English version
An introduction to the poem: The set of three poems, called "The warnings", begins with a poem dedicated to Bandarra, the XVI century shoemaker turned prophet whom interpreters credit with foretelling accurately the coming of a period when Portugal was under Spanish rule, the subsequent 1640 revolution and liberation under king John IV. The same Bandarra is said (by a miracle of interpretation) to have foretold a future supremacy of Portugal among nations. The second poem is dedicated to father Antonio Vieira who was the true theoreticist of the Fifth Empire to which Portugal (and the world) would be lead by a great king. Finally, the third poem does not have a name (the only nameless poem in Mensagem) because the third prophet, the man who voices the third warning, is Fernando Pessoa himself! He says he is waiting for the King, which tradition says will come in a misty morning, and he is despairing of witnessing his advent in his own time...
Third Warning
I write my book at the brink of despair.
My heart has nothing to hold.
I have my eyes warm with water.
Only you, Lord, give me a reason to live for.
Only the feeling and thinking of you
Fills and gilds my empty days.
But when will you want to return?
When is the King? When the Hour?
When will you come to be the Christ
Of one on whom the false God died,
And to awaken, from the evil of today,
The New Earth and the New Skies?
When will you come, oh Hidden One,
Dreamed by Portuguese of all eras,
To turn me into more than the uncertain breath
Of a great yearning that God inspired?
Ah, when will you wish, by returning,
Turn my hope into love?
From the mist and the yearning, when?
When, my Dream and my Lord?
NOTA: Ver AQUI a tradução de 1997 do Prof. Mike Harland (que eu li antes de produzir a versão acima)
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