“Un Soir à Lima”

A Poem from Poetry – Minimal Anthology

By Fernando Pessoa

Poetry – Minimal Anthology is an anthology of poetry by Fernando Pessoa, edited by Jerónimo Pizarro, and translated from Portuguese to English by John Pedro Schwartz and Robert N. Schwartz.

John Pedro Schwartz reads “Un Soir à Lima”

“Un Soir à Lima”
Over the radio comes a voice,
Drawn out in suave announcer’s style:
“Up next
Un Soir à Lima...”

I cease to smile...
My heart grows vexed...

Suddenly,
That melody, loved yet cursed,
Rings out from the still machine...
A memory loosened, burst!
My soul strays off to a scene...
The African moon cast forth its glow
On tree-swept hillsides just below.

Our living room was cool and large,
And placed where all, even the sea,
Did bask in moonlight dark and clear...
Yet at the window—only me.

My mother at the old piano
Would play…
Precisely this,
Un Soir à Lima.

My God, how distant, how lost it all is!
What now remains of her elegant style?
Her voice so cherished and dear?
Her soft, maternal smile?
All that remains
To remind me is this that I hear,
Un Soir à Lima.
Still from the radio richly it soars,
That melody coursing through memory’s stores,
The same, the same Un Soir à Lima.

Beautiful was her silver hair
Beneath the light.
And I who never thought she’d die
And leave me bound to who I am!
She died, but I am still her child.
For mothers, none becomes a man!

Credits
Poetry – Minimal Anthology by Fernando Pessoa, edited by Jerónimo Pizarro, translated by John Pedro Schwartz and Robert N. Schwartz. (Emergence Education Press, 2025).

Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) is today Portugal’s principal literary link with the world. His work in verse and prose is the most multifarious imaginable, for it has multiple facets, materializes innumerable interests, and represents an authentic collective patrimony: of the author, of the diverse authorial figures invented by him, and of the readers. Some of those personae—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos—Pessoa called “heteronyms,” reserving the designation “orthonym” for himself. The director, of and a collaborator on, various literary magazines and the author of The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa was, in everyday life, a “foreign correspondent in commercial houses.” Pessoa left a universal oeuvre in three languages, one that has been edited and studied ever since he wrote, before dying in Lisbon, “I know not what tomorrow will bring.”