Le Gardeur de troupeaux

The essential work by Alberto Caeiro – the primary heteronym for Fernando Pessoa – Le Gardeur de troupeaux (The Herdsman) is an early 20th-century Portuguese masterpiece. In it, Caeiro takes a new and initiatory look at the world, adopting a positive and joyful discourse that contrasts with the tumult that would later mark the work of his disciples.

This limited edition of 20 copies features a new, never-before-published French translation by Patrick Quillier that echoes as closely as possible the rocky cadence of Alberto Caeiro’s free verse.

Forty-nine poems handwritten in Garamond, one of the historic typefaces used by the French Imprimerie Nationale, are interlaced with original watercolors by Gérard Traquandi. These illustrations, created as the artist was reading, make each example a unique work made in the tradition of illustrated books.

Page by page and throughout the book, in function of the positive and negative space created by its typographic composition, Gérard Traquandi layers in his personal sensations with simple, instantaneous gestures in natural colors that are at once sublime and rustic.

An exceptional work that invites each reader to slip free of everything that has come to parasitize the way we live, so that we may keep relearning how to experience things and the world around us.