Guardador de Rebanhos

On a singular March day in 1914, Fernando Pessoa felt his master appear inside him, Alberto Caeiro, the heteronym that stands over his epiphanic collection, composed that day The Keeper of Sheep -- the pivotal work in the career of Portugal's great modern poet. Of the poet's persona Octavio Paz declares, his words strike us as truths from another age, that age in which everything was the same. The Keeper of Sheep is appears here in its original Portuguese beside its first English translation.