The haikus of Fernando Pessoa, characteristic of this so Japanese and so universal, poetic genre, reveal another aspect of the multifaceted literary activity of the great Portuguese... An aspect that is by no means unexpected, however, for the poet who, through his famous heteronyms, proclaimed that every thought of his was a "sensation," as he thought "with his eyes and ears," or declared with disarming simplicity that "it does not exist," just like the poet who composes haikus does not exist in his poems.

If "literature is the most pleasant way to ignore life," as he wrote in the famous Book of Disquiet, Pessoa found in haiku - the least "literary" poetic genre - a means to capture and preserve fragments of life, "small" moments, with the utmost clarity, which are nothing more than unexpected openings to eternity.