Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person: A Translation of Alberto Caeiro/Fernando Pessoa's O Guardador de Rebanhos [Paperback]

Fernando Pessoa (Author), Erin Moure (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2001

A temporary move to Toronto in the winter of 2000, a twisted ankle, an empty house—all inspired Mouré as she read Alberto Caeiro and Fernando Pessoa's classic long poem O Guardador de Rebanhos. For fun, she started to translate, altering tones and vocabularies. From the Portuguese countryside and roaming sheep of 1914, a 21st century Toronto emerged, its neighborhoods still echoing the 1950s, their dips and hollows, hordes of wild cats, paved creeks. Her poem became a translation, the jubilant and irrepressible vigil of a fervent person. "Suddenly," says Mouré impishly, "I had found my master." Caeiro's sheep were his thoughts and his thoughts, he claimed, were all sensations. Mouré's sheep are stray cats and from her place in Caeiro's poetry, she creates a woman alive in an urban world where the rural has not vanished, where the archaic suffuses us even when we do not beckon it, and yet the present tense floods us fully. In this ecstatic long poem of hope and creeks and cats and rain, Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person catches Governor General's Award-winner Erin Mouré at her most playful and ingenuous—and wearing her Galician name.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, Portugese

About the Author

Erin Mouré is a poet and translator in French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese. She is the author of 12 books of poetry, including Domestic Fuel, A Frame of the Book, and Furious. She has been the recipient of the Governor General's Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award.

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: House of Anansi Press; Bilingual edition (April 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0887846602
• ISBN-13: 978-0887846601
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,486,163 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)