those who never wrote love letters are truly ridiculous.” … By building a narrative frame around Pessoa’s original text, he describes the Portuguese poet as he falls asleep surrounded by his literary personalities (“those who wrote for him”, the heteronyms that Pessoa created to respond to the many intrusions of society) and re-proposes alienating points of view. Ofelia Queiroz was, however, the true unrequited love of Fernando Pessoa.
“Vecchioni portrays the poet in his latest hour, when he is about to die yet still wants to write and, therefore, needs his glasses. The Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi, on the wake of João Gaspar Simões, wrote that Pessoa’s last words were “give me my glasses.” The poet thus abandons the heteronymous masks (Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and Bernardo Soares) that had accompanied him in his life and literary activity. Unlike the historical Pessoa, Vecchioni’s Pessoa lets go of Ofelia by relinquishing his love for her in order to write about it, thus making a radical choice between living life and writing about it.”
If that did something for you, here’s the full video with three additional, no less beautiful songs, including “La Bellezza (Gustav e Tadzio),” based on
A Death in Venice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZSmpNp6Z0k
Roberto Vecchioni turned eighty in June.
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