From Lisbon to the World: Fernando Pessoas Enduring Literary Presence (The Portuguese-Speaking World) 1845199383, 9781845199388

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From Lisbon to theWorld

Fernando Pessoa’s Enduring Literary Presence

This new series will publish high-quality scholarly books on the entire spectrum of the Portuguese-speaking world, with particular emphasis on the modern history, culture, and politics of Portugal, Brazil, and Africa. The series, which will be open to a variety of approaches, will offer fresh insights into a wide range of topics covering diverse historical and geographical contexts. Particular preferences will be given to books that reflect interdisciplinarity and innovative methodologies. The editors encourage the submission of proposals for single author as well as collective volumes.

Published The Lusophone World: The Evolution of Portuguese National Narratives Sarah Ashby The Politics of Representation: Elections and Parliamentarism in Portugal and Spain, 1875–1926 Edited by Pedro Tavares de Almeida & Javier Moreno Luzón Inequality in the Portuguese-Speaking World: Global and Historical Perspectives Edited by Francisco Bethencourt Marcello Caetano: A Biography (1906–1980) Francisco Carlos Palomanes Martinho From Lisbon to the World: Fernando Pessoa’s Enduring Literary Presence George Monteiro

From Lisbon to theWorld

Fernando Pessoa’s Enduring Literary Presence GEORGE MONTEIRO

Copyright © George Monteiro, 2018. Published in the Sussex Academic e-Library, 2018. SUSSEX ACADEMIC PRESS PO Box 139, Eastbourne BN24 9BP, UK Distributed worldwide by Independent Publishers Group (IPG) 814 N. Franklin Street Chicago, IL 60610, USA

ISBN 9781845199388 (Paperback) ISBN 9781782845928 (EPub) ISBN 9781782845935 (Kindle) ISBN 9781782845614 (Pdf ) All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This e-book text has been prepared for electronic viewing. Some features, including tables and figures, might not display as in the print version, due to electronic conversion limitations and/or copyright strictures.

Contents Author’s Preface Series Editors’ Preface Acknowledgments

viii x xi

1 Works and Days

1

2 Imaginary Poets

14

3 The Great War

23

4 “O menino”: Follow-Up

32

5 Campbell’s Discovery

34

6 A Book That Never Was

48

7 Ulysses, the Founder

51

8 Myth is the Message

53

9 Pessoa’s Critics

58

10 The First Symposium

120

11 Notes for a Review

132

12 The Bat and the Raven

139

13 Ofélia’s Lovers

143

14 Poe Spiritualized

151

15 Álvaro de Campos: Note

158

16 “The Bishop” and Edwin Honig

161

17 Translating Nathaniel Hawthorne

169

18 Pessoa’s Enduring Presence

181

Notes Works Cited Index About the Author

186 195 200 213

Author’s Preface Fernando Pessoa is his country’s greatest poet, surpassing Luiz Vaz de Camões, the sixteenth-century author of Os Lusíadas who wrote some of the finest sonnets in the Western literary tradition. Many in Portugal have believed this, though they are hesitant to slip Camões into second place, given the patriotic mottos of those whose saudades lend credence to patronymic heroics in the past. Outside of Portugal, Pessoa’s literary reputation gradually grew slowly but steadily throughout Western Europe. And of course his work was discovered early on in Brazil and, less quickly, in other Portuguese-speaking areas. But it was to the English-speaking world that he had first, and long after, made his appeal. His first writer’s voice was English. With his first poems in English and those of his first heteronyms—i.e. Robert Anon and Alexander Search—Pessoa sought and hoped to find and secure a place in the highest regions of the English literary tradition. It was not to be. In fact, it was not until he returned to Portugal in 1905 that he even attempted to learn Portuguese well enough to write poetry in the language of his native land. But never did he abandon English as a language available to him for literary expression, though it’s inconceivable to me that in his last years writing in English was nothing less than quixotic at best. Yet it can be said with utter sureness that decades after his death he conquered the world, leaving England in his traces. It’s a good story, well worth rehearsing. Despite the publication in England and the United States of a bevy of book-length translations in 1971, the steady growth of Pessoa’s reputation in Portugal and Europe, what finally catapulted him to worldwide fame as one of that world’s greatest twentieth-century writers was the virtually ubiquitous availability of translations of Livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet). Remarkably, Pessoa would confess that when depressed the only writing he could do was contributing to the manuscript eventually called Livro do Desassossego, but which, early on, was nothing more than a scrap pile of tenuously related thoughts that only later would he describe as an “autobiography without facts.” What the book has become, however, is a far cry from any sort of autobiography, for it does not call for a reading of every page in sequence, from beginning to end, since the book has no true beginning

Author’s Preface

ix

or determined conclusion. One can dip into Bernardo Soares’s aperçus and random thoughts anywhere in the collection, respond to a selfcontained entry or two, and feel free to put the book down. For the whole of its fragments add up to no confident conclusion. The book has no point to make. Yet in another sense it is replete with conclusions and questions, providing a simulacra of “conclusions.” Philosophical and aphoristic in tenor, the book promises to satisfy its readers, but does so only in parts and pieces. This was no mean feat for a book that its author never gave shape, let alone hinting at the selection he favored or the arrangement of fragments he would have sanctioned. It is no exaggeration to say that when the first edition of this book of fragments first appeared, in 1982, it attracted only a modest readership, mainly among readers and scholars already interested in Pessoa. But over time that all changed, and Livro do Desassossego has turned out to have great appeal in a post-modernist world in which each reader fulfills his or her expectations by participating in the selection and more or less arbitrary ordering of literary materials in a contemporary world of uncertainties and no absolutes. From Lisbon to the World brings together essays and reviews relating to various aspects of the life and works of Fernando Pessoa. In the aggregate, they cover, analyze, and celebrate his poetry and life from a reader’s professional point of view. Written at different times for different audiences, these pieces have been reworked for inclusion in this book. Among other matters, they take up his lasting interest in Edgar Poe, his translation of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, the South African Roy Campbell’s discovery of Pessoa’s poetry, Pessoa’s politics during the Great War, his achievement as the creator of personified voices (heteronyms), the C.I.A.’s mistaken interest in “the man who never was,” and the background and circumstances surrounding the 1977 symposium on Pessoa.

Series Editors’ Preface George Monteiro was one of the first scholars to pay attention to the English works of Fernando Pessoa. It was Monteiro who discovered that Pessoa had translated Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter when, while working on Pessoa’s archives at the National Library in Lisbon, he encountered a loose page typed in Portuguese that he immediately recognized as the final page of Hawthorne’s famous novel. Since this discovery, Monteiro’s scholarship on the Portuguese Modernist poet has been prolific. Two of his books have become essential reference works: The Presence of Pessoa: English, American and Southern African Literary Responses, and Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-century Anglo-American Literature (University Press of Kentucky, 1998 and 2000). When, in 2015, Pessoa scholars from around the world gathered at Brown University to devote a two-day conference to the English poetry and writings of Pessoa (see Patricio Ferrari, ed., Inside the Mask: The English Poetry of Fernando Pessoa [Gávea-Brown Publications, 2018]), his Brown colleagues and Pessoa connoisseurs who attended the event made tribute to his pioneering work. They acknowledged his foresight in detecting what other scholars had overlooked, and for inspiring students, academics and lay persons to take a closer look at the English writings of the poet. George Monteiro’s scholarship, however, is not limited just to the English writings of Pessoa. He has written about many other facets of the poet’s work. Like Pessoa, Monteiro is a multifaceted author—a translator of various poets, including Pessoa, he is also a poet who, using his poetic voice, has maintained a lively dialogue with Pessoa’s oeuvre, as demonstrated in his The Pessoa Chronicles: Poems, 1980– 2016 (Bricktop Hill Press, 2016). From Lisbon to the World: Fernando Pessoa’s Enduring Literary Presence opens doors into a broad variety of recent explorations on Pessoa’s literary output by one of his most attentive and insightful readers. ANTÓNIO COSTA PINTO (University of Lisbon) ONÉSIMO T. ALMEIDA (Brown University) MIGUEL BANDEIRA JERÓNIMO (University of Coimbra)

Acknowledgments For their consent to use material that first appeared in the pages of their publications, I wish to thank the editors of Edgar Allan Poe Review (“The Bat and the Raven” and review of Principais Poemas de Edgar Allan Poe); Gávea-Brown (reviews of T. S. Eliot and Fernando Pessoa, Fernando Pessoa & Company, and Poesia Inglesa); Harvard Review (“Fernando Pessoa and Álvaro de Campos”); Hispania (reviews of Book of Disquietude, Ficçiones Modernistas, and O Olho “Esfingico”); Luso-Brazilian Review (“Roy Campbell’s ‘Delighted Discoveries’” and review of Proverbios Portugueses); Pessoa Plural (“Imaginary Poets in a Real World,” “The First International Symposium on Fernando Pessoa,” “Notes for a Review,” “Ophelia’s Lovers,” “The Enduring Presence of Pessoa,” and review of Prosa de Álvaro de Campos); Portuguese American Journal (review of The Transformation Book); Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies (“World War I, Europe, Africa, and ‘O Menino da sua Mãe,’” and review of Eu sou uma antologia). Finally, I wish to extend my thanks to the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group (“Poet Spiritualized”).

CHAPTER

1

Works and Days Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa, the first-born child of Joaquim Seabra Pessoa and Maria Madalena Pinheiro Nogueira Pessoa, was born on June 13, 1888, at Largo de São Carlos, 4, Lisbon, across from the São Carlos Opera House. The day was a holiday in Lisbon commemorating Santo Antonio, the city’s patron saint. This coincidence was marked by the child’s parents who chose “Antonio” as one their first child’s names. For four-and-a-half years or so Fernando enjoyed life as an only child. In January 1893 Pessoa’s brother Jorge was born. Six months later, on July 13, his father died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-three. A civil servant in the Ministry of Justice, he had also served as a music critic for the Diário de Noticias in Lisbon. On November 15 the family moved away from the Largo de São Carlos, 4, to Rua de S. Marçal, 104. On January 2, 1894, the infant Jorge died. Pessoa’s widowed mother meets Commander João Miguel Rosa. Pessoa creates the “Chevalier de Pas,” his first heteronym, who writes him letters. In 1895 João Miguel Rosa was named consul in Durban, the capital of the British colony of Natal in Southern Africa. On July 26 of that year, at the age of seven, Pessoa wrote his first poem, a quatrain addressed to his mother. On December 30 his mother married João Miguel Rosa by proxy with General Henrique Rosa, the groom’s brother, standing in for João Miguel at the Church of S. Mamede. On January 6, 1896, Pessoa and his mother sail for Durban. There Pessoa was enrolled in the West Street convent school where he learned English. In the same year Madalena Xavier Pinheiro Nogueira, the poet’s maternal grandmother, died on the Island of Terceira in the Azores. On November 27, Henriqueta Madalena, Pessoa’s first half-sister, was born to be followed, on October 22 of the next year, by Madalena Henriqueta, a second half-sister. In April 1899 Pessoa entered the Durban High School, Form II-B. In June he was promoted to Form II-A, and in December won the

2

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Form Prize. “Alexander Search,” a Scot, made his first appearance. One of the earliest conceived of Pessoa’s many literary heteronyms, he is credited with much of Pessoa’s early poetry in English. On January 11, 1900, Luis Miguel, a third child, was born to Maria Madalena and João Miguel Rosa. Pessoa, who was now in Form III, took a prize in French. In December he moved on to Form IV. In June 1901, Pessoa passed his Higher Certificate with distinction. On June 25 his half-sister Madalena Henriqueta died. In August Pessoa’s family sailed for Lisbon on a year’s leave. On January 17, 1902, João, Pessoa’s second half-brother, was born. On March 22 Pessoa brought out the fifth issue of O Palrador, a newspaper written by hand, followed on May 24 by the sixth issue and on July 5 by the seventh. On May 15 Pessoa brought out the second issue of A Palavra, another such newspaper. The family visited the Island of Terceira in May. While there Pessoa wrote the poem “Quando ela passa.” O Pimpão, a Lisbon journal, published Pessoa’s riddles (on August 27, September 24, October 5, and November 26) under the pseudonym “Dr. Pancrácio.” (As Pessoa noted later, in 1914, “My interest in life is that of one who solves riddles.”) In September of that year the family returned to Durban. Upon arrival Pessoa enrolled in the Commercial School to prepare for the University Matriculation Examination. In July O Imparcial, a Lisbon journal, published Pessoa’s poem “Quando a dôr me amargurar.” In 1903 Pessoa passed the entrance examination for the University of the Cape of Good Hope. Over a four-month period he submitted riddles to the Natal Mercury in Durban under the pseudonym of “Tagus” and the (equally pseudonymous) initials “J. G. H. C.” In 1904 Pessoa returned to the Durban High School as a Form VI student. He continued to contribute riddles to the Natal Mercury during the first three months of the year. On February 24 he was awarded the Queen Victoria Memorial Prize for the Best English Essay on his entrance examination for the University of the Cape of Good Hope in 1903. At the time Pessoa kept a diary in which he listed his reading of Milton, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson and Poe. He studied Pope and his circle, along with Carlyle. He wrote poetry and prose in English. On July 9 the Natal Mercury printed a letter from “C. R. Anon,” one of Pessoa’s early English-language heteronyms. Incorporated in the letter was a poem beginning: “Hillier did first usurp the realms of rhyme.” On August 16 Maria Clara, Pessoa’s third half-sister, was born. In December Pessoa took the Intermediate Examination in the Arts for entrance to the University of the Cape of Good Hope. In the same month The Durban High School Magazine published his essay

Works and Days

3

on the nineteen-century English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay. On July 5, 1905, again as “Charles Robert Anon,” Pessoa wrote a letter to the Natal Mercury, accompanied by three sonnets, none of which was published. In August, Pessoa, traveling alone, left for Lisbon aboard the Herzog. In Lisbon he would live with his grandmother Dionísia and two aunts at Rua da Bela Vista, 17. He continued his reading of English authors, but now discovered the French poet Charles Baudelaire as well as the late nineteenth-century Portuguese poet of the city Cesário Verde. He continued to write poetry and prose in English. On September 7 his newspaper O Palrador reappeared, this time as the first issue of a new series. In October 1906, Pessoa’s family arrived in Lisbon, again on leave, and installed themselves at Calçada da Estrêla, 100, where Pessoa joined them. In October Pessoa matriculated in the Curso Superior de Letras at the University of Lisbon, but student strikes against the dictatorship of João Franco soon brought an end to his university studies. On December 11 his sister Maria Clara dies. In May 1907, after his family had returned to Durban, Pessoa moved back to Rua Bela Vista, 17, to live with his paternal grandmother. But in August his grandmother died. Later in the same month, supported by the small legacy she left him, he spent several days in Portalegre acquiring presses and other printing equipment. “Portalegre is a place where all a stranger can do is get tired of doing nothing,” he complained. He set up “Imprensa Ibis,” his publishing and printing company, on the fourth floor at Rua da Conceição da Glória, 38. It failed almost immediately. In 1908 Pessoa became a translator, with work coming mainly from commercial houses in Lisbon that he served as an itinerant foreign-language correspondent. He later described the work he would do for the rest of his life as “pseudowork.” In the same year he started his work on Faust, a five-act drama he left unfinished at his death. In 1910 Consul João Miguel Rosa was transferred to Pretória. In December the review A Águia was founded in Porto. Pessoa began to do more of his writing in Portuguese. In 1911 he translated for pay poems by Wordsworth, Tennyson, Thomas Moore, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell, among others, that were included in A Biblioteca Internacional de Obras Célebres, a multi-volume anthology, sold in Portugal and Brazil. In April 1912, in A Águia, Pessoa publishes his first article. His subject is the “new” Portuguese poetry considered from “a sociological point of view.” In the May issue of the same journal he followed up with “Reincindindo,” an answer to a letter criticizing his first piece

4

Works and Days

in A Águia. It is at this time that “Ricardo Reis,” Pessoa’s first major Portuguese heteronym, made his initial appearance. On September 21 Pessoa published a contentious article about Adolfo Coelho in the journal República. In the September, November, and December issues of A Águia he published his third article, on the “new” Portuguese poetry, this time considered from “a psychological point of view.” Pessoa now moved from Rua da Glória, 4 (street level), to Rua do Carmo, 18, 1st floor, and later, to live with his Aunt Anica (Ana Luisa Nogueira de Freitas), to Rua de Passos Manuel, 24, third floor left. In January 1913, Pessoa revealed his plan to publish Gládio. But this book of poems did not materialize. In Teatro he published three satirical reviews (March 1, 8, and 25) and a note announcing that he intended to initiate a column (November 25). He considered writing a piece on the problem of authorship in Shakespeare’s plays. On March 29 he wrote the poem “Pauis.” In April he published an article in A Águia on José de Almada Negreiros’s caricatures. In May, from Paris, his closest friend Mário de Sá-Carneiro sent him poems for a book to be called Dispersão. Pessoa wrote “Epithalamium,” an English poem. In August he published “Na floresta do Alheamento,” which turned out to be his last contribution to A Águia. It is the first portion of Livro do Desassossego to achieve print but not yet identified as such. He would work on this book for the rest of his life but would leave it incomplete with no indication as to how it would be organized. In October he read proof for Sá-Carneiro’s Dispersão. In February 1914, Pessoa published in A Renascença, as “Impressões do crespúsculo,” comprised of two poems—“Ó sino da minha aldeia” and “Pauis.” That spring he prepared a collection of Portuguese proverbs in English translation for a publisher in England. There is no indication that it was ever published. On March 8 of that year “Alberto Caeiro,” Pessoa’s second great Portuguese heteronym, appears. Sometime in March Álvaro de Campos, the third of Pessoa’s great Portuguese heteronyms, wrote two long poems “Ode triunfal” and “Opiário.” Pessoa moved, with his aunt Anica, to Rua Pascoal de Melo, 119, third floor, right. On April 7 he answered an enquiry by the editors of República on the subject of “the most beautiful book.” In May or early June he sent off his play O marinheiro to A Águia. On June 16 he wrote the first of Ricardo Reis’s poems. On September 2 Pessoa complained that the War had brought all writing by Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos to a halt and that Alberto Caeiro had written only a few lines. He had made headway only in Livro do Desassossego, which suited his current ill-temper and depression. O Raio, for September 12, published his “Cronicas decorativas.”

Works and Days

5

In October 1914, the group that would launch the avant-garde journal Orpheu held its first meeting at the Cervejaria Jansen on Rua Vitor Cordon in Lisbon. In November Pessoa’s aunt Anica moved to Switzerland. On November 12, angry at not hearing from A Águia, Pessoa broke off ties permanently. He contributed a short piece on Portuguese traditional poetry to Missal de Trovas, a book compiled by António Ferro (the youngest member of the Orpheu group) and Augusto Cunha. In January 1915, Pessoa wrote “Antinous,” an English poem. On February 25 he published an article in A Galera, a journal in Coimbra, on the subject of the famous nineteenth-century Portuguese poet Antonio Nobre, the author of Só. In April appeared the first issue of Orpheu with contributions by Pessoa (O marinheiro) and Álvaro de Campos (“Ode triunfal” and “Opiário”), causing a scandal that sold it out in three weeks. In the same month Pessoa contributed several pieces to O Jornal, including, on April 6, a plug for Orpheu. On May 13 he published a piece on notions of social order and stability in the pamphlet Eh Real! It is reprinted in the December 12 issue of the weekly Portugal. On June 11 Álvaro de Campos writes his “Saudação a Walt Whitman,” a major poem celebrating one of the greatest of poetic influences on Pessoa, but the poet did not publish the poem during his lifetime. In July appeared the second issue of Orpheu, containing the long poem “Ode marítima” by Álvaro de Campos and Pessoa’s suite of poems “Chuva oblíqua.” The Livraria Clássica Editora of Lisbon published Compendio de Theosophia and Os Ideaes da Theosophia, Pessoa’s translations of work by C. W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant, respectively. On December 6 Pessoa revealed in a letter to Sá-Carneiro that doing these translations had taught him the doctrines of theosophy, bringing him to an “intellectual crisis.” In December, in Pretória, Pessoa’s mother suffered a stroke. In 1916 the Livraria Clássica Editora brought out A Clarividência and Auxiliares Invisíveis, Pessoa’s translations of two other works by C. W. Leadbeater. In the same series appeared Pessoa’s translations of A Voz do Silencio and Luz Sobre o Caminho e O Karma. Pessoa considered setting up as an astrologer but abandoned the idea. On March 31 Sá-Carneiro informed Pessoa, in a letter from Paris, that he intended to commit suicide. On April 26 Sá-Carneiro died of strychnine poisoning in his room at the Hotel de Nice. In April, Pessoa published in Exílio a book review and a poem “Hora absurda.” In September the third issue of Orpheu was announced but was never published. (It survives in page proofs, which show two poems by Pessoa—“Gladio” and “Além-Deus”—and the only poem ever

6

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written by C. Pacheco, who was once thought to be one of Pessoa’s lesser heteronyms.) On June 24 Pessoa told his aunt Anica that he too was a “medium” (as she is), having discovered the fact through some involuntary automatic writing. In September he published “A ceifeira” (a poem indebted to Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper”) in Terra Nossa. On September 4 he announced to a friend that he had made “a great change” in his life. He had dropped the circumflex over the “e” in his name. Intending to publish in English, he thought it wise to “disadapt” himself to the circumflex, the use of which might be injurious to the sense of “cosmopolitanism” he wished to encourage. In the first issue of Centauro (October-December 1916) Pessoa published “Passos da cruz,” a sonnet sequence comprised of fourteen sonnets. In 1917 Pessoa moved still again, this time to Rua Bernardim Ribeiro, 11, first floor. On April 14 Almada Negreiros delivered his immediately notorious “futurist” lecture at the Teatro República. On June 6 the London publisher Constable turned down The Mad Fiddler, a collection of Pessoa’s English-language poems. On the first of July O Heraldo, a newspaper published in Faro, published Pessoa’s poem “A casa branca nau preta” as an example of “futurist” poetry. In November Portugal Futurista published its first (and only) issue to an angry reception. It includes two poetic sequences by Pessoa entitled “A múmia” and “Ficções do interlúdio,” Álvaro de Campos’s manifesto “Ultimatum,” and (furnished by Pessoa) three poems by Mario de Sá-Carneiro. In 1918 in Lisbon Pessoa printed up some of his best English poetry—Antinous and 35 Sonnets—as chapbooks to be distributed in the British Isles. On September 19 the two titles were noticed briefly in the London Times and the Glasgow Herald. At about this time Alberto Caeiro wrote his “Poemas inconjunctos.” On April 12, 1919, Alberto Caeiro (whose death, indicated Pessoa, occurred in 1915) wrote a series of new poems. To a potential contributor Pessoa detailed plans for a new journal, which would be the work of Portuguese writers but would be published, alternately, in English and French—a journal that would present the true selves of the Portuguese (not the “servile” Portuguese so familiar to foreigners), and would contribute to the creation of an authentic “Portuguese culture.” This journal did not materialize. Pessoa’s translation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem, “Catarina to Camoens,” first published in 1911 in A Biblioteca Internacional de Obras Célebres, was reprinted in Mário de Almeida’s Os Sonetos From the Portuguese e Elisabeth Barrett Browing [sic], a book published in Coimbra. On October 5 João Miguel Rosa, Pessoa’s stepfather, died in Pretória. On

Works and Days

7

January 30, 1920, in London, the Athenaeum published Pessoa’s English poem, “Meantime.” It was his first and only poem published in the United Kingdom. On February 27,1920, Pessoa published the poem “À memória do Presidente Sidónio Paes” in Acção. On March 1 he wrote his first love letter to Ofélia Queiroz, a nineteen-year-old secretary for one of the firms whose foreign correspondence is handled by Pessoa. On March 25 he moves to Rua Coelho da Rocha, 26, first floor right, to live with his widowed mother and siblings, who would arrive in Lisbon on March 30. On October 15 Pessoa thinks of having himself committed to a psychiatric hospital. On November 29, by letter, he broke off his courtship of Ofélia. He wrote “Inscriptions,” a series of English poems based on the poems in the Greek Anthology. In 1921 Pessoa sets up “Olisipo,” a combined printing shop and publisher. Under this imprint he publishes his English Poems I–II [“Antinous” and “Inscriptions”] and English Poems III [“Epithalamium”]. That no notices of these works have been turned up suggests that he did not send out copies for review. In May 1922 appeared the first issue of Contemporanea, which includes Pessoa’s novella “O banqueiro anarquista” and “Paris” (poems by Sá-Carneiro). Olisipo brings out a second edition of Canções, poems by Antonio Botto, a contemporary whose work Pessoa faithfully championed over the years. In June Contemporanea published Sá-Carneiro’s poem “O Lord.” In July it published Pessoa’s essay on Antonio Botto and the fate of the aesthetic ideal in Portugal, and in October two poems by Pessoa (under the collective title “Mar portuguez”), along with a letter from the heteronym Álvaro de Campos. In the same issue appeared Álvaro Maia’s “Literatura de Sodoma,” an essay attacking Pessoa’s argument in his article on Botto. In December Contemporania published Pessoa’s poem “Natal” and Álvaro de Campos’s “Soneto já antigo.” In January 1923, Contemporanea published “Trois chansons mortes,” a sequence of poems in French that Pessoa later dismissed as really a “prank.” In February Olisipo published Raul Leal’s Sodoma Divinizada, a defense of Pessoa’s position as expressed in the May 1922 issue of Contemporania. In February Contemporania published Álvaro de Campos’s poem “Lisbon Revisited (1923)” and Pessoa’s open letter to the author of the “novella-film” Sáchá. In March Contemporania published “Spell,” an English poem by Pessoa. On March 6 the “Liga de Ação dos Estudantes de Lisboa” distributed a manifesto attacking the “literature of sodomy.” Pessoa reacts by having Álvaro de Campos react to the student attack with “Aviso por causa da moral,” a broadside defending Antonio Botto

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and Raul Leal. In April Pessoa distributed his own manifesto defending Leal and answering the student manifesto. At the same time Leal published a second manifesto, this time aimed at the Catholic Church, as well as the students. Pessoa’s translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (O baile das chamas) and “William Wilson” appear in Lisbon under the Delta imprint. On October 13, 1923, the Revista Portuguesa published an interview with Pessoa. In an otherwise undated issue (number 10) of Contemporanea appeared SáCarneiro’s poem “5 horas.” On February 4, 1924, Pessoa commemorated Camões in the Diário de Noticias. October saw the appearance of Athena, co-edited by Pessoa and Ruy Vaz. This first issue contained eight sonnets by Henrique Rosa (Pessoa’s step-uncle, who had died earlier in the year), twenty odes by Ricardo Reis (his first appearance in print), and Pessoa’s translation of Poe’s “The Raven.” The November issue included Pessoa’s appreciation of Sá-Carneiro along with six of his friend’s “last” poems, Pessoa’s translation of an excerpt from Walter Pater’s Studies in the Renaissance, his own translations from the Greek Anthology, and an essay attributed to Álvaro de Campos on the subject of “metaphysics.” In the December issue Pessoa published sixteen of his own poems, including “Sacadura Cabral,” “Gladio,” “Ó sino da minha aldeia,” and “Ela canta, pobre ceifeira”; his translations of two stories by the American writer O. Henry; and the first installment of Álvaro de Campos’s essay proposing an aesthetics not based on Aristotelian principles. He also published three additional sonnets by Henrique Rosa. Folha de Arte reproduced, in facsimile, a manuscript of one of Pessoa’s poems. Alberto Caeiro finally made his initial appearance in print in the January 1925 Athena with forty-nine poems from the sequence “O guardador de rebanhos.” The issue also included the second installment of Álvaro de Campos’s essay on non-Aristotelian aesthetics, along with Pessoa’s translation of Poe’s “Annabel Lee” and “Ulalume.” In February (its last issue) Athena published Pessoa’s translation of another story by O. Henry as well as sixteen poems from Alberto Caeiro’s “Poemas inconjunctos.” On March 17, 1925, Maria Madalena, Pessoa’s mother, who has never been well since returning to Lisbon for good, died. Beginning with its inaugural issue, dated January 1, 1926, and running until February 16, 1927, Ilustração serialized A Letra Encarnada, Pessoa’s translation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, without, curiously enough, identifying its translator. On January 26 Pessoa joined Francisco Caetano Dias, his brother-in-

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law, in publishing the Revista de Comercio e Contabilidade. Pessoa is a regular contributor from the outset to this journal devoted to the matter of business. On May 28 he took the time to answer an “inquiry,” conducted nationally, by O Jornal do Comercio e das Colonias on the subject of “Portugal, Vasto Imperio.” In May Contemporanea published his poem “O menino da sua mãe,” following it, in the July-October issue, with his poem “Rubaiyat.” In June appeared Álvaro de Campos’s poem “Lisbon Revisited (1926).” The journal A Informação reprinted “Regie, monópolio, liberdade” (July 31, August 1) from the Revista de Comercio e Contabilidade. On August 4 Sol: bi-semanário republicano reprinted Pessoa’s article on the nature and principles of “organization” from the Revista de Comercio e Contabilidade. To Sol: diário independente Pessoa contributed a chronicle (October 30) and a poem, “Anti-gazetilha” (November 13). On September 17 Álvaro de Campos answered an “inquiry” on writing from A Informação. On October 30 Sol: diário independente presented the first installment of Pessoa’s translation of The House on Fifth Avenue, Anna Katherine Green’s detective story. This serialization was never completed. The projected fourteenth issue of Contemporanea (undated) survives only in proofs, but it would have included Pessoa’s poem “D. Sebastião” and Álvaro de Campos’s poem “Quasi.” On April 8, 1927, in its third issue, the Coimbra-based journal presença published the editor José Régio’s essay “Da geração modernista,” which identified Portugal’s presence in the Modernist movement with the names of Sá-Carneiro, Almada Negreiros, and Fernando Pessoa. On June 4 presença published poems by Pessoa (“Marinha”), Álvaro de Campos (“Ambiente”), and Mário SáCarneiro (“Apice”). In its July 4 issue appeared three odes by Ricardo Reis. In O Imparcial, on June 13, Pessoa published his appreciation of the poet Luís de Montalvor, one of the original editors of Orpheu and who would, after Pessoa’s death, become one of the principal editors of his work. On March 15, 1928, presença published two odes by Ricardo Reis, a poem by Álvaro de Campos (“Escripto num livro abandonado em viagem”), a poem by Pessoa (“Qualquer música”), and a poem by Sá-Carneiro. In November presença published Pessoa’s poem “Depois da feira” and his unsigned bibliography of Sá-Carneiro’s work, while in December it published a primary bibliography for Pessoa, which appears over Adolfo Casais Monteiro’s signature, although it was prepared by Pessoa himself. Pessoa made his first appearance in O Notícias Ilustrado on May 27 with Álvaro de Campos’s poem “Apostilha,” followed on August 12 by Pessoa’s essay on Portuguese

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provincialism, on September 16 by his biographical note on Poe, on September 28 by his poem “Gomes Leal,” on November 11 by a reprinting of his poem “O menino da sua mãe,” and on December 30 by a second poem titled “Natal.” Pessoa’s O Interregno—Defeza e Justificação da Dictadura Militar em Portugal, a manifesto in defense of the military’s takeover of the government, appeared late in the year, even though, having been written in 1927, it no longer reflected Pessoa’s views on the dictatorship. In 1929 Pessoa continued to publish in O Notícias Ilustrado. On January 20 appeared the poem “Prece” from the series “Mar portuguez,” on April 14 his answer to an “inquiry” on the “fado,” on April 28 a poem from the “Passos da cruz” series, on July 14 the poem “Tomámos a villa depois de um intenso bombardeamento,” and on August 18 a reprinting of a piece originally titled “Um grande português” when it appeared in Sol: diário independente on October 30, 1926. Álvaro de Campos appeared in the January presença with the poem “Gazetilha” and in the April–May issued with the poem “Apontamento.” In the first issue of A Revista da Solução Editora Álvaro de Campos published the poem “Addiamento.” In the next issue Pessoa published a prose fragment he identified as coming from the Livro do Desassossego and in the fourth issue he published an additional fragment from the same work. In the fourth issue appeared as well Álvaro de Campos’s poem “A Fernando Pessoa depois de ler o seu drama statico O Marinheiro em Orpheu I.” On September 9 Pessoa revealed that he hoped to move himself to Cascais in order to bring his work to completion. The first installment of Antologia de Poetas Português Modernos, edited by Pessoa and Antonio Botto with an unsigned preface by Pessoa, appeared under the imprint of Solução Editôra. On September 11 Pessoa began once again to correspond with Ofélia Queiroz. In January 1930 Pessoa once again broke off with Ofélia, this time permanently, explaining that he had decided to devote himself exclusively to what he took to calling his “obra.” Álvaro de Campos contributed a note to the catalogue for the I Salão dos Independentes. Pessoa initiated a correspondence with Aleister Crowley, the English poet, occultist, and ceremonial magician. On September 2 Crowley visited Pessoa in Lisbon. On September 25 Crowley “disappeared” off the Cascais seacoast at the so-called Boca do Inferno. Pessoa wrote about the mystery surrounding Crowley’s disappearance for O Notícias Ilustrado (October 5) and for Girassol (December 16). In its June-July issue presença published “Aniversario,” a poem by Álvaro de Campos, and another excerpt from the Livro do Desassossego. In December it published “O último sortilégio,” a poem by Pessoa.

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In its January–February 1931 issue presença published the “eighth poem” of Caeiro’s “O guardador de rebanhos” and an essay by Álvaro de Campos about “his Master, Caeiro.” The March–June issue published Álvaro de Campos’s poem “Trapo,” Pessoa’s poem “O andaime,” two odes by Ricardo Reis, a “penultimate” poem by Alberto Caeiro, and a poem by Mário Sá-Carneiro. In its July– October issue appeared Pessoa’s translation of Aleister Crowley’s poem “Hymn to Pan.” The autumn issue of Descobrimento published another five fragments from Livro do Desassossego. To the winter 1931–1932 issue of Descobrimento Pessoa contributed the poem “Guia me a só razão” and Álvaro de Campos the poem “Quero acabar entre rosas.” To its summer-autumn issue he contributed a book review. In its November–February [1931– 1932] issue presença published Álvaro de Campos’s poem “Ah, um Soneto” and a fragment from Livro do Desassossego. In its MarchMay issue appeared Pessoa’s poem “Iniciação.” The same issue carried Adolfo Casais Monteiro’s criticism of Pessoa’s laudatory preface to Luíz Pedro’s Acrónios. In November presença published Pessoa’s poem “Autopsicografia.” On June 6 the journal Revolução published a fragment from Livro do Desassossego. In Fama, on November 30, Pessoa published an essay on Portuguese mentalité. In the first issue of A Revista he published another fragment from Livro do Desassossego. Pessoa’s revised version of the essay “António Botto e o ideal estético creador” appeared in Botto’s book Cartas que me foram devolvidas. Pessoa wrote a preface for Alma errante, a book of poems by Eliezer Kamenezky, a Ukrainian Jew living in Lisbon. On September 16 Pessoa applied, without success, for the position of “conservador-bibliográfico” at the Museu-Biblioteca do Conde de Castro Guimarães in Cascais. During 1933 presença published in February one of Ricardo Reis’s odes, in April a poem by Pessoa (“Isto”) and one by Sá-Carneiro (“Crise lamentával”), and in July a major poem by Álvaro de Campos (“Tabacaria”). In Fama, on March 10, Pessoa published an essay on the American millionaire Bernard Macfadden. In Revolução, on June 16, appeared Pessoa’s “Mar português,” a suite of twelve poems. Pessoa contributed an afterword to Antonio Botto’s book António and prepared Indícios de ouro, a collection of Sá-Carneiro’s uncollected poetry, for the “Presença” Editora. On February 15, 1934, Fradique published Pessoa’s piece on Coleridge’s “Man from Porlock.” In March Pessoa published the poem “Fresta” in the journal Momento. In May presença published Pessoa’s poem “Eros e Psique.” In its July–August issue, under “Tríptico,” O Mundo Português published three of Pessoa’s “his-

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torical” poems—“O Infante D. Henrique,” “D. João o Segundo,” and “Afonso de Albuquerque.” Pessoa contributed a preface to Quinto Império, a book of poems by Augusto Ferreira Gomes. In Augusto da Costa’s Portugal Vasto Império appeared an extract from Pessoa’s answer to an “inquiry” published in O Jornal do Comercio e das Colonias on May 28, 1926. In December Pessoa published Mensagem. The only book of Portuguese poetry Pessoa published in his lifetime, it was awarded what amounted to a second first prize in the “Antero de Quental” poetry competition sponsored by the Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional under the direction of Antonio Ferro, the youngest member of the original Orpheu group. The first of the two first prizes in this first-time competition was awarded to A Romaria by Vasco Reis. On December 14 the Diário de Noticias published an interview with Pessoa and reprinted three poems from Mensagem—“O Infante,” “O mostrengo,” and “Prece.” On December 28 the same newspaper reprinted Pessoa’s poem “Natal.” On January 4, 1935 the Diário de Noticias published Pessoa’s ambiguously favorable commentary on Vasco Reis’s A Romaria. On January 6, O Notícias Ilustrado reprinted two poems from Mensagem. On January 13, in a reply to Adolfo Casais Monteiro’s questioning, Pessoa offered a detailed account of the genesis of his major heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. In the Diário de Lisboa, on February 4, Pessoa published a defense of “secret societies,” which are under governmental and legislative fire. The piece was altered for clandestine issue and issued as a pamphlet entitled A Maçonaria Vista por Fernando Pessoa. On March 1, in the Diário de Lisboa, Pessoa reviewed Ciume, a book of poems by Antonio Botto. On March 29 and July 29 he wrote poems satirizing Antonio Salazar and the Estado Novo but did not publish them. In Diário de Lisboa, on November 11, he commented on Amor de outono, an unpublished collection of prose poems by Cunha Dias. In Momento, in April, Pessoa published the poem “Intervalo.” In November presença explained editorially why its review of Pessoa’s Mensagem was put off to its next issue. In November, in Sudoeste (Almada Negreiros’ journal), Pessoa contributed a note about Orpheu, his poem “Conselho,” and Mário Sá-Carneiro’s poem “Serradura,” while Álvaro de Campos contributed a note. On November 29 Pessoa entered the Hospital de S. Luís. He died the next day. Obituaries and notices of his death appeared throughout Continental Portugal, the Azores, and the island of Madeira. The December issue of presença announced that its next issue would memorialize to Pessoa. The December issue of

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Momento was dedicated to Pessoa and reprinted sixteen of his poems.

CHAPTER

2

Imaginary Poets Were I to link my remarks on Fernando Pessoa to the world of Portuguese tiles (azulejos), the theme of this exhibition at the Rhode Island School of Design,1 I might begin with a reference to the single poem written by C. Pacheco, long considered (erroneously) to be still another of Pessoa’s many heteronyms. In “Para Além de Outro Oceano” (“Beyond a Further Sea”), we read only of “a noble hall of shadows in which there are blue tiles / In which there are blue tiles coloring the walls.”2 Or I might invoke Azulejos, a journal to which Pessoa’s friend, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, contributed. Or, offering a third example, I might look at The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese, Joyce Carol Oates’s 1975 collection, about which she writes: “[T]he tales in this collection are translated from an imaginary work, Azulejos, by an imaginary author, Fernandes de Briao. To the best of my knowledge he has no existence and has never existed, though without his very real guidance I would not have had access to the mystical ‘Portugal’ of the stories—nor would I have been compelled to recognize the authority of a world-view quite antithetical to my own.”3 A curious beginning, this, for a collection of original short stories by a well-read, famous, and prolific author in her own right, stories that she attributes to one imaginary writer called “Fernandes.” But things get curiouser and curiouser, as Alice says. For Oates never once mentions Fernando Pessoa, not in The Poisoned Kiss, nor, I believe, anywhere else in her published essays or fiction. The story of Oates’s bold, utterly fictional “stories from the Portuguese,” however, is a tale told elsewhere. Here the subject is the one and several major selves of Fernando Pessoa. Fernando Pessoa is the last great discovery in twentieth-century Western poetry. Only now does it seem that he will be accorded something of his rightful high place among the great poets of the first half of the twentieth century. He has been discovered by the critics, including Harold

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Bloom and George Steiner.4 Even the spot drawings in the New Yorker by the Belgian artist Benoit van Innis suggest that he ranks with the Austrian Rainer Maria Rilke and the Anglo-American T. S. Eliot.5 Indeed no other poet of his time, or perhaps any other time, surpasses him in creative versatility, for Pessoa is not one poet but many. He is the poetic and critical creator of poets who themselves are the ingenious creators of poetry and criticism. Other poets have written poetry in the voices of fictional, historical, and literary figures—one thinks of the English Robert Browning, the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, and the Danish Søren Kierkegaard—but Pessoa is unique in writing for each of the major figures he created (calling them heteronyms) a generous corpus of poetry, which is not only readily identifiable as the work of its fictional author but constitutes in itself an invaluable contribution to Portuguese, European, and world poetry. No poet was ever blessed (or burdened) with a more appropriate family name, for “Pessoa” means both person and persona, a fact that the poet seems to have recognized at an early age, for the writer who became, arguably, Portugal’s greatest poet (at least since the sixteenth-century Luís Vaz de Camões) took to addressing letters to himself at the age of five or six that he attributed to an imaginary companion he recognized as “Le Chevalier de Pas.” This precocious French companion of his childhood was followed by other selves, themselves destined to divide and sub-divide into a veritable legion of such projected figures of the imagination. Pessoa’s suggestive name offered him a creative opportunity that he seems to have taken as a challenge. At last look— I say “last look” because new ones keep turning up—the count stood at seventy-two such dramatis personae in this, as Pessoa called it, “intimate theatre of the self.” True, some were names and little more, but several of them were full-blown or nearly so. Yet because Pessoa had spent his formative years in Durban, a South African city that was culturally British and linguistically English, it is hardly surprising that he composed his first poems in English. Only after returning to Lisbon, and then not immediately, did he turn to composing principally in his native tongue. Yet it was in Portuguese that Pessoa wrote the bulk of his poetry, whether under his own name (as author of his so-called orthonymic poems) or the names of his heteronyms, the major ones being Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. In 1935, in his last year, a question posed to him by the young poet-critic, Adolfo Casais Monteiro, gave Pessoa an opportunity to spin out his own genesis story, that is, the foundational story of the “birth” of his great heteronyms. “It is rare for a country and a language to acquire four major poets on one day,” Steiner had (belatedly and misleadingly) observed in his New

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Yorker piece. “[Yet] this is precisely what occurred in Lisbon on the eighth of March, 1914.”6 Though it has become a staple of scholarship, Pessoa’s richly detailed account of that day of “miraculous” creation laid out to answer a query put to him by one of the journal presença’s young coeditors, is well worth reproducing at some length. On March 8, 1914—I found myself standing before a tall chest of drawers, took up a piece of paper, began to write, remaining upright all the while since I always stand when I can. I wrote thirty some poems in a row, all in a kind of ecstasy, the nature of which I shall never fathom. It was the triumphant day of my life, and I shall never have another like it. I began with a title, The Keeper of Sheep. And what followed was the appearance of someone within me to whom I promptly assigned the name of Alberto Caeiro. Please excuse the absurdity of what I am about to say, but there had appeared within me, then and there, my own master. It was my immediate sensation. So much so that, with those thirty odd poems written, I immediately took up another sheet of paper and wrote as well, in a row, the six poems that make up “Oblique Rain” by Fernando Pessoa. Immediately and totally . . . It was the return from Fernando Pessoa / Alberto Caeiro to Fernando Pessoa alone. Or better still, it was Fernando Pessoa’s reaction to his own inexistence as Alberto Caeiro. With Alberto Caeiro’s appearance, I set out right away—instinctively and subconsciously—to discover some disciples for him. I separated out the latent Ricardo Reis from his false paganism, discerned his name, and made adjustments—for at that time I could already see him. And suddenly, deriving in a way opposite to that of Ricardo Reis, there came impetuously to my mind a new individual. In a flash and at the typewriter, without interruption or emendation, there emerged the “Triumphal Ode” by Álvaro de Campos—the ode known by that title and the man who now carries the name.

Then Pessoa sums up, crossing t’s and dotting i’s. I created, therefore, an inexistent coterie. I fixed everything into plausible patterns. I gauged influences, discovered friendships, and heard, within myself, discussions and disagreements over criteria. In all this, the creator of everything and everyone, I think, mattered the least. It seemed as if all of it had taken place independently of me. And this still seems to be the way things go. If someday I am able to publish the esthetics discussion between Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos,

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you will see just how different they are and that I am nothing in the matter.7

The upshot, unbelievable as the account must have seemed to Casais Monteiro in 1935, was that on a single day in 1914—at one fell swoop—Pessoa claims to have discovered not only his own voice but the voices of three major heteronyms as well: Caeiro, the oldest of the three and the master, who is a zen-like ascetic of a direct, antipoetic vision; Reis, a social and political conservative who is a stoic with an obsessive desire for stasis and immutability; and Campos, a bombastic, nihilistic, romantic dandy with bisexual proclivities. Each one of these major heteronyms—and there were others (many others, it will be recalled)— achieved his own body of poetry. And in the cases of Reis and Campos, each of whom considered himself a disciple of Caeiro, the third heteronym, there were also essays and prefaces for anthologies and collections of poetry planned by Pessoa. Campos even wrote letters—to the newspapers—and, on occasion, to Pessoa’s own real-life love interest, Ofélia Queiroz. On rare occasions, it was suspected that it was not always the citizen known as Fernando Pessoa who walked along the streets of lower Lisbon but the redoubtable Álvaro de Campos. It will be useful to recall that as early as 1928, in an article in the journal presença whose editors had proclaimed him to be the “Master” of living Portuguese poets, Pessoa defined what he meant by “heteronyms”: “A pseudonymic work is, except for the name with which it is signed, the work of an author writing as himself; a heteronymic work is by an author writing outside his own personality: it is the work of a complete individuality made up by him, just as the utterances of some character in a drama would be.”8 Some further clarification of the relationship of his heteronyms to the poet who “created” them is available in the (truncated) piece Pessoa set down for his never published (or even compiled) collected works: “I divide what I have written into orthonymic and heteronymic work. I do not divide it into autonymic and pseudonymic work because those that I publish under fictitious names do not represent either my opinions or my emotions.”9 Fernando Pessoa considered his “true” life to be the interior life of the poet and thinker. What happened to him in the streets of Lisbon, in the cafés, in the offices of the firms he served as clerk of correspondence, as journal polemicist— political and artistic—or as the courtier of the young typist Ofélia (aptly so named, given Pessoa’s Hamlet complex)—all this pales before the reality of his interior life, lived in a far and distant land, the news from which are his essays,

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stories and, above all, poems. In fact, so richly complex was that life that no single one of his many identities—and certainly not the one he called Fernando Pessoa himself (êle-mesmo)—could, as John Keats put it, glean his teeming brain. It took the whole complement of his heteronyms, especially Caeiro, Reis and Campos, to enact that drama-within-persons (drama em gente) that he called his life’s work. That work and the surprises it always brought him remained to the last his preoccupation and his sustenance. Even his final words in English, set down as he lay dying in hospital on November 30, 1935, betray a related concern. Those words—”I know not what tomorrow will bring”10—echo, I suspect, Scripture (“Boast not thyself of tomorrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth”—Proverbs 27:1). What that “tomorrow” did not bring him was oblivion or, as he was wont to put it, inexistence, for the long future brought forth the steady gathering and publication of his opera, both those writings scattered in journals and newspapers and those left behind at his death in the famous chest in which he secured his literary legacy. It might be said that posterity has in Pessoa’s case followed scripture, as, perhaps, he knew it would: “Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth; a stranger, and not thine own lips” (Proverbs 27:2). That the whole of Fernando Pessoa’s formal education was typical of the schooling accorded the late-nineteenth century British colonial needs to be weighed-in in any determination of just how his knowledge of English literature and literary culture shaped specific poems and affected his work overall. It is this internalized Englishness that is the focus of lines by the English poet, John Wain, in his 1979 suite of poems entitled “Thinking About Mr Person”: Mr Person did not need to look for England: he carried a little of her inside himself. He wrote some poems in English. He often had English thoughts. He once saw Queen Victoria, for God’s sake! It happened in South Africa, when he was at school in Durban. What a strange life, a mad history!11

Those “nuggets of England in his Portuguese mind”12 made Pessoa something of an Anglo-Portuguese poet. If the South African writer Roy Campbell, who was born in Durban and who, like Pessoa, attended Durban schools, cannot claim Pessoa entirely for South Africa, he does claim some of his poetry for South African literature.

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Campos’s “‘Maritime Ode,’” he argues, may well begin in Lisbon “but Durban ‘of the towering ships / With wine and chanteys on her lips’ is the ‘dock of which all docks’ are fragments, the quay to which nations use their ships in this great ‘Maritime Ode.’” His evidence is that Pessoa “describes the coal-dust on the quay after the coaling of the ships; and that coal dust glitters.” That is the dust on the quays in Durban, not Lisbon, where there is no “iron pyrites in the coal.” And of “O Mostrengo,” the poem at the heart of Pessoa’s Mensagem, he writes: “[It is] the greatest sea-lyric ever written . . . where a helms man is interrogated by the nightmare sentry of the rocky capes, ‘Who goes there?’ The helms man trembles but replies, ‘It’s King Don John the Second.’ The whole decor of this poem is the Cape of Storms and its mountainous seas. So it is, by inspiration, that is to say it is in the most profound sense, South African Literature.”13 Having written scores of poems in English, it is not surprising that Pessoa at times certainly thought of himself as an English poet. Until the publication in 1934 of the Portuguese-language sequence he called Mensagem, he had published in book form only the English-language chapbooks—35 Sonnets (1918), Antinous (1918), English Poems I–II and III (1921)—already mentioned. As early as 1917, however, he had tried to interest the London publisher Constable in a collection of his English-language poems he was calling The Mad Fiddler. Without denying that his major poetry is indisputably Portuguese, it can be acknowledged that Pessoa never abandoned that part of himself that wrote in English. It was the desire to make his mark as an English poet that led him to send out his Lisbon-published chapbooks to potential reviewers in England and Scotland, as well as to British libraries, and to publish in January 1920 a small poem entitled “Meantime” in the Athenaeum. Surely the fact that the Athenaeum, edited by John Middleton Murry, was publishing the fine writing of the likes of E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, George Santayana, Conrad Aiken, Aldous Huxley, Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, and Aubrey Bell, stood tall in London (along with the Times) among the handful of periodicals that noticed Pessoa’s two 1918 chapbooks encouraged him to submit his poem for editorial consideration.14 Pessoa would not again appear in the Athenaeum, which ceased publication in 1921, but it is obvious that at the time it was the one of the London journals for which the ambitious English poet Pessoa might set his cap. His English-language epitaphs (“Inscriptions”) is a case in point. There is only circumstantial evidence to go on, but it seems likely that in choosing to write his “inscriptions” in English, Pessoa was hoping to place them in England. The fourteen epitaphs, which Pessoa dates “Lisbon, 1920,”

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are in the elegiac vein of the Greek Anthology.15 Preceding their composition in all probability, the Athenaeum had published, over several issues in 1919–20, some thirteen translations from the Greek Anthology.16 It’s plausible that Pessoa intended to offer his fourteen “Inscriptions” to the Athenaeum, but with the demise of the journal as Pessoa knew it, the Portuguese poet lost what he must have considered to be his best bet for the publication of his English-language work. Possibly it was his disappointment at this lost opportunity that led him to include “Inscriptions” in English Poems: I–II in 1921, which might have constituted one of Pessoa’s last attempts to get a hearing for his work in England. Unlike his first chapbooks, this one was not reviewed.17 Pessoa gave up on his dream to be widely published in England, or so it seems. In this light, it appears that the publication of “Spell,” an English-language poem, in the May 1923 issue of the Lisbon periodical Contemporanea can be seen as a gesture of farewell to the English audience he never reached. “Spell” was the last of his English-language poems to achieve print in his lifetime. The Athenaeum’s publication of translations from the Greek Anthology preceded Pessoa’s own translations into Portuguese from W. R. Paton’s Greek Anthology, published in five volumes (1916– 18).18 Pessoa’s translations appeared in 1924 in Athena (which he co-edited). Jorge de Sena suggests that Pessoa modeled Athena on the Athenaeum.19 Sena also thought that Pessoa’s interest in the elegiac poems of the Greek Anthology, which led him to write his own set of “Inscriptions,” flowered unexpectedly into Mensagem, the volume that took his followers by surprise in 1934. “In many of the poems that are ‘epigrams’ in his Mensagem (not all of them are),” writes Sena, “[Pessoa] employed the tone and the spirit of the ‘epitaph’ praising the hero; see, for example, the epitaph of Bartolomeu Dias.”20 It is intriguing to think of Mensagem as a species of “Portuguese Anthology”—to put up there with Portugal’s national anthem—a notion that might deserve some notice. Also worth considering is Sena’s proposition that had the British reader given the author of 35 Sonnets a fair hearing, Pessoa might have been the one to herald in the Modernist rediscovery of English metaphysical poetry. In a way, it can be said that modern interest in primarily sixteenth-century English poetry was anticipated by Pessoa, working alone to recreate the English “metaphysical” sonnet, well before the appearance in 1921 of H. J. C. Grierson’s landmark anthology Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the Seventeenth Century, a book widely promoted with great success by the Anglo-American poet-critic, T. S. Eliot. Worth considering, too, is Sena’s proposal that Pessoa was denied this primacy because he was a foreigner living in a foreign land. A young

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poet without London connections might have expected such cold neglect, argues Sena, but the British cold shoulder contributed undoubtedly to Pessoa’s becoming, from that time on, more Portuguese than English, even though his thinking remained always more English than Portuguese.21 Yet the fact that Pessoa sometimes wanted to be an English poet can be misleading to the reader who wishes to understand his work in its entirety. His Englishness and the way he employed his genuine bi-culturalism can be a stumbling block even to his most perspicacious readers. But the matter should be faced. Jorge de Sena, surely one of Pessoa’s most knowledgeable critics, reached an ingenious conclusion over the period of a quarter of a century. Two short excerpts from Sena will serve to make his point. The first is dated 1953. The problem of Pessoa’s relationship with “English” and indirectly with British culture (in the broadest accepted sense of the term, which should include its institutions and political customs) is of the highest importance. Let no error in perspective, therefore, modify its true sense, which is that of helping to explain the way in which his intellectual and artistic formation complied with his being a great Portuguese poet.22

The second of these excerpts from Sena dates from 1977, nearly a quarter of a century after the first one. For Pessoa, English is—within himself—a defensive distancing that he preserves in relation to a Portuguese world to which he senses himself infinitely superior (and so he was), but which exists only for “internal” consumption—in the two senses of a private world and of an expressive freedom in a language that is not that of the tribe to which, whether he wanted to or not, he ended up by belonging, and belonging to it with all that true-falsity (because action is complex in that way) of the converse . . . . Conversely in a country in which he functions as a stranger in the midst of everyone else, that rare thing: a fictitious Englishman, with no reality, creating in Portuguese a series of equally fictitious poets, with the total reality of great poetry.23

To the puzzle posed by Pessoa’s Englishness, Jorge de Sena offers a solution based on a fruitful contradiction. Pessoa both was and was not English. Having received a standard English Victorian education and acquiring something of an English temperament might not neces-

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sarily turn Pessoa into an Englishman, but the gradual realization of how he could use his “Englishness” to forge anew Portuguese poetry turned him willfully into a “fictitious Englishman.” In fact, he so successfully brought off his tricky cultural identities that in the process he became a great Portuguese poet, or so says one critic, who even ventures to claim. that Fernando Pessoa “even ‘reinvented’ the Portuguese language, because he knew English.”24

CHAPTER

3

The Great War Over forty years ago Georg Rudolf Lind identified and analyzed Fernando Pessoa’s handful of anti-war poems.25 Written during World War I (1914–1918), there are wartime poems by the heteronyms Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro, and Álvaro de Campos (“Ode Marcial”), as well as “Salute to the Sun’s entry into Aries,” “Tomámos a Vila depois de um Intenso Bombardeamento,” and “O menino da sua mãe,” poems Pessoa attributed to himself. The last of the three poems named is the subject of this chapter, a poem that was written, most likely, sometime before the Portuguese government, succumbing to British political pressure and in defiance of Portuguese public opinion, agreed to send troops to support the English and the French in their war against the Germans and their allies.26 It is the last of these three poems that is the focus of this chapter. For some unknown reason, however, it remained unpublished for a decade, until it appeared in the May 1926 issue of the Lisbon periodical Contemporânea.27 It is my contention that reading “O menino da sua mãe” in the light of specific poems written by the English poets Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) and A. E. Housman (1859–1936) will take it out of the realm of disguised autobiography (as João Gaspar Simões would have it28) and give it a more universal resonance. Undoubtedly Pessoa’s most frequently declaimed and oft-quoted lyric, “O menino da sua mãe” reads, in English translation: On a deserted plain Heated by a warm breeze, Drilled clean through— By two bullets— He lies, dead, turning cold. Blood steeps his uniform. Blond, white, bloodless,

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His arms extended, He stares listlessly and Unseeingly at lost skies. He was so young! So young. (And now how old is he?) An only son, his mother Had called him “Mother’s Child.” The name stuck. Anon from his pocket Falls his cigarette-case, A gift from his mother. The case is intact and in Good shape. He is not. From the other pocket, a Dangling edge, the hemmed White of a handkerchief flicking The ground—a gift from the old Nurse who carried him about. Far off, at home, there is prayer: “Return him soon—safe, sound.” (Such webs the Empire weaves!) He lays dead, and rots, This mother’s child.29

In late July 1914, the result of political and diplomatic events that began with the assassination in Sarajevo of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian-Hungarian throne, warfare broke out in Europe. Within days England was deeply involved. Patriotism ran high. Despite Portugal’s long-standing alliance with England, the smaller country did not enter the war until March 9, 1916, sending troops to the front no earlier than February 1917. Portugal’s quarrels with Germany were not such that the country felt it needed to fall in immediately on England’s side. In fact, if Pessoa’s views at the time are any indication, there was much to be said in Germany’s favor, at least until Germany declared war on Portugal in 1916. Pessoa’s references to Germany, especially before 1916—in his political, sociological, and historical writing—indicate a comparatively favorable view of the role the Germans were made to play in the Great War. He did not, however, hold any brief for warfare itself. In fact, it

The Great War

25

was in 1916, most likely, that Pessoa wrote the most famous of his three or four great anti-war poems. His view of warfare, revealed in the figure of a dead soldier, is in sharp contrast, as will be seen below, with that of the English poet Rupert Brooke—so sharp is the contrast, in fact, that one is tempted to see “O menino da sua mãe” as something of an answer to the public sentimentality exemplified in the young Brooke’s last poetry. In December 1914, Rupert Brooke placed five poems in New Numbers, a journal of small circulation. Grouped under the title “1914,” they soon become known as the “War Sonnets” and were widely circulated. Two of the poems—“The Dead” and “The Soldier”—were reprinted on March 11, 1915 in the London Times Literary Supplement; and on April 4th (Easter Sunday) “The Soldier” was read from church pulpits. But it was Brooke’s death less than three weeks later, on April 23, 1915, that turned “The Soldier,” a stirring feat of bravado in which he celebrated his own death and burial as gestures of an ultimate patriotism, into the British national anthem par excellence.30 If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England’s, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Notably, in “The Soldier” Brooke did not write about his soldier’s death in battle or anything of the sort. Rather he takes up the meaning that the soldier at eternal rest—the buried soldier—will always have for his country. It is in “The Dead” that he talks about the aftermath of the soldier’s sacrifice in losing his life for his country. They are the dead, in his words—“the rich Dead.”

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Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old, But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. These laid the world away; poured out the red Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, That men call age; and those who would have been, Their sons, they gave, their immortality. Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth, Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain. Honour has come back as a king, to earth, And paid his subjects with a royal wage; And Nobleness walks in our ways again; And we have come into our heritage.

There is no question that it was Rupert Brooke’s deep-seated desire (or foolhardy wish, some would say) to prove his mettle by risking his life in combat, even dying a hero’s death. It was not to be, however, for on April 23, 1915, the would-be warrior “died of septicaemia in a French hospital ship in the Aegean, and was buried the same day on the island of Scyros,”31 at some distance from Gallipoli, where the ship carrying the young naval officer was headed and where England (and her allies) were destined to suffer disastrous naval defeats in a long and unsuccessful campaign to take the Dardanelles strait. Brooke’s death had at least spared him that dispiriting experience. As might well be imagined, the circumstances surrounding the poet-soldier’s untimely death were not the most propitious for launching a real-life hero into the midst of propaganda for the war. Here is the Brooke obituary in the London Times for April 26, 1915: During the last few months of his life, months of preparation in gallant comradeship and open air, the poet-soldier told with all the simple force of genius the sorrow of youth about to die, and the sure triumphant consolations of a sincere and valiant spirit. He expected to die; he was willing to die for the dear England whose beauty and majesty he knew; and he advanced towards the brink in perfect serenity, with absolute conviction of the rightness of his country’s cause and a heart devoid of hate for fellow-men.

The Times account coninues:

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The thoughts to which he gave expression in the very few incomparable war sonnets which he has left behind will be shared by many thousands of young men moving resolutely and blithely forward into this, the hardest, the cruelest, and the least-rewarded of all the wars that men have fought. They are a whole history and revelation of Rupert Brooke himself. Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, ruled by high undoubting purpose, he was all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable, and the most precious is that which is most freely proffered.32

As might well be imagined, the specific nature of the circumstances surrounding the poet-soldier’s untimely death were not the most propitious for launching a real-life hero into the midst of propaganda for the war. But Henry James, the famous Anglo-American novelist, who had thrown himself into the war effort, including efforts to raise money for American voluntary ambulances, was perfectly suited to the task of placing the sacrificed life of the poet-warrior Rupert Brooke at the very center of the exemplary ethos the British nation had imagined for itself and saw confirmed in Brooke’s meaningful death. In the preface he contributed to Brooke’s posthumously published Letters from America, James defined that meaning: The event [death] came indeed not in the manner prefigured by him in the repeatedly perfect line, that of the received death-stroke, the fall in action, discounted as such; which might have seemed very much because even the harsh logic and pressure of history were tender of him at the last and declined to go through more than the form of their function, discharging it with the least violence and surrounding it as with a legendary light. He was taken ill, as an effect of blood-poisoning, on his way from Alexandria to Gallipoli, and, getting ominously and rapidly worse, was removed from his transport to a French hospital ship, where, irreproachably cared for, he died in a few hours and without coming to consciousness. I deny myself any further anticipation of the story to which further noble associations attach, and the merest outline of which indeed tells it and rounds it off absolutely as the right harmony would have it. It is perhaps even a touch beyond any dreamt-of harmony that, under omission of no martial honour, he was to be carried by comrades and devoted waiting sharers, whose evidence survives them, to the steep summit of a Greek island of infinite grace and there placed in such earth and amid such beauty of light and shade and embracing prospect as that the fondest reading of his young lifetime could have

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suggested nothing better. It struck us at home, I mean, as symbolizing with the last refinement his whole instinct of selection and response, his relation to the overcharged appeal of his scene and hour. How could he have shown more the young English poetic possibility and faculty in which we were to see the freshest reflection of the intelligence and the soul of the new generation? The generosity, I may fairly say the joy, of his contribution to the general perfect way makes a monument of his high rest there at the heart of all that was once noblest in history.33

There were those few, however, who, unlike James, demurred when Brooke was apotheosized so, of course, but, significantly, they did not choose to go public with their reservations or complaints. But one of those who did privately question the young poet’s “attitudinizing” was a fellow poet. Writing at the time of Brooke’s death, Charles Sorley complained that his “War” sonnets were over-praised: [Brooke] is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice, regarding the going to war of himself (and others) as a highly intense, remarkable and sacrificial exploit, whereas it is merely the conduct demanded of him (and others) by the turn of circumstance, where non-compliance with this demand would have made life intolerable. It was not that “they” gave up anything of that list in one sonnet: but that the essence of these things had been endangered by circumstances over which he had no control, and he must fight to recapture them. He has clothed his attitude in fine words: but he has taken the sentimental attitude.34

But the younger poet’s less than salutary words were meant for private ears only, as has been noted, and so they remained. For when almost immediately after Brooke’s death his publisher brought out 1914 & Other Sonnets, the English took to the book so eagerly that in 1915 alone it was reprinted eleven times. Eager to cash in on Brooke’s new and greater prominence, his publisher managed to bring out a Collected Poems in the same year, a copy of which, in the 1925 edition, survives in Fernando Pessoa’s personal library.35 Pessoa’s awareness of war waged close-by occurred while he was living with his step-father, mother and half-siblings in Durban, South Africa. The Boer War, carried on by the farmers of the small Boer republics against British troops in the years 1899–1902, evoked from the fourteen-year-old Fernando Pessoa, in the guise of his English heteronym Alexander Search, the following poetic complaint, which he submitted to the Natal Mercury.

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29

The fallen lion every ass can kick, That in his life, shamed to unmotioned fright, His every move with eyes askance did trace. Ill scorn beseems us, men of war and trick, Whose groaning nation poured her fullest might To take the freedom of a farmer race.36

The Natal Mercury did not publish the poem. The Boer War, as history would deem, brought fresh attention in a far less singular way, to a small book of poems published in England at its author’s own expense in 1896, three years before the fighting broke out in South Africa. While A. E. Housman did not participate in the wars of his time—the Boer War, the Great War—he nevertheless included in A Shropshire Lad several poems about the fate of the young soldier at war. Modestly presented (and mostly untitled), Housman’s poetry was slow to gain readers at first, but a dozen or so years after publication, according to Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, Housman’s Shropshire Lad was ‘‘in every pocket just before the war,’” and thus “the book was on the spot (as was Rupert Brooke) to take advantage of the increase of interest in poetry brought about by 1914.”37 Not incidentally, that the poetry of Housman and of Brooke was immediately available to the Englishlanguage reader (like Pessoa) at the outbreak of war answers Georg Rudolf Lind’s question, “How does the poet, living in a pacific Lisbon, become inspired by bellicose motives, knowing nothing about war other than what the newspapers told him?”38 In fairness, it should be noted that Housman’s own credibility as an anti-military poet was later compromised by the popular success of “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries,” a poem recalling the British army’s defeat at Ypres in 1914 that he published in 1915. Caught up in home-front controversies over whether soldiers should be paid or not, Housman supplied a defense of the English mercenary that had been taken up as a patriotic rallying poem, celebrating the grit and courage of the British soldier. Useful as propaganda, it was reprinted on anniversaries of the otherwise disastrous defeat. In later years, well-aware of how the poem was employed during the war, Housman refused to let it be reprinted or anthologized. But it was not the wrongly or rightly perceived patriotism of “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries” that appealed to Fernando Pessoa, but Housman’s antimilitary ethos especially as it is expressed in this early Shropshire Lad poem:

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The Great War

On the idle hill of summer, Sleepy with the flow of streams, Far I hear the steady drummer Drumming like a noise in dreams. Far and new and low and louder On the roads of earth go by, Dear to friends and food for powder, Soldiers marching, all to die. East and west on fields forgotten Bleach the bones of comrades slain, Lovely lads and dead and rotten; None that go return again. Far the calling bugles hollo, High the screaming fife replies, Gay the files of scarlet follow: Woman bore me, I will rise.

In “O menino da sua mãe” Pessoa goes so far as to draw on this Housman poem for particulars. When he writes that on that “On the deserted plain” the young soldier “lies dead, and is rotting,” he echoes Housman’s lines “on fields forgotten / Bleach the bones of comrades slain, / Lovely lads and dead and rotten.” If Housman’s poem works more generally, its naturalistic detail—the corpse left to rot on the deserted battlefield—a poetic gift from Housman to Pessoa as a corrective to Horace’s notion that dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—which, it can be said, is the overarching theme of Rupert Brook’s “War” sonnets. In the poetry written during the war, body parts—usually referred to, with a strong trace of Victorian delicacy, as “limbs”—were lost and heroically dead bodies were interred under fields of red poppies and blooming roses but it was not noted that myriads of corpses, unclaimed for burial, lay rotting on the battle-fields where they died. Housman and Pessoa knew better, even if Rupert Brooke did not, or would not. Interesting, too, is the discrepancy between the fate of the corpse in Brooke’s poem—it is “claimed,” so to speak, and is, of course, buried. The corpse in Pessoa’s poem lies on an abandoned field, unburied. It does not take a classicist of Housman’s stature and wide learning, to recall here the Greek theme of the crime committed against the righteous Antigone herself when she is denied the right to claim her brother’s body for burial. This tragic note was sounded by Pessoa by his singling out, metonymically, the unburied, rotting body of one lad (as Housman would have called him). Yet he serves as a sign of what was to come. It is estimated that “some 400,000 British soldiers

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31

would have no known grave,” according to a recent report, “their bodies swallowed in shell-torn mud, sometimes emerging to this day when a plow strikes bones.”39

CHAPTER

4

“O Menino”: Follow-Up “O Menino da Sua Mãe,” Pessoa’s trenchant anti-war poem, was written—its now generally acknowledged—in the midst of World War I. As I have argued elsewhere, the poem works the traditional trope called the “corpse amid the flowers.”40 Rimbaud’s “Le dormeur du val” (“The Sleeper in the Valley”) is the typical poem of the tradition. I give it here in Wallace Fowlie’s English translation. It is a green hollow where a river sings Madly catching on the grasses Silver rags; where the sun shines from the proud mountain: It is a small valley which bubbles over with rays. A young soldier, his mouth open, his head bare, And the nape of his neck bathing in the cool blue watercress, Sleeps; he is stretched out on the grass, under clouds, Pale on his green bed where the light rains down. His feet in the gladiolas, he sleeps. Smiling as A sick child would smile, he is taking a nap: Nature, cradle him warmly: he is cold. Odors do not make his nostrils quiver. He sleeps in the sun, his hand on his breast, Quieted. There are two red holes in his right side.41

But there is a second Portuguese-language poem centering on the trope of the “corpse amid the flowers”: Sophia de Melo Breyner’s “O Soldado Morto” (“The Dead Soldier”). Collected in the volume Mar Novo in 1958, it looks back at Rimbaud’s lines through the lens of Pessoa’s poem.

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33

Os Infinitos céus fitam seu rosto Absoluto e cego E a brisa agora beija a sua boca. Que nunca mais há-de beijar ninguém. Tem as duas mãos côncavas ainda De possessão, de impulso, de promessa. Dos seus ombros desprende-se uma espera Que dividia na tarde se dispersa. E a luz, as horas, as colinas Inclinam-se a chorar sobre o seu rosto Porque ele foi jogado e foi perdido E no céu passam aves repentinas.42 (The endless skies gaze at his face Absolute and sightless And now the breeze kisses his mouth That will never kiss anyone else. His hands still keep the concave shape Of possession, impulse, promise. And hope slides from his shoulders, Divided and dispersed by evening. The light, the hours, the hills Become a lament around his face Because he was played and was lost And across the sky, sudden birds pass.)43

Not surprisingly, Sophia’s poem is virtually a reprise of Pessoa’s “O menino da sua mãe,” with the significant omission of references to the soldier’s mother. In that sense, not only does Sophia “remove” from her poem the familial (oedipal) context that João Gaspar Simões and others see as crucial to our understanding of the psychological workings of Pessoa’s poem but by doing so she “returns” the trope to one of its earlier forms in the tradition of “the corpse amid the flowers.” True, there are no flowers in her poem but the single focus is on the “discovered” corpse, which as in the poems by Rimbaud and Pessoa, is once again that of a soldier, one who in a single trick in the card-game of “Empire” has been “played” and has been “lost.”

CHAPTER

5

Campbell’s Discovery The great Portuguese poet of the sixteenth century Luís Vaz de Camões was Roy Campbell’s beau ideal.44 If the twentieth-century South African poet stopped short of thinking he was the reincarnation of the author of Os Lusíadas, he certainly tried to live up to the lofty standards set by the wounded warrior, the Asian and African traveler, and the great poet responsible for lyrics and sonnets that are trenchant and tender, as well as the first modern epic. Campbell’s admiration for Camões led as a matter of course to other “discoveries” among the Portuguese writers. As he stated in a radio broadcast in 1954, “I came to Portugal actually to farm, but as I learned the language better, I fell in love with Portuguese literature [beyond Camões’s poetry], and began making delighted discoveries . . .”45 What he did about his interest in Portuguese literature, before and after making those “discoveries,” is my subject. Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell (1901–1957) achieved fame in his twenties with such books of poems as The Flaming Terrapin (1924) and The Wayzgoose (1928), followed, in his thirties, by Adamastor (1930), The Georgiad (1931), Taurine Provence (1932), Mithraic Emblems (1936), and Flowering Rifle (1939). That his artistic reputation and overall importance to English poetry reached their height in that period is evidenced by his presence in Poetry of the 1930s—Allen Rodway’s anthology—as one of the eight prominent poets of the decade, the others being—a coterie of still familiar and highly respected names—W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis, Louis Macneice, Dylan Thomas, George Barker and David Gascoyne.46 In his last fifteen years or so Campbell devoted himself less to poetry and more to non-fictional prose (much of it autobiographical) and to translation of both poetry and prose, from the Spanish, French or Portuguese. His sudden and unexpected death, in his fifty-seventh year, resulted from injuries suffered in an automobile accident in Setubal while he was returning to Sintra after spending the Easter

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35

holiday in Spain. His death was widely noted in Portuguese newspapers. In the Diário Ilustrado, J. Monteiro-Grillo (better known as Tomás Kim) called attention to Campbell’s efforts on behalf of Portuguese literature: “To him we are indebted for the ever-increasing interest in Eça’s work in England and America as well as, in the wake of Campbell’s translations, in contemporary Portuguese literature.”47 Campbell’s interest in Portuguese writing was first sparked in 1926 when he discovered Luís de Camões’s Os Lusíadas in William Julius Mickle’s eighteenth-century translation.48 So inspired was he by the Portuguese poet and his epic poem, that he entitled his striking second collection of poems Adamastor. “There is nothing in his models,” Campbell would later say of Camões’s creation, “to equal the terrifying grandeur of the apparition of the Spirit of the Cape of Good Hope, as the Giant Adamastor.”49 In the collection of poems he called Talking Bronco (1946) Campbell included “Luís de Camões,” a sonnet he wrote during the war, along with an “Imitation (and Endorsement) of the famous Sonnet of Bocage which he Wrote on Active Service Out East.” “I had Camões in my kitbag out east during the whole of this last War, not only the ‘Lusiads’ but the lyrical poems and the sonnets,” Campbell recalled in the early 1950s in a letter to Leonard Bacon, an American poet and fellow-translator; “I was ‘coast-watching’ at the desolated and terrible desert Cape Guardafui just over the way from the place where he wrote the poem about Arabia Felix. I was also at Lamu for many months & as the only white soldier amongst thousands of negroes and Arabs so I got to have quite an intimate feeling for the Master.”50 At that earlier time Campbell had written to his wife: “I could never have understood this masterpiece [Os Lusíadas] so well if I had not lived out here in contact with the unchanged populations of which Camoens writes and in the midst of the same racial and religious clashes which form so much of his theme. He stands out much more clearly and magnificently, from here, as one of the eight or nine greatest writers in all literature.”51 Both of Campbell’s Camões poems were composed “almost certainly” while he was in the hospital recuperating from malaria.52 Not surprisingly, the sonnet “Luís de Camões,” a soldier-poet’s homage to a soldier-poet greater than he, was soon recognized as one of Campbell’s best poems, and thus one of his most often reprinted and anthologized poems.53 Camões, alone, of all the lyric race, Born in the black aurora of disaster, Can look a common soldier in the face: I find a comrade where I sought a master:

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Campbell’s Discovery

For daily, while the stinking crocodiles Glide from the mangroves on the swampy shore, He shares my awning on the dhow, he smiles, And tells me that he lived it all before. Through fire and shipwreck, pestilence and loss, Led by the ignis fatuus of duty To a dog’s death—yet of his sorrows king— He shouldered high his voluntary Cross, Wrestled his hardships into forms of beauty, And taught his gorgon destinies to sing.54

Campbell’s poem in Jorge de Sena’s translation was published in the Diario de Lisboa in 1952, and, along with Sena’s translation of “The Making of a Poet,” was reprinted in O Comércio do Porto the next year.55 At the time of Campbell’s death, the sonnet was again reprinted, along with Sena’s translation of “Rounding the Cape,” to illustrate Sena’s piece in O Comércio do Porto.56 These translations, along with one of “On the Martyrdom of Garcia Lorca,” can now be found in Sena’s anthology Poesia do Século XX.57 When Sena came to write about Campbell in A Literatura Inglêsa, a historical account of literature written in English and first published in Brazil, he noted that Campbell, who had enjoyed a “picturesque” life in Portugal, “where he lived seduced by the delights of rural primitivism, authoritarian peace and religious fanaticism,” had also, oddly, “enjoyed the esteem of those in the avant-garde,” with whom he has, “esthetically speaking, nothing in common . . . Rather he is one of the last of the traditional poets ‘in the grand manner,’ a man of the open air, and, in complement, on the scale of the common soldier, capable of the ‘gratuitous’ heroics of T. E. Lawrence; modernism would become, for the most part a glorious experiment of the chamber into which outside winds penetrated only when filtered through intellectualized estheticism.”58 Campbell would have found nothing to object to in Sena’s observations, except for the comparison he draws with T. E. Lawrence, the famed Lawrence of Arabia and author of Seven Pillars of Wisdom—whom Campbell charged with being “the greatest fraud in English history.”59 The poet David Wright, a fellow South African, assesses Campbell’s achievement as a poet-translator. Citing with approval Ezra Pound’s assertion that “English literature lives on translation, it is fed by translation: every new heave is stimulated by translation, every allegedly great age is an age of translations,” Wright concludes: “Pound himself is indisputably the greatest translator of our time, but, after Pound, the laurel must go to Campbell, who, though not as

Campbell’s Discovery

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apparently omnilingual or as consistently felicitous as Pound, made profitable raiding expeditions upon the poetry of half-a-dozen tongues.”60 Among those half-dozen tongues, according to Wright, it was Spanish and Portuguese that offered him his most “conspicuously successful” translations.61 Campbell’s knowledge of Spanish stood him in good stead, when he tackled poetry in that language. It is widely granted that Campbell did marvelously well with the poetry of Garcia Lorca and the rhapsodic verse of the mystic St John of the Cross. These translations stand at the top of Campbell’s work in this vein. Unfortunately, Campbell was far less sure of himself when he tried to translate from the Portuguese. It is true that he published translations of two books by “the great novelist Eça de Queiroz, whose masterpieces,” Campbell asserted, “are able to stand beside the greatest Russian and French novels of the last century.”62 But he worked through those translations of Eça, especially O Primo Basílio, using “a dictionary constantly,” scrambling to improve his knowledge of the language as he went along.63 It is not surprising that neither his Cousin Bazilio nor his The City and the Mountains garnered great praise for accuracy or consistent fidelity to the originals. When Campbell had difficulty making out the Portuguese, it was felt, he resorted to making things up or just leaving them out.64 With Portuguese verse, happily, he had less difficulty, precisely because he held himself to different standards. His opinion was that “there is no such freak alive as a good all-round translator per se,” though, he admitted, “Dryden came pretty near the mark.”65 He also conceded, curiously, without following the practice himself, that “a literal prose translation is always very necessary in understanding foreign poetry, even when one is provided with the most superb verse translations.”66 The desired goal, of course, was to embody the “literal prose translation” within a “superb verse translation” without turning the poem translated into a new poem. That this could become a bibliographical problem is evidenced, for instance, in Campbell’s version of a poem by the twentieth-century Brazilian poet Manuel Bandeira. In Mary Campbell’s preface to the Collected Poems of Roy Campbell, third volume, published in London in 1960, the poet’s widow offers an apologetic explanation: “‘Counsel’ (Manuel Bandeira) was wrongly included in Collected Poems, Vol. II, as an original poem, and appears correctly here as a translation.”67 Her decision to so label it is supported by the editors of The Collected Works II Poetry Translations, who included “Counsel” among Campbell’s translations. But what seems like an earlier error in attribution becomes rather curious when one consults the earlier volume. Since Campbell wrote the preface to his Collected Poems, posthu-

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Campbell’s Discovery

mously published in 1957, it is not unreasonable to suggest that he also chose and arranged its contents. Because “Counsel” is listed in the Table of Contents under “Later Poems (1939–1956),” it is also reasonable to think that Campbell considered it to be one of his own poems and not a translation, especially since, in a late draft among his papers at Texas, under the title, “Renunciation,” he offers this clarification, within parentheses: “After the Brazilian of Manuel Bandeira.” This draft, very close to the final version published as “Counsel,” reads: The world is pitiless and lewdly jeers All tragedies. Anticipate your loss. Weep much, in secret, but conceal your tears So to become accustomed to your cross. Alone grief can ennoble us. She only Is grand and pure. Then learn to love her now— To be your muse, when yours has left you lonely, And lay the last green laurels on your brow. She will be sent from heaven. The seraphic Language she speaks in, you should learn (since she Can speak no other) for your daily traffic When you receive her as your second wife Pray humbly, too, to God that she may be Your constant, kind companion all your life.68

Here is Manuel Bandeira’s poem, “Renúncia”: Chora do manso e no íntimo . . . Procura Curtir sem queixa o mal que te crucia: O mundo é sem piedade e até riria Da tua inconsolável amargura. Só a dor enobrece e é grande e é pura. Aprende a amá-la que a amarás um dia. Então ela será tua alegria, E será, ela só, tua ventura . . . A vida é vã como a sombra que passa . . . Sofre sereno e de Alma sobranceira, Sem um grito sequer, tua desgraça.

Campbell’s Discovery

39

Encerra em ti tua tristeza inteira. E pede humildemente a Deus que a faça Tua doce e constante companheira . . . 69

What interests me most here is that at some point Campbell seems to have decided that, despite its having started out to be more or less a straight-forward translation, it now differed sufficiently from the original that he might consider it to be a new and different poem, one of his own authorship. His vacillation on this score seems to be mirrored in the English choices for rendering Bandeira’s title that Campbell went through, as evidenced in the versions of his translation preserved among Campbell’s papers at the University of Texas at Austin. “Renuncia,” Bandeira’s title, starts out, in Campbell’s translation, as “Renunciation,” is changed, first to “Resignation,” then to “Warning,” followed by “Life-Insurance,” before finally becoming “Counsel.” But Campbell’s text, in my opinion, is not that far off from Bandeira’s. Campbell’s rhyme scheme—abab cdcd efe gfg—does not track Bandeira’s—abba abba cdc dcd—but Campbell has kept faithful to the sonnet form and sense of the original. That his version is as faithful to the original as it is, is something of a mild surprise, if one considers what Campbell said about translations and the act of translating elsewhere. For example, he starts out his foreword to T. W. Ramsey’s translation of Dante Alighieri’s Il Paradiso (1952): “Translations, especially verse-translations, resemble wives, in that the most faithful ones are generally the most homely: whereas the most beautiful ones are seldom faithful.”70 He expressed the notion frequently, expanding on the idea, bringing in Ezra Pound to make his case: Translations, some cynic once said, are like wives: the more faithful, the uglier they are likely to be: the more beautiful, the less faithful they are likely to be. I am not so cynical as to believe that beauty is irreconcilable with fidelity, and I have tried to reconcile them. One of the best modern translations, Ezra Pound’s “Seafarer”, is successful because he tried to do the same thing: this compensates for the several errors in meaning that occur in the poem. If I have distorted anything, it is an error, not an intentional deviation.71

After all, he insisted, “I am more concerned with finding the poetical equivalent in English than with literal conformity.”72 He also wrote: “Granted that the verse-translator is first of all a poet in his own right, he must also be fortunate in his choice of material, and it is surprising how many good translators have made bad choices.”73

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Campbell’s translations from the Portuguese are divided between fiction and poetry. In fiction he translated Eça de Queiroz’s O Primo Basilio and A Cidade e as Serras. Frequently described as Portugal’s Madame Bovary, Cousin Bazilio appeared in 1953, with The City and the Mountains following two years later. In his first year in Portugal, working at “Quinta dos Bochechos,” his farm in Galamares, near Sintra, Campbell studied Portuguese intensely and, as V. S. Pritchett would later assert (perhaps too readily, in the case of Portuguese), “did his excellent translations from the Spanish and Portuguese.”74 More responsible assessments, surely, were those of Harold V. Livermore, who reviewed the London edition of Campbell’s Cousin Bazilio, and Gerald M. Moser, who reviewed the New York edition of the same novel. In the academic journal Hispania Moser writes charitably: “Though inexact at times, the translation is enjoyable. Much curious background information about the motivation of the main characters has been omitted.” He then adds: “Those who are not familiar with Portuguese will find it [that background] in Mary Serrano’s older translation.”75 Livermore’s more harshly judgmental review offers some specifics regarding content and language, along with a criticism of publishers’ attitudes towards works of translation. London publishers are notorious for the lengths they will go to avoid accepting translations. It follows that when one of them “discovers” one of the great prose-writers of the nineteenth century he produces him incompletely and on the whole unworthily. Neither Mr. Reinhardt nor Mr. Campbell has thought it worth while to mention that about a third of O Primo Basílio has disappeared in the rendering; and though some cutting may well have been necessary, the present treatment is unfortunate. Eça was particularly careful to follow all his threads to the end: yet in the English version we are not told what happened to the Conselheiro or Dona Felicidade, and even the Conselheiro’s obituary notice of Luisa has got lost [ . . .] Generally speaking, the translation is readable, but there are some surprising lapses. For some unexplained reason, Julião Zuzarte becomes Zugarti for part of the book, and proper names are treated with monotonous disrespect. Perhaps Mr. Reinhardt cannot read Mr. Campbell’s writing. Wherever the Portuguese becomes difficult Mr. Campbell guesses like any schoolboy; fazenda preta “pale material” (p. 5): casou um bocado no ar “he is marrying a mouthful out of the wind” (!!) (p. 8): sentira-se enjoada “she felt terribly bored” (p. 15); cochichado ao canto dum sofa “whispered to the creaking of a sofa” (p. 17): por quem é, prudencia! “whoever it is, prudence!”

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(p. 34): o balouço debaixo do castanheiro “the old woman pedlar under the chestnut-tree” (p. 68) are a few random examples. Poor Eça, who read his own proofs almost with a microscope and often altered whole pages after they had been set up!76

Not everyone was as conversant with Eça’s novel in the original as was Harold Livermore, and, in the main, Campbell got a passing grade for his work on Eça’s prose. His was not a bad reception given that his Portuguese was “still very imperfect,” compelling him “to use a dictionary constantly.”77 In the waters of Portuguese poetry Campbell cast his nets more widely, venturing further back in time and in variety. Incorporated in his posthumously published book Portugal are versions of poems ranging in date from the twelfth century to the twentieth, from the “Cantigas” to Fernando Pessoa and José Régio. Other poets represented include Gil Vicente, Camões, Bocage, Antero de Quental, and Carlos Queirós. He also translated the verse of Joaquim Paço d’Arcos, a friend, collected as Poemas imperfeitos, a title that Campbell replaced with Nostalgia. His explanation of this choice allowed him to expatiate on questions of Portuguese character and temperament in terms of history and literature. The original title of this book of lyrical memories, Poemas Imperfeitos, does not translate satisfactorily into English as “Uncompleted Poems.” “Nostalgia” comes nearer to expressing not the title but the mood of these poems since it is the nearest word we have to express “Saudades,” that blend of enjoyable melancholy with tender memory and regrets, which the Portuguese, whose home, for so many centuries, has been the wide world and the seven seas—feels for any part of that wide home in which he has sojourned. The Portuguese is at home anywhere on sea or land: he does not have to reconstruct his home-country abroad before he can feel at home in his colonies, or in foreign lands. The very ocean, as Fernando Pessoa, greatest of modern Portuguese poets, writes in Mensagem, is salt with the tears of Portuguese widows, mothers and sweethearts, who have lost their husbands, sons or lovers at sea or overseas. Far continents and the horizons of the oceans have a greater significance for the Portuguese than they have for any other European nation, for they not only mean grief, hardship, toil, and death, but livelihood, sustenance, wealth, power, and life itself. “Saudades,” however, are inherent, in varying forms, in the poetry and music of all Celtic and Celtiberian peoples, from the love-lilts of the Hebrides to the medieval barcarolas of the Portuguese and the modern fados which

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are so popular in Lisbon today. “Saudades” embody that wistful yet smiling melancholy with which Baudelaire sees Surgir du fond des eaux le Regret souriant. But the waters in this book are wider, stormier, and less familiar than those of the Seine.78

More important to Campbell than Paço d’Arcos’s poems, however, was Portugal’s great poetry of the sea, from Camões to Pessoa. Camões he had discovered in the 1920s, it will be recalled; Fernando Pessoa he would come upon much later. In an unpublished fragment on Olive Schreiner, he calls Pessoa “a modern throw-back to Camões, and one of the greatest marine poets of all times, along with Homer, Melville, Corbière, and Camões”; his “O Mostrengo” is the “greatest sea-lyric ever written” and his “Ode marítima” is only prevented from being “a greater poem than the old Saxon SeaRover, which Ezra Pound mistranslated so magnificently” by its disconcerting “Yo-ho-hoing.”79 Pessoa, of course, is much more than a sea-poet, as Campbell well knew. This poet of multitudes is undoubtedly the subject of Campbell’s note, left among his papers: “The very opposite of Valéry who declared that it was impossible for him to write on a blank sheet ‘The Marchioness went out at five o’clock,’ this poet here began by creating multitudes of fictional figures by means of which he hoped to disguise his own features.”80 Although he did not live to finish his small book on Pessoa, Campbell did publish four finished translations from the poetry of Pessoa—three poems by the orthonymic Pessoa (that is, poems he assigned to himself rather than to one of his major heteronyms—Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, or Alberto Caeiro) and a fourth, an excerpt from “Ode marítima” by Campos. The orthonymic poems translated are the celebrated “Autopsicografia” (which Campbell begins: “The poet fancying each belief”), “A morte chega cedo” (“Death comes before its time”), and “O que me doi não é” (“The thing that hurts and wrings is not”). These translations appeared in Portugal, Campbell’s last book.81 Other translations from Pessoa he incorporated in his unfinished manuscript entitled Fernando Pessoa 82—a different version of pretty much the same lines from “Ode marítima” that he published in Portugal, along with “O Mostrengo,” Pessoa’s poem about Adamastor, Camões’s original image for the dangers posed by the sea as well as the African continent—and a handful of lines from the poems of the heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos.83 From the surviving pages of Campbell’s manuscript it is clear that the book he intended would combine generous swatches

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of quoted poetry with extended commentary and evaluation, one modeled, in structure and overall intention, on his earlier book, Lorca: An Appreciation of his Poetry.84 Just how many of Pessoa’s poems he would have chosen to translate is unknown, but some of them—not represented in the unfinished monograph on Pessoa—can be identified by their survival in manuscript. Ranging from barely begun to nearly completed, these include versions of the orthonymic “Mar português,” Álvaro de Campos’s “Ah, um soneto” (eleven lines), and Campos’s “Opiário” (the opening lines of one of Campos’s longer poems). The three poems can be considered to be, in one way or another, sea-poems. Set against Pessoa’s originals, these attempts offer the reader a clear sense of the way Campbell worked. One of Campbell’s versions of “Mar português” is complete (though probably not finished), while a second version lacks only two words. First published in 1922 in the journal Contemporânea and reprinted in 1933 in the journal Revolução, in both instances as part of a sequence of patriotic poems, “Mar português” was incorporated in 1934 in Mensagem, Pessoa’s one book of Portuguese poems published during his lifetime. Ó mar salgado, quanto do teu sal São lagrimas de Portugal! Por te cruzarmos, quantas mães choraram, Quantos filhos em vão resaram! Quantas noivas ficaram por casar Para que fosses nosso, ó mar! Valeu a pena? Tudo vale a pena Se a alma não é pequena. Quem quere passar além do Bojador Tem que passer além da dor. Deus ao mar o perigo e o abysmo deu, Mas nelle é que espelhou o céu.85

Here is the draft of Campbell’s translation. How much of your salt The tears How much of you, O salty sea, The tears of Portugal must be! What mothers have bewept their loss What sons have prayed your deeps to in vain to cross

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Your gulfs. How many maids sweethearts Unmarried. That you should be ours[.] Was it in vain worth while. Well worth the pain If the soul is not small or He who would weather round Cape Bojador Must pass beyond all pain. What’s more God furthermore God gave the sea Gave the sea But Must pass the Cape sorrow long before God gave the sea its dangers to the deep But heaven is mirrored in its

Just how selective, even fussy, Campbell could be about metrics and prepositional phrasing is even more evident in a second draft of his translation of “Mar português”: How much of your salt waves, O sea, The tears of Portugal must be! How many mothers wept their loss And sons have vainly prayed—to cross Your deeps. How many maids have tarried, To make you ours, and died unmarried. How many maids for life have tarried? Was it worth while? Yes worth it all, If the soul is not mean or small. He who would pass Cape Bojador Must round the Cape of Grief before God gave the sea Port God gave the abyss God gave the deep its its dangers to the sea But in all its depths God gave the sea its dangers, yes be true. But heaven is mirrored in its blue.

Even rougher and indecisive are Campbell’s attempts to translate Álvaro de Campos’s “Ah, um soneto,” a poem Pessoa published in 1932 in presença, the modernist journal whose editors prided themselves as Pessoa’s “discoverer” and champions. Campos’s sonnet reads: Meu coração é um almirante louco que abandonou a profissão do mar e que a vai relembrando pouco a pouco em casa a passear, a passear . . .

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No movimento (eu mesmo me desloco nesta cadeira, só de o imaginar) o mar abandonado fica em foco nos músculos cansados de parar. Há saudades nas pernas e nos braços. Há saudades no cérebro por fora. Há grandes raivas feitas de cansaços. Mas—esta é boa!—era do coração que eu falava . . . e onde diabo estou eu agora com almirante em vez de sensação? . . . 86

A look at one of Campbell’s attempts at translating “Ah, um soneto” will suffice for our purposes. The draft survives in Campbell’s “Cadernos de Apontamentos,” now at the University of Texas. It starts out with some sureness but soon turns sketchy and indecisive, blanking out on words, phrases and lines to be filled in later. My heart like a mad admiral re retired From his profession of the sea, indoors Walks up and down and wears My heart the mad admiral from his profession Retired, walks up and down, walks up and down indoors Little by little regaining the possession Of Imagining the movement dislocates me And some outside the brain to live and die Where the hell am I with That I was was speak. . . but was I with An admiral instead of a sensation So far so good . . . me just now my conversation Was of the heart . . . but where the hell am I with An admiral instead of a sensation. Now in the scrapheap to Captain Promoted for

One last example of Campbell’s attempts at translating Pessoa’s poetry is his rough version of the opening stanzas of “Opiário,” published in the inaugural issue of Orpheu in 1915. Described by

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Pessoa as an example of Álvaro de Campos’s early “decadent” work, “Opiário,” in four-line rhymed stanzas, begins: É antes do ópio que a minh’alma é doente. Sentir a vida convalesce e estiola E eu vou buscar ao ópio que consola Um Oriente ao oriente do Oriente. Esta vida do bordo há de matar-me. São dias só de febre na cabeça E, por mais que procure até que adoeça, Já não encontro a mola pra adaptar-me.87

In Campbell’s draft, it is obvious, he isn’t even considering endrhymes: It is before I

It is before I smoke it that my soul Is sick Before I smoke the opium, then my soul Is sick: life Then do I seek the opium to console And Orient to the Orient of the East This life on board My convalescence I convalesce my weakness But I can find no spring

It is evident that Campbell intended to include translations of these poems (and others, presumably) in the Pessoa book he did not live to work and rework until it met the high standards he set for all his work. In this regard consider his plan for revising a long poem: “I wrote it [Flowering Rifle] between battles on the Madrid and Teruel fronts and in hospital on anything that came handy—so the first version of 5,000 lines was a bit rough. But it is gradually getting streamlined. I shall re-write it again 3 times all through and it will be my best book of verse comprising more than half the verse I’ve written in all my lifetime.”88 A month after Campbell’s death and just two months after he himself had appeared on the same television program “Miradoiro” over RTP in Lisbon, he was remembered by way of an interview with Tomás Kim (J. Monteiro-Grillo) conducted by David Mourão-

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Ferreira. In a final question Mourão-Ferreira asked his guest to comment on Campbell’s success as a translator from the Portuguese and to say something about the intrinsic worth of those translations. Tomás Kim answered: Roy Campbell’s translations have increased interest in things Portuguese in English-language countries. More particularly, his translations have given Eça de Queirós renewed visibility. On the other hand, Campbell’s English-language translations themselves have validity as literary works in the English language. They are the consequence of a recreation to which Campbell dedicated himself. Certain exigent critics—lesser ones—have pointed, here and there, to infidelities in Campbell’s text. Well, that, I think, hardly matters. His work recreates but does not betray the original. That’s what matters, in fact, and we Portuguese owe Campbell a great deal, as I say, because it is to him above all that we owe—I repeat—that resurgence of interest in things Portuguese in the English-speaking countries.89

Though Tomás Kim seems not to have been overly sanguine about the lasting effect of Campbell’s translations of Eça on the Englishspeaking reader, his observation that Campbell is a “re-creator” of texts (following in the footsteps of Pound, as Campbell himself might have claimed) seems to be both just and useful.90

CHAPTER

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A Book That Never Was When it was decided to call the proposed book of essays on Fernando Pessoa The Man Who Never Was (1982), I certainly did not foresee that the title would cause anyone any difficulty. Nor did I anticipate that it would mislead anyone. After all, I had merely taken over the title from someone who, in turn, had taken it over from someone else. The practice is common enough. There had recently been on Broadway a play called The Real Thing and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the famous short story by Henry James bearing the same title. To take a second example, John Philip Sousa, the American March King, and the well-known writer Shirley Hazard both entitled novels Transit of Venus, books that were published sixty years apart. Examples are legion. Now I had not seen anything wrong with it when Jorge de Sena had decided to call his major address at the First International Symposium on Fernando Pessoa in 1977 “The Man Who Never Was.” It was clear, as it must have been to some of those in attendance, that Sena was consciously playing, in this title, with the notion that the several poetic selves created by the Portuguese poet (Fernando Pessoa himself called them his “heteronyms,” of course) were fully characterized personae created to live the several lives that the poet himself could not in fact live out, and that Sena would, in this essay, seek to define the self of the man who had, in a real and (even) poignant sense, never lived. It was also clear that Sena had deliberately borrowed his title from a book first published in Great Britain in 1954. That English book deals with a real-life episode of wartime espionage and counter-espionage in which there is created an elaborate identity and rather complicated past and projected future (as a courier carrying highly revealing letters) for a cadaver destined to be “planted” in the sea off the coast of Spain. The book detailing all this (and revealing it publicly for the first time) was written by the officer in British Intelligence, one Ewen Montagu, who concocted the plot in the first place. I happened to have read (and enjoyed) the book when

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it was first published in the United States the year I graduated from college. In fact, I thought it clever of Jorge de Sena to have appropriated for his own essay about the man who had made central to his life and art the creation of such “identities” the title of a book which, had it appeared during Pessoa’s lifetime, would certainly have caught the poet’s attention and engaged his interest. And I thought further, when the time came, that it would be a clever stroke to assign the title Sena shared with Montagu to the book of essays on Pessoa (including Sena’s own) that would subsequently appear under my editorship. That book of essays on Pessoa appeared late in 1982. A year later there appeared a brief notice of the existence of the book in a journal devoted to serious scholarship on matters Portuguese. The notice was the work of the journal’s editor (a full review by another hand appeared elsewhere in the same issue of the journal), who limited himself to complaining that the editor of The Man Who Never Was: Essays on Fernando Pessoa was guilty, at best, of an error in taste in deciding to take over a title from a real-life spy thriller published years earlier. He suggested as well that my having duplicated such a title might well confuse and annoy students of Pessoa’s work. Now there are several things that could have been said in my defense. First, I seriously doubted that any perceptive student of Pessoa’s life and work would find such a title inappropriate, alluding as it does to a classic instance of deception on that grand scale the Portuguese poet could only dream of. Secondly, the first writer to apply the title to Pessoa was, of course, Jorge de Sena himself, one of the most profoundly committed students of everything having to do with Pessoa. Could anyone doubt that Sena knew full well what he was doing in choosing to appropriate Montagu’s title (thereby revitalizing it) or that he was, in so levying on it, guilty of a lapse in taste? The questions, one ventures, are rhetorical. Yet, after is said and done, I must admit that my judgmental friend, a historian, had a point. He was right about one thing. At least in one case the title The Man Who Never Was has caused confusion. A few months ago, at the publisher’s office, there appeared a purchase order for one copy of the book—paperbound. The envelope carried a Commonwealth of Virginia postmark, and the order it contained came from the headquarters of the C.I.A., an outfit that is purported to know a thing or two about espionage and counter-espionage. The book was shipped out, and in due course a check for the amount due arrived in the mail. Case closed. Except, that is, that neither the book’s publisher nor its editor had any way of knowing why the C.I.A. should evince an interest in a book of essays on Fernando Pessoa. But we have our suspicions. What we suspect, of course, is that some

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eagle-eyed spy at the C.I.A. made a mistake. Thinking that our 1982 book might have something to do with “Operation Mincemeat” (as the British called their escapade against the Axis Powers), they dutifully put through an order. On the other hand, it might well be that, like many other individuals who, to their sorrow, have learned differently, the C.I.A.—knowing exactly what they are up to—have now turned their attention to the legacy of modern Portugal’s great trickster poet. Postscript. Subsequently, copies of Gávea-Brown Publications’ The Man Who Never Was were purchased by direct order for the United States Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, the United States Army in South Korea, and a third military outfit—I cannot recall, at the moment, which one—located in Maryland or Virginia. None of these copies has been returned. Second postscript. On July 31, 1985, there arrived at Gávea-Brown Publications a letter from one Laurent Weichberger asking to buy a copy of The Man Who Never Was. He had read about Ewen Montagu’s life and times in the Sunday New York Times for July 21st and had, as a result, tried to buy a copy of Montagu’s book in New York City but had not been successful. Upon checking the Times for that date, I discovered that the article was actually an obituary entitled “Ewen Montagu, 84; Briton Led a Mission That Deceived Nazis” (p. 28). It described the events of that mission and mentioned the book—The Man Who Never Was (1953)—that narrated them. Mr. Weichberger was dutifully informed that Gávea-Brown’s book has nothing whatsoever to do with the late Ewen Montagu’s wonderful account of his World War II exploits. Third postscript. And orders for The Man Who Never Was that was not published by Gávea-Brown continue to come in. In the summer of 1988 the Military Bookstore of Leavenworth, Kansas, tried to place an order for twenty copies (we telephoned them to suggest that it was not our book that they really wanted) and Aztec Shops at San Diego State University ordered fifteen copies to be used, as a phone call uncovered, as a text in History 410A—United States History for Teachers. The same week there was a call from a woman who identified herself only as a secretary at Citibank, New York City, who had been directed by her boss (also a woman) to get her a copy of The Man Who Never Was—“that book about the C.I.A.” The beat goes on.

CHAPTER

7

Ulysses, the Founder Ulysses Myth is the nothing that is everything. The same sun that opens up the skies Is a mute and brilliant myth— God’s body, dead, Naked, alive. The one who landed here Continued to be by not existing. Non-existent, he sufficed. By not coming he came And he created us. Thus the legend runs down Into reality, and Impregnating, passes through. Down below, life, a half Of nothing, dies.91

Were it not for the title assigned to this lyric from Fernando Pessoa’s Mensagem (1934), it might well be that its direct reference to the particularly Portuguese foundation myth involving the Greek hero of Ithaca would go undetected. Yet the legend that Odysseus founded the city of Lisbon on the banks of the Tagus, a legend employed in Luis de Camões’s national epic Os Lusíadas (1572), was one especially “dear to Lusitanian humanists.”92 Indeed, in the year 2000 the legend was invoked by the Portuguese historian João Medina. In Ulisses, o Europeu (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte), Medina argues that Portugal’s unique legendary position in the formation of a united Europe stands at the beginning of the history celebrated by Camões nearly four centuries earlier and revived by Pessoa in his allusively representative, if subtly ironic, poetic sequence of national poems in Mensagem.93

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Following Camões’s sixteenth-century example, Pereira de Castro’s Vlyssea, ov Lysboa edificada (1636) recycles selected episodes from Homer’s epic, so shaping them to point toward a new ending more in keeping with the Portuguese poet’s own theme and purpose. In Pereira de Castro’s poem, Ulysses “sets his sights on establishing a city that will become the center of an empire built for eternity.”94 It is this Odysseus, founder of Lisbon, that fits into Portuguese history. “He was so well-known a mythological figure that the Portuguese seeking an ancient origin for the city of Lisbon,” writes Ronald W. Sousa in The Rediscoverers, “hit upon the concept (based on a supposed similarity between the words Ulysses and Olisipo, the Latin name from which the name Lisbon derived) that Ulysses had founded the city.”95 Presented toward the beginning of Mensagem (it is placed third in a sequence of forty-four poems), “Ulysses” sets the tone that will guide the reader, in important ways, in his or her response to the glorious and prophetic master narrative that must be teased or pieced out from the accumulation of lyrics that follow, making up the argument for the poem’s so-called “message.” Pessoa’s “Ulysses” is a wry meditation on the fact that myth (“the nothing that is everything”) shapes reality and empowers things, even that life (itself half of nothing) that must die in order to live, whether or not the poet himself believes manifestly in a gloriously prophetic interpretation of Portuguese history—perhaps, to put the matter in terms of contemporary history—as the spiritual (Odyssean) force in the unification of Europe.

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Myth is the Message The full story of the literary, political, and social relationship of Antonio Ferro and Fernando Pessoa remains to be written. Acquainted since the days of Orpheu in 1915, when Ferro, the youngest member of the group, helped to raise the money for the inaugural issue of this avant-garde journal, there seems to have followed a long fallow period during which Ferro prospered as an editor and journalist while Pessoa struggled to earn his daily way as a correspondent for business concerns situated in the lower city. Indeed, the first significant literary successes after the brief Orpheu years belonged to Ferro, who found publishers for his plays and fiction, while Pessoa’s work found only a more humble place in journals and newspapers. Regardless of where they published, however, the two writers shared strong interests in literary and cultural modernism and were avid proponents of Portuguese nationalism. It was Ferro’s journalism that eventually lent itself to propagandizing for Europe’s flowering of dictatorships, emergent, seemingly everywhere following the end of the Great War, including, of course, the series of interviews with Antonio Salazar that earned him a key post in Salazar’s so-called Estado Novo. An avid proponent for modernism with a strong component of Marinetti’s futurism’s unquestioning adulation of the machine with all its potential for power use in all sectors of a civilization, Ferro found himself with considerable personal power to control and shape the Estado Novo’s efforts in the support of Culture writ large. As the head of SNI, he initiated and promoted large, well-funded projects in architecture, the literary arts, and in preservation and fostering of the varied aspects of popular tradition. As part of his overall project, in the early 1930s he instituted annual prizes—named for the great luminaries of the past—for poetry, fiction, the essay and drama. It was at precisely this moment—1934—that Ferro hit on the idea of bringing his Orpheu companion of twenty years earlier into his orbit. He encouraged Pessoa to enter the competition for the newly-

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created and just-announced Antero de Quental prize for poetry. Pessoa, who for all his plans for large and sometimes grand projects, was unable (or at least unwilling) to write to order, could not come up with a 100-page poem (as required for the competition), reached back into his hoard of writings, for poems that could be used to flesh out an old idea that he had for a book he had long intended to write and to which he would give the simple title of Portugal. He had, of course, been writing this book piece-meal. It would be comprised of short poems written at various times and, seemingly, in no particular order, all of them about specific figures or events in the panoply of Portuguese history, legendry, and literary mythology. But even so—after gathering them together, he still did not have the required 100 pages. So he introduced divisions and mottoes—separately paged—that would not only increase the volume of the book to the minimum of 100 pages, but also, as collateral benefit, give the poem a clearer sense of overall structure, authorial intention, and thematic purpose. All this he did, one suspects, with Ferro’s awareness and, perhaps, cooperation, if not, one is tempted to say, collusion. There is strong indication that Ferro even assumed the cost of printing the manuscript. (Regulations required that only published works would be considered.) Of great interest is the story of how he got around the judges’ decision to award the Antero de Quental prize for a book of poetry, not to Pessoa’s book Mensagem, but to another entry. Ferro found money enough to declare Pessoa the winner of a second (first) prize in the same amount as the original first (and until then the only authorized) first prize. The poem—never mind its litany of deaths and history of losses—was deemed to be unequivocally patriotic and thus useful to the aspirations and goals of the Estado Novo—and had it not been so interpreted, it can be safely conjectured that Ferro would not have declared it a first-prize winner. That it continued to be seen as such is indicated, in my estimation, by the fact that the second edition of the poem, in 1941, came out under the official auspices of the government’s Agência Geral das Colónias. Notably, the demise in 1974 of the Salazar–Caetano dictatorship, brought about not a reconsideration of Mensagem as an unmistakably patriotic poem with a direct, straightforward prophetic message in which the poet himself believed, but a closer look at the nature of the poem’s measured, but clear message—put forth by this paradoxically self-proclaiming Sebastian rationalist. Here is where Onésimo Teotónio Almeida comes in in the history of critical discussion over Mensagem. When his Mensagem: uma tentativa de reinterpretação (Angra do Heroísmo: Secretaria Regional

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da Educação e Cultura; re-issued, in expanded form, as Pessoa, Portugal e o Futuro, 2012) first appeared in 1987, I reviewed this pioneering work for the journal World Literature Today. Ever more secure in my conviction that the interpretation pioneered by Onésimo Teotónio Almeida is “right,” I would like to quote that brief review. The author of Mensagem that emerges from Onésimo Teotónio Almeida’s closely researched and intensely argued study of poetic intentions and literary design (I insist on the word) stands forth clearly as a theorist of social action and practical politics. Fernando Pessoa’s patriotism wears the hard shell of structural coherence and logical pragmatism earned by a thinker, both cool and fervid with the message he would bring to those worthy to hear it, a message brilliantly exemplified in the very act of his presenting his poem to be considered for a public honor. It is a subtext of Almeida’s remarkably lucid and cogent essay, if we are to judge from the varieties of commentary and interpretation evoked by the unequivocally vital text, that the thoughtful and expressive thinker’s great message to his countrymen has been made out to be nearly everything he had not intended it to be, ranging from a pie-in-the-sky wish for an imperial future built on the soft sands of nostalgia to an encoded blueprint for any poet’s desire to write of the self in that most hermetic of ciphers: the occult language of the romantic eremite. It should not surprise us to learn as we do in Almeida’s important study (but it does) not only that in Mensagem the poet knew what he was about, but that his message is so straightforward and, in a way, so practical that it is almost as if it has taken a collective act of perversity to have egregiously misread it for over fifty years. Based on the author’s discovery of the poem’s rootedness to Pessoa’s understanding of the writings of Georges Sorel, the case is so clearly argued and so convincingly documented that from now on, seen precisely for what it is, Mensagem stands as a benchmark for all study into the mind and thought of Fernando Pessoa.

To that original review of a quarter of a century ago can be added a few words regarding details pertinent to the development of Mensagem that surfaced a decade after the publication of Onésimo Teotónio Almeida’s book, facts that shed light on Pessoa’s exact wishes for the effect he was after in his poem and the use to which it might be put—all this forecast in the pro-active title that was his final choice. Pessoa’s intention to entitle one of his prospective books Portugal dates no later than the early 1910s. Just before such a book was

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published, in 1934, however, Pessoa was induced to change its title from Portugal to Mensagem. Advised, it is said, that his original title for the collection of historical, elegiac, and prophetic lyrics he would submit as a single long poem in the newly-minted SNI competition had become, of late, a bit shop-worm, he settled on Mensagem, a seemingly more pro-active title. Oddly enough, this title seems to have been suggested to him, years earlier, by an English acquaintance living and working in Lisbon. Still hoping for a career as an Englishlanguage poet, in 1918 Pessoa forwarded copies of two chapbooks, 35 Sonnets and Antinous, to William A. Bentley, the Lisbon-based editor of Portugal, a monthly compendium of news of politics and the arts, aimed at the English reader, mainly in London and other parts of Great Britain. Somewhat repulsed by what he considered to be the unhealthy and disreputable subject matter of Antinous, Bentley offered the aspiring young poet some avuncular advice as to the directions in which he should take his gift for poetry in the future. May I suggest that you go to your own history; the purer sources of your national life; the faith, enthusiasm and devotion of those who made Portugal the first land in the awaking Europe of the Renascence, choose some subject there that shall at least be healthy elevating and pure and devote your poetry to that. That is unless you can have the courage and feel the call to sing nor [sic] only the far away past; but have a message for the Present. Camões in this seems to me so much braver than the mass of poets that reveling as he did in romance and the history of old times, he yet manfully chose for the subject of his great poems, the things, the men and the events of his own day and the voyages and discovering of his companion of everyday. Is there naught noble today to be worthy your praise and your inspiration? If not can you not point your people to what may be and were worth their effort.

We do not have Pessoa’s reply (if, indeed, there was one) to this wellmeaning letter of advice from the founder and editor of Portugal, a Lisbon-based monthly review of “the country, its colonies, commerce, history, literature and Arts” (1915–1916), though the substance of Bentley’s letter, it seems to me, stayed with Pessoa for the rest of his life, resulting, some fifteen or so years later, in the shaping and naming of Mensagem. The nature of the message delivered in Mensagem, however, the way to uplift and direct the collective Portuguese spirit to action, was of Pessoa’s own devising. That the point of Pessoa’s “message” was intended to be a sacerdotal call to action, as I see it, is the major theme of Almeida’s indispensable account of Pessoa’s

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inspired appropriation of Blaise Pascal’s and Georges Sorel’s heuristic work—particularly their shared conception of a pragmatist theory of truth, as well as a unique conception of myth as a guide to action.

CHAPTER

9

Pessoa’s Critics To account for what Pessoa’s critics said about the Portuguese writer over a forty-three year period (1971–2014), this chapter presents my takes on that criticism as published at the time. Thus collected here are thirty-three reviews written of books about Pessoa as well as editions of his work. They are presented in the order in which they were published. These reviews may be seen as the record of my responses to the scholarship on Pessoa as it appeared over a more than three decades during which Pessoa studies burgeoned into a virtual industry. 1. Selected Poems by Fernando Pessoa. Trans. Edwin Honig. Intr. Octavio Paz. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1971. It is uncanny that Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), a poet who would create several heteronyms for his other poetic selves and detailed biographies for each of them, was born with a family name translatable both as “person” and “persona.” Just as remarkable is the fact that early on Pessoa sensed that he was actually many poets, and further that he was all of them, not in stages but simultaneously. Since Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and “Fernando Pessoa”—all heteronyms—would not wait for a discrete, sequential place in the poet’s own career, Pessoa brought them all to the fore, in 1914. From then on, each heteronymic self freely pursued its own career. There is little point, consequently, in ever talking about Pessoa’s career in terms of shifts of poetic voice, verse form, or philosophical outlook. Pessoa has not been widely known in the United States. A very few poems have appeared in translation, but Edwin Honig’s bilingual edition is the first concentrated effort to bring him to the attention of Americans. That Honig’s translations are faithful in letter and spirit to Pessoa is a reviewer’s assertion that the reader without Portuguese can accept

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only on faith. That Honig’s translations are themselves new poems in English, however, is an assertion that the reader can test for himself. Here, then, are four examples, each one representing one of Pessoa’s major heteronymic selves. Alberto Caeiro, a bucolic poet, opens one poem: Today I read nearly two pages In a book by a mystic poet And I laughed like someone who’d been sobbing. Mystic poets are sick philosophers, And Philosophers are mad men. Because mystic poets say that flowers feel And say that stones have souls And rivers have ecstasies in moonlight.

As traditional, but in a different vein, Ricardo Reis, the composer of odes, writes: I only ask the gods to grant me That I ask nothing of them. Happiness is a burden, Good fortune is a yoke. Both bespeaking too secure a state. Not composed nor discomposed, I would calmly live Beyond that state in which men take To sorrows and to joys.

In “The Tobacco Shop,” one of the vital poems of our century, Álvaro de Campos talks to a child who does not hear the poet and who, true to her simple being, could never hear him with understanding. Go eat your chocolates, little one! Eat your chocolates! Look, there’s no metaphysics on earth like chocolates. Look, all the world’s religions are just as edifying as making candy. So eat, my dirty little one, eat them up! If I could only down those chocolates as honestly as you do! But no, I’m the thoughtful kind who peels off the silver wrapper, thinks, This is only tinfoil, And throws it all on the floor, just as I’ve thrown my life away.

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As much the work of a heteronymic self, the poems of “Fernando Pessoa” have their own distinctive quality. The following poem, written in 1931, anticipates Camus’s famous observation on the fortunate cosmic situation of the cat that, unlike man, is totally unselfconscious because he is an animal among animals. Cat, you tumble down the street As if it were your bed. I think Such luck’s a treat, Like feeding without being fed. You’re just a pawn in the hands Of fate, as stones are, and people! You follow your instinct and glands; What you feel you feel—it’s simple. Because you’re like that you’re happy; You’re all the nothing you see. I look at myself—it’s not me. I know myself—I’m not I.

Poets who take up translation work at a trade which is both selfsacrificing and life-sustaining. Insuring a place in the world community for a fellow poet cannot help being attractive to the successful poet-translator. But when, as in Pessoa’s case, that poet has written in a language that the Portuguese themselves in desperation have characterized as the mausoleum of their art, the act of translation is useful, and wonderfully humane. 2. José Blanco, Fernando Pessoa: Esboço de uma bibliografia. Lisboa. Imprensa Nacional / Casa da Moeda, 1983. Among the many finds in this excellent bibliography is the information that Fernando Pessoa, whose reputation and fame have grown steadily from the moment of his death in 1935, has been translated into seventeen languages, that in his lifetime he saw through the press 132 prose texts and 299 poetic texts and that he was uncommonly partial, for some reason, to the publication of his translations from the works of others. I leave it to others to glean from this rich harvest other facts of this nature. The principal break in this book divides it into a primary bibliography and a secondary bibliography (to which is added a final section on translations). In the 280-odd pages of the former, publications are further divided into a section on prose and another on poetry, covering publications from April 1912 to June 1982. In the 140 or so

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pages of the latter, a selection of over 1300 items, organized thematically, runs through 31 December 1981. The selectivity involved was dictated by José Blanco’s desire to list only articles and books that he has examined (which usually means, as he tells us, items in his vast personal library of work by and about Pessoa). If such selectivity will be seen as a limitation by some, the bibliographer’s decision to organize his material along thematic and topical lines will be a boon to most scholars. As offering some indication of the trans-lingual attention already paid to this great writer, I direct the reader to the section on translations. Therein one finds listed translations of Pessoa in these languages: German, Bulgarian, Czech, Chinese, Spanish, Estonian, Finnish, French, Greek, Dutch, English, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian and Swedish. Among the translators, one is impressed to discover such names, among others, as Paul Celan, Edouard Roditi, Octavio Paz, Armand Guibert, John Betjeman, Roy Campbell, Jonathan Griffin, Edwin Honig, Jean Longland, Thomas Merton, and Luciana Stegagno-Picchio. This is not at all bad for a poet who, at his death, as Carlos Felipe Moisés has recently reasserted, “não era ainda unanimidade internacional, e muito menos local.” One of the dedicatees of this book is the late Jorge de Sena. Of all the critics and readers who have been attracted to Pessoa in the nearly fifty years since his death, no one has surpassed Jorge de Sena for the loving and informed attention with which he paid homage to the achievement of Portugal’s great modernist poet. Had Sena lived to see this esboço, he would, I think, have applauded the way in which it meets his own high standards. 3. Joaquim-Francisco Coelho, Microleituras de Álvaro de Campos. Lisboa. Dom Quixote, 1987. Joaquim-Francisco Coelho’s collection is divided into two parts. The first part presents seven “micro-readings” in the poetry of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym Álvaro de Campos. The second part offers six pieces devoted to Pessoa on a variety of subjects: the hospital records at the time of the poet’s death in 1935, the journalistic reaction to his death, the appearance of Pessoa and other Portuguese modernists in a forgotten satiric work, the great Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade and the genesis of his “Sonetilho do Falso Fernando Pessoa,” Pessoa’s announced penchant for writing standing up, and finally, an interview with the critic on the subject of Pessoa. Each piece in the second section, with the exception of the interview,

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contributes to what the author himself properly calls the ideal factual biography of the poet and his reputation. The items in the first part are readings centering on the poetry of Pessoa’s most congenial heteronym. Álvaro de Campos, whose centenary in 1990 is upon us, is read from the complementary vantages offered by focusing on specific elements and images in his poetry such as the chair, the moon, the heart, the stars, dogs, and other beasts. Taken together, the readings present a richly contextualized entry into the imaginary Pessoa created, populated, and furnished for his navalengineer poet. Having cast his nets wide but only for these chosen images, the critic gives us micro-readings that cannot be expected to cover all of Campos’s poems. The separate book that these seven pieces can be seen to constitute, however, makes up for such lacunae by providing hints and clues for further exploration, particularly on possible inter-textual links with other writers and poets such as Cavafy and Walter Pater. In closing, let me return to Coelho’s note on Pessoa as an “upright scribe.” In wishing to counter the charge that Pessoa’s predilection for writing in a standing position is in no way either bizarre or, surely, unique to the poet of “Tabacaria,” Coelho notes that the novelist Eça de Queiroz, for one, also wrote standing up. For what it is worth, I would add three notable American examples who immediately come to mind: the novelist Thomas Wolfe, whose size enabled him to use the top of a refrigerator for a writing surface; Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose stand-up desk can still be seen displayed in his last home, “The Wayside,” in Concord, Massachusetts; and Ernest Hemingway, one of whose best-known photographs shows him standing at his desk. At times Pessoa’s behavior might well have been bizarre (though almost daily, it seems, more and more of that so-called bizarre conduct turns out to be amenable to reasonable explanation), but in his intended or inadvertent emulation of the “upright scribe” he was behaving normally indeed, especially if the man did have a case of back trouble, as Coelho himself suggests, in this engaging and congenial book. 4. Fernando Pessos, Pessoa en personne: Lettres et documents, ed. José Blanco, trans. Simone Biberfeld. Paris: EAL/La Difference, 1986. The odd thing about Pessoa en personne, a volume of Fernando Pessoa’s letters, supplemented by a rigorous selection of his autobiographical writings, is that it exists only in French translation. It has not yet appeared in either Portuguese or English, the poet’s own two

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“native” languages. How extraordinary, then, and how utterly in character with the imaginative creator of so many heteronyms and personages that such an essential volume—a generous collection of letters gathered from scattered sources such as the volumes devoted to the poet’s letters to João Gaspar Simões (his first biographer), to Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues, an early friend, and to Ofélia Queiroz, his only confirmed love interest—should be published first not in the author’s own country but in France. It is almost as remarkable that the biographical-critical introduction to the volume, as well as the selection and organization of the letters and documents, is the work of José Blanco, Pessoa’s knowledgeable and learned bibliographer, should not be available in its original Portuguese. More’s the pity, for Blanco’s insightful piece, organized by theme and topic ranging from “initiation” and “sincerity” to “alcoholism” and “irony and humor,” now takes its place, rightfully, as the most helpful essay-length introduction to the great modernist poet now in print. In short, until it is superseded by an edition of all of Pessoa’s extant letters and pertinent personal writings (for which volume Blanco’s introduction could easily double), Pessoa en personne will remain of unquestioned value to all those interested in modern poetry. It would not surprise me in the least, therefore, to see the volume eventually translated into such languages as Italian, Spanish, German, and English. I would add the proviso that all such translations should be based on the as-yet nonexistent Portuguese edition. Come to think about it, there seems to be something very Pessoa-like in all this. 5. Fernando Pessoa, Always Astonished: Selected Prose. Edwin Honig, ed. and trans. San Francisco: City Lights, 1988. Almost two decades have passed since Edwin Honig published his first book of translations from the poetry of Fernando Pessoa. Selected Poems, a bilingual edition, appeared under the imprint of Swallow Press in 1971. In the intervening years Honig has brought out The Keeper of Sheep, the first full translation in English of the masterpiece the poet attributes to Alberto Caeiro (Sheep Meadow Press, 1986), and Poems of Fernando Pessoa, a revised and expanded edition of the Swallow Press volume (Ecco Press, 1987). On these last two titles Honig had the collaboration of Susan M. Brown. Now, in Always Astonished, he gives us a selection of Pessoa’s prose. No one has contributed more than has Honig to the making of Pessoa’s reputation in the United States. In Always Astonished we sample only Pessoa’s literary prose, some of which he attributes to his heteronyms (who often write about one

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another). An inveterate theorizer about literature, Pessoa also had notions about all sorts of other things—history, sociology, politics, the occult, philosophy, even commerce and business methods—yet he sometimes claimed that everything he wrote was literary. “In my trade, which is literary, I’m a professional, in the highest sense of the term,” he wrote; “that is, I’m a scientific craftsman who does not permit himself to have any opinions that are not literary.” Nice to think so, at least sometimes, but it simply was not true—except insofar as the assertion in itself can be seen as a literary expression. As Álvaro de Campos says, “To feign is to know oneself.” Even when his figure was familiar to the cafés and business houses of Lisbon, Pessoa was something of a will-of-the-wisp, and in the important respects the biographical Pessoa remains a mystery to this day. “After looking for him in the poems,” writes his American translator, “we search for him in the prose.” He will not be found there either, however. Described by Jorge de Sena as “the man who, never was,” Pessoa gives us prose that, following the example of his poetry, constructs a second hall of mirrors, which gives us, as it did the living poet, the only images of the writer—shadows and further shadows— that we really have. 6. Fernando Pessoa, Œuvres complètes. 1: Proses (publiées du vivant de L’auteur). José Blanco, ed. Paris: La Différence, 1988. The irony continues. Pessoa texts consistently appear in French translation before being published in book form in the original Portuguese. A short time ago we had the instance of a welcome edition of Pessoa’s letters. Now we have the prose texts published during the writer’s lifetime: essays, introductions, chronicles, stories, and interviews. Five such volumes are scheduled to appear by 1995, with another fifteen volumes of posthumous writings also projected. Proses thus leads off a complete-works series that evidently cannot wait for the preparation and publication of the critical edition of Pessoa’s work now in progress in Portugal. Ranging in length from three sentences (a response to a journalistic survey) to thirty-three pages for O banqueiro anarquista and seventy-three pages culled from the Revista de Comércio e Contabilidade, sixty-seven pieces arc presented chronologically by date of original composition and in a large, handsome, beautifully executed volume. José Blanco, an indefatigable source of biographical and critical information on all things involving Pessoa, adds an informative introductory essay focusing on the various categories into which Pessoa’s prose falls, a selective chronology, and judicious notes that provide a wealth of precise

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details as well as solid contextual information. The general editor Joaquim Vital and the publishers deserve the highest marks for their courage in conceiving a most ambitious venture and for their auspicious beginning. 7. Yara Frateschi Vieira, Sob o ramo da bêtula: Fernando Pessoa e o erotismo vitoriano. São Paulo: Unicamp, 1989. Sob o ramo da bêtula (Under the Birch Branch) is a natural. It studies two of Fernando Pessoa’s English poems, “Epithalamium” and “Antinous,” against the discourse of eroticism in Victorian England. It makes eminent good sense to look into these heavily charged poems, as Yara Frateschi Vieira does, in the context of the English education given Pessoa in South Africa and the contemporary literary culture made available to him through that schooling. The study is divided into two parts: first, a survey of the relationship between the sadomasochism inherent in the “English vice” (flagellation and its intimate connection to the practice of birching or caning English schoolboys) and homosexuality, pedophilia, androgyny, misogyny, and other such Victorian avocations; and second, a reading of Pessoa’s two poems against such Victorian discourse. That discourse is defined by such diverse texts as Swinburne’s cheeky poem “Dolores” (reprinted both in the original and in Portuguese translation), Wilde’s essay “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” J. A. Symonds’s essay on Antinous, and the bibliographic work on pornography and obscenity by the audacious Pisanus Fraxi (the pseudonym of Henry Spencer Ashbee). Vieira takes up three questions regarding “Epithalamium” and “Antinous.” 1) Why did Pessoa wish to eliminate from his interests, as he said he did, these elements he himself called obscene? 2) Why did he undertake to do this in English? 3) Why did he publish the poems? Some of her answers are simple enough. All of them are plausible. Pessoa published these poems because, as one of his heteronyms asserts, it is as natural for a poet to publish his poems as it would be unnatural for a tree to try to hide the fact that it bears fruit. He published them in English because their discourse derives from the discourse of the “other Victorians.” As for his explanation to João Gaspar Simões as to why he undertook the poems in the first place, Vieira suggests that Pessoa combined the need to purge himself of these elements with a profound desire to confess. As for the two poems, although I cannot go into the details of her strong argument, the critic concludes that although the themes, motifs, and language of flagellation, homosexuality, androgyny, and pedophilia are present in

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both poems, “Epithalamium” is obscene whereas “Antinous” is erotic. The pioneering importance of Sob o ramo da bêtula lies precisely in the way it expands our sense of the meaning of Pessoa’s English poems when they are read within their proper cultural-historical contexts. 8. Fernando Pessoa, Œuvres complètes. 3: Poésies et proses de Álvaro de Campos (publiés du vivant de Fernando Pessoa). José Blanco, ed. Teresa Rita Lopes, intro. Paris: La Différence, 1989. Œuvres completes. 4: Poèmes de Alberto Caeiro (publiés du vivant de Fernando Pessoa). José Blanco, ed. José Gil, intro. Paris: La Différence, 1989. Volumes 3 and 4 of the projected multivolume collected works of Fernando Pessoa in French translation (along with the poetic originals) present respectively the writings of two of the poet’s major heteronyms, Álvaro de Campos and Alberto Caeiro. In preparation are Odes de Ricardo Reis (volume 5) and Poésies (volume 2). The collections, limited to the pieces—in both prose and verse in the case of the Campos volume—that were actually published during Pessoa’s lifetime, are the work once again of José Blanco, who also provides meticulously detailed textual and bibliographic annotations. Each volume contains as well an introduction: by Teresa Rita Lopes (the author of the fine study Fernando Pessoa et le drame symboliste: Héritage et création, 1977) for the Campos, and by the philosopher José Gil for the Caeiro. Above all, the volumes are a boon to those readers of French who have little or no Portuguese. They will also prove to be of considerable value to all students of Pessoa, not only for the valuable information contained in their introductions and annotations but because they respect the integrity of the two heteronyms insofar as that integrity has been established in one important way by Pessoa’s own choices as to when and how to present his heteronyms to a small and not always admiring public. 9. Álvaro de Campos (Fernando Pessoa), Vida e ohras do engenheiro. Teresa Rita Lopes, ed. Lisboa: Estampa, 1990. Modern British literature has its Bloomsday, the day in June (more precisely, 16 June 1904) on which James Joyce’s Leopold. Bloom peregrinated throughout Dublin in the novel Ulysses. William York Tindall, a fine teacher and scholar at Columbia University, told his

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classes that he always observed Bloomsday, starting with the setting out of a saucer of milk, not for his cat as Bloom did (because Tindall did not have a cat) but for his daughter. Never mind the objections one might have to Tindall’s well-meaning but still insensitive little joke. The point is that Joyce had not only created a character whose reality could not be denied but that he had also brought forth a minor holiday for aficionados of British modernist writing. On 15 October 1990 Álvaro de Campos celebrated a birthday. The most nearly modernist of Fernando Pessoa’s three great poetic heteronyms and the one whose company the poet himself enjoyed the longest (it is thought that he was with him until his death in 1935), Campos, had he lived, would have been on that date exactly one hundred years old. To celebrate the occasion, the Lisbon publisher Estampa has brought out, as volume 16 in its “Ficções” series, Vida e obras do engenheiro. The volume is inscribed: “Para o Álvaro de Campos / estes 63 textos ineditos /—pelos seus 100 anos! Lisboa, 15 de Outubro 1990.” It is signed by the scholar-poet Teresa Rita Lopes, who discovered, transcribed, edited, and annotated the unpublished texts. Her title for the volume derives from Pessoa, whose plan—never carried out—had been to collect in one volume the writings (poems and prose) of his Glasgow-trained engineer and poet. What a welcome addition, these sixty-three texts, to what we already had of the work of this, the most engaging and most sympathetic, because most like us (or so we think), of Pessoa’s major heteronyms. Alberto Caeiro demands our respect for his clear-eyed, unwavering gaze on man’s nature and nature’s man, and Ricardo Reis earns our admiration for his stern loyalty to the world view and the poetic forms of Western classicism; but Campos engages us by his contradictions, his earnestness, his mood swings, his triumphs, and his follies. He wears his heart on his sleeve, and he has the courage of his enthusiasms. He risks much and loses much of the time. The birthday book is an unexpected feast for Campos’s readers. There are “new” poems, to the American temperance-fighter Carry Nation and to Walt Whitman. There is a touching apoimento poem on Campos’s sentimental life. “Até casado! (à portuguesa ou à inglesa)” begins: A rapariga ingleza, tam loura, tam jovem, tam boa Que queria casar commigo . . . Que pena eu não ter casado com ella . . . Teria sido feliz Mas como é que eu sei se teria sido feliz? Como é que teria sido, que é o que nunca foi?

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Hoje arrependo-me de não ter casado com ella, Mas antes que até a hypothese de me poder arrepender de ter casado com ella.

There is a scatological poem, which begins: “A alma humana é porca como um anus / E a Vantagem dos caralhos pesa em muitas imaginações.” There is a priceless definition, in some 150 words, of the “specialist,” which goes a long way toward explaining, in Campos’s words, why “os especialistas são muitos e felizes.” There are—a further surprise—more sonnets, including one in which the poet apologizes aggressively to the sea (and perhaps indirectly to his master Caeiro): “Ó grande mar atlantico, desculpa! / Cuspi á tua beira trez sonetos, / Sim, mas cuspi-os sobre a minha culpa.” There is an all-too-short list of perverted proverbs, a neglected minor genre established in English literature by William Blake in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell and exploited wittily, if less trenchantly, by Oscar Wilde. Of the five proverbs swerved awry, my favorite is “Deus escreve os tortos por linhas direitas.” An interesting notion this, for a poet trained in naval engineering. There is a lagniappe. The clutch of texts is preceded by a perceptive, informative introductory essay. Here is one scholarly editor who knows how to throw a birthday party. 10. Anne Terlinden, Fernando Pessoa: The Bilingual Portuguese Port; A Critical Study of “The Mad Fiddler”. Bruxelles: Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, 1990. On June 6, 1917, Constable and Company, Limited, of London, returned Fernando Pessoa’s manuscript The Mad Fiddler. They had given Mr. Pessoa’s poems “very careful consideration,” but could not see their way to publishing them. We know about this offer and rejection because the disappointed poet saved the letter from Constable. We do not know whether or not Pessoa offered his manuscript elsewhere. When during the following year he decided to publish some of his English work himself, he bypassed The Mad Fiddler, publishing instead 35 Sonnets and Antinous—A Poem, two pamphlets printed in Lisbon. He bypassed The Mad Fiddler again, in 1921, when he published in Lisbon, in two volumes, English Poems I (a reprinting of Antinous, to which he added a set of epitaphs collected under the rubric Inscriptions) and English Poems II (Epithalamium). The Mad Fiddler was not to be published during Fernando Pessoa’s lifetime. In fact, if I am not mistaken, it did not achieve print until Pessoa’s work went into the public domain. In 1988, the year of Pessoa’s centenary,

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appeared O Louco Rabequista, a bilingual edition employing Pessoa’s own Portuguese title for The Mad Fiddler, with translations into Portuguese by Jose Blanc de Portugal. Although Pessoa’s literary reputation has always rested (rightly) on his work in Portuguese, there is ample evidence to believe that not only did he start by thinking of himself as an English poet but he continued to entertain the possibility that his rather substantial body of English-language poetry might someday matter in the Anglo-Saxon world. Besides continuing to write poems in English until his final days, he also tried his hand at translating some of his own Portugueselanguage verse into the language he had learned and mastered during his formative school-years in Durban, South Africa. Incidentally, during his lifetime he was published only once in England. “Meantime,” a poem of twenty lines, appeared in the Athenaeum on January 20, 1920. Pessoa wrote a preface for The Mad Fiddler. It is not especially remarkable, except for its apologia or disclaimer. “Some of these poems seem to be based on a Christian and mystical philosophy,” he explains; “others on a pantheistic conception of the world; others, still, on what may be best described as a transcendentalist attitude. It may occur to the reader to ask which of these is the author’s philosophy of belief, and, seeing that more than one philosophy appears, whether he has any at all. He has one, which is neither of those; and, as it is neither of those, it is of no purpose to mention which it is” (p. 206). The preface from which these sentences are taken is reproduced in an appendix to Anne Terlinden’s Fernando Pessoa: The Bilingual Portuguese Poet; A Critical Study of “The Mad Fiddler”, a monograph based on her 1984 doctoral dissertation done in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In fact, she somehow manages to incorporate these sentences (more than once, I think) into her argument that Pessoa’s poetry—Caeiro’s, Reis’s, Campos’s, that of Fernando Pessoa ele-mesmo—everywhere records the poet’s sustained search for the Absolute. Her thesis compels her to arrange lines and parts of poems synchronically with no attempt to keep or consider separately the discrete opera of each of the heteronyms. The concerns that matter in the work of each heteronym are those concerns that can be seen to link the heteronyms not only to one another but to the orthonymic poet who wrote The Mad Fiddler. In this respect, this unpublished book of English-language poems (written, Anne Terlinden asserts, “between 1911 and 1917, the period of Pessoa’s fully developed poetic powers which also saw the birth of his four famous Portuguese heteronyms” [17]), consti-

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tutes a full-blown treatment on a smaller scale of everything Pessoa was versifying in Portuguese at the time as well as virtually everything he would do in poetry from that time on. Anne Terlinden puts it this way: Pessoa does not want to depict two different worlds, each of them having its specific nature. He is aiming at proving the unity of a Universe, which does only find its real Meaning in an Absolute called God. Life is then a slope leading to God; this explains why the logical structure of the eight Books of The Mad Fiddler is the expression of our poet’s spiritual journey. This evolution in the perception of God’s mystery will finally lead the poet to the mystical experience of Nothingness. The last three Books—Songs, after Slumber, The Dropped Torch, The Labyrinth—offer a building crescendo starting from a mere aspiration towards The Infinite and ending in actual occultist beliefs. (48–49)

There is something wrong about this. Some of those capitalized nouns strike the wrong note about poems, some of which, the author insists, seem to be based on various philosophies, conceptions, or attitudes (Christian, pantheistic, transcendentalist) but which do not represent or reflect the author’s own philosophy. And he will not tell us what that philosophy is. Of course, that is precisely what Anne Terlinden attempts to do. The rabbit is out of the hat, and lo and behold it is the same old occultist rabbit. One would not mind that so much, if Anne Terlinden did not seem to insist so relentlessly that the philosophical Pessoa, whether or not he rested easily in the commitment, ended finally as a believer in the occult. It is odd, but not irrelevant to our understanding of why this study of the poems in The Mad Fiddler in the context of the whole of Pessoa’s poetry seems so often to miss its mark, that Anne Terlinden never once acknowledges the fact that Pessoa is a supreme ironist. Whether or not one attributes his possession of an English sense of irony (as João Gaspar Simões does) to his having been steeped in English literature and culture, the point is that to read Pessoa’s finely nuanced poems one must be aware not only of his keen sense of irony in things, characters, and situations, but the tonal irony he arrogates to himself and his preoccupations. Too often to inspire the confidence in a critic’s reading we are entitled to require, does Anne Terlinden miss this crucial dimension of a poem. Take, from The Mad Fiddler, the poem entitled “Sister Cecily.” Even when encountering the title for the first time one should be somewhat forearmed against reading the poem as if it were an example of the poetry of statement, by Pessoa’s employ-

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ment of the name “Cecily,” an English name used elsewhere in Pessoa’s poetry by Álvaro de Campos in “Soneto já antigo” when he refers to “Cecily that odd one” (“essa estranha Cecily”). Alas for Sister Cecily! To whom prayeth she, Till feet are numb and painted knees torn And pale lips inward driven. Eye-lifting orisons at morn, Low-lidded prayers at even? She prayeth to Mary, Mother and Queen, Who still hath been Who keepeth child and maid from harm, Our Lady with eyes of dole, With a lily along her conscious arm And a virgin’s aureole. For of the Virgin it is said That she hath bled At seven pains for her sad son And therefore for us all, Whose souls by heavenly hands are spun Out of the same white wool. So to her prayeth Cecily, That all may be Washed pure in the perennial fount Where the saints meet, And given to reach the Shining Mount Though with torn feet. And though she know me not, nor pray For me, oh! may Her prayer for man’s woe make me part Of what she says, So a vague rest fall on my heart Because she prays.

It may be that Sister Cecily is in earnest when she prays to the Virgin Mary, but it will not do to transfer her earnestness to the speaker who voices the poem. If there is nothing comic in the “numb” feet, “pained” knees, and “inward driven” lips, there does seem to be something of a send-up in the poet’s description of so neatly complementary morning orisons that are “eye-lifting” and evening prayers that are “low-lidded.” Notice, too, how the light comic touch everywhere evident in the poem is lopped off in line nineteen when “Sister

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Cecily” is condescendingly (if quietly) diminished to simply “Cecily” (though still a nun whose praying, the speaker feigns to implore, will to his heart bring “vague” rest). It seems apparent to me that the subject of the poem is not the good Sister’s piety but the speaker’s not entirely good-natured spoofing at her expense. Anne Terlinden will have none of this, however, for in “Sister Cecily” she finds a poem of faith, one in which can be found “references to the act of praying, to the Holy Virgin, or to angels”: In the poem entitled ‘Sister Cecily’, Pessoa prays to ‘Sister Cecily’ to intercede with the Holy Virgin so that she may soothe his pains, and help him reach Paradise. References are also made to Saints, Mary’s seven pains, and men being created by God. The interest of this poem not only lies in its typical Christian symbols, but also in Pessoa’s apparent belief in the power of prayer . . . (57)

If this is anything like what Pessoa intended to convey in “Sister Cecily,” one must conclude that he had no business trying to write poems in English. 11. Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquietude. Translated by Richard Zenith. Manchester: Carcanet, 1991. Livro do Desassossego is a post-modernist reader’s dream. There is no single text for it and it now exists in several texts in the original Portuguese and in several texts in English translation. Conceived as a book by his semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper in Lisbon, Fernando Pessoa never brought the book to completion. Far from it, for although he listed it as early as 1912 as a project and managed to publish during his lifetime brief fragments in journals such as presença (1930, 1932) and Descobrimento (1931), no “complete” edition of the work appeared until 1982 when Ática brought it out in two volumes. Jorge de Sena had begun work on an edition as early as 1964, and although he even wrote the preface for such an edition, by 1969 he had abandoned the project, suggesting at the time that Maria Aliete Galhoz be entrusted with the task of bringing out the book. I have placed the word complete in the penultimate sentence of the last paragraph within quotation marks because the 1982 edition organized by the eminent pessoano Jacinto do Prado Coelho utilizing texts identified and transcribed by two other notable pessoanos, Maria Aliete Galhoz and Teresa Sobral Cunha, was neither definitive in any way nor, for that matter, inclusive in its presentation of the frag-

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ments and apercus that constitute the existing materials out of which the Prado Coelho text was constructed or, for that matter, any of the succeeding texts of Livro do Desassossego, such as those of the Brazilian pessoano Leyla Perrone-Moises (in one volume, published in 1986), of Antonio Quadros (in two volumes, also in 1986), and that of Teresa Sobral Cunha (published in two volumes: I [1990], II [1991]). It does not take any prescience to foresee the future publication of still other texts of this quebra-cabeça of a protean mass of discrete mini-texts. Even if no new texts are found to include in the macro-text the arrangement and order of the texts will continue to be a problem for editors and readers alike, since no existing arrangement has authorial sanction. It is always open season on Bernardo Soares’s lucubrations, especially if one includes those of Vicente Guedes (as Teresa Sobral Cunha has). This rather complicated and vexed problem of textual authority among the various Portuguese and Brazilian editions of Livro do Desassossego has implications for an edition in translation. What existing text shall form the basis for new translations into Spanish or French (one of which is being prepared by José Blanco) or English? The translation under review, Richard Zenith’s, brought out by Carcanet Press, the publishers in 1971 of Jonathan Griffin’s translations of Pessoa’s poetry, draws on the text prepared by Jacinto do Prado Coelho as well as that prepared by Teresa Sobral Cunha, along with a small amount of material drawn directly from manuscript. Alfred MacAdam’s edition for Pantheon, on the other hand, follows the order of texts in the Ática edition but omits about half of the Portuguese text’s 520 entries. The Book of Disquiet, brought out by Serpent’s Tail in 1991—a year that saw the publication of four English translations of Livro do Desassossego—follows a selection and arrangement of texts authorized by Maria Jose de Lancastre, the compiler of Fernando Pessoa: Uma Fotobiografia (1984). Zenith’s edition, it can be said—without making invidious comparisons with the other three editions in English with which it finds itself in competition—is a thoroughly workmanlike performance. By and large, its 523 numbered texts have been translated into serviceable English prose. Sometimes that prose is not as supple as one would want. Say, for instance, in Zenith’s translation of the last sentence of entry 450—”it would be interesting to be two kings at the same time (being not the one soul of them both, but the two souls)”— which could have used some reworking. Or, in 441, “I was staggered in all my body,” or, to take one last example, 514, “To speak is to have too much consideration for others. It’s by the mouth that fish and Oscar Wilde die.” The translation of proverbs is always problematic. What

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works figuratively in one language often just does not come across in the other. Yet no matter what is done to the “text” of the Livro do Desassossego or (perhaps) even because so many different things have been done with it, this book has tapped into reservoirs of renewed interest in Fernando Pessoa’s work. To describe it Zenith has gone back to the story of the arca, the fabulous trunk in which the poet left his manuscripts. He notes appropriately that “within the trunk of multifarious writings we now know as the Pessoa archives, The Book of Disquietude is like a smaller trunk, full of long and short, divergent and frequently contradictory fragments written throughout Pessoa’s adult life” (ix). Whether or not the Livro do Desassossego is Pessoa’s magnum opus (Zenith’s opinion), it is the book that will most likely put Pessoa’s international reputation over the top. No “completed” work of Pessoa’s—not Alberto Caeiro’s O Guardador de Rebanhos, not the orthonymic Mensagem—can do the promotional work that this fragmentary book of fragments of thoughts, insights, and opinions, published at what historically is its most opportune time, has already done. This book speaks uniquely to the continuing anxieties, ambiguities, perplexities, and insights that go a long way toward making up what one might nominate as the modern temper. I am not being entirely facetious when I suggest that somebody should put all the texts that have gone into the various editions of the Livro do Desassossego on a computer disk so that all readers of Pessoa who care to do so can work out their own ideal versions of this emblematic text for the times. One can go Ecclesiastes one better, for then there need be no end to the making of this one book. 12. António Cirurgião, O “Olhar Esfíngico” da Mensagem de Pessoa. Lisboa: Instituto de Cultura e Língua Portuguesa/Ministério da Educação, 1991. This is not a book to be read at one or two sittings. Rather, it will be used for consultation as needed by anyone puzzled over a single image or an entire verse in Pessoa’s prize-winning long poem Mensagem. Indeed, its principal value lies exactly in the intelligent way it tackles all the verses—often line by line, sometimes word by word. To this daunting task António Cirurgião has brought to bear his impressive store of knowledge—historical (Portuguese and, more broadly, European), religious (from the Old Testament to Rosicrucianism), mythic, and literary—deploying it as needed in what he calls a “close reading” of the poem, admittedly following the

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pedagogic lead of the English critic and theorist, I. A. Richards. Some of that knowledge reveals itself in the excerpts and chunks of other texts Cirurgião adduces to establish the poem’s rich and seldom obvious intertextuality. It will surprise no one that among such predecessor texts there is one that is preeminent, Camões’s Os Lusíadas. There exists a good deal of scholarship on the Camões-Pessoa connections, especially between their two major poems. The notes to O “Olhar Esfíngico” da Mensagem de Pessoa acknowledge its author’s substantial debt to his own scholarly predecessors, but at the last he has written a highly personal book, one which for its schematic construction and consistently applied approach (metrical and strophic description, identification of allusions and names, etc.—even the furnishing of a concordance to the poem) nevertheless comes down firmly in favor of a rather straight-forward reading of the poem as a mystical-religious-political-historicalprophetic work. Hence numbers of lines in given poems, as he sees it, reflect and orchestrate the various realms and different discourses that feature the same numbers—threes, sevens, twelves, etc. Of course, this sort of approach has been employed by others—by Y. K. Centeno, S. Reckert, et al., all of whom have drawn generously on Pessoan material external to the text of Mensagem itself. But Cirurgião largely, if not exclusively, limits himself to reading out of the text in a rather freely analogical way. The result is that his readings of poems resemble more closely contextualized explications of the text than they do the sort of new critical readings once advocated by, say, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their enormously influential textbook Understanding Poetry. If, like Brooks and Warren, he seems to credit the author with full architectural-structural and decorative control, he nevertheless seems implicitly to want to see every word of the poem linked to the diachronic realities of Portuguese history and the synchronic paradigms of myth and religion (but for religion read Christianity) and leading to an in-no-way ironic prophesy that the Portuguese will yet enjoy a spiritual “Quinto Império,” but not a geographical one. But there is evidence that Mensagem does not deliver, in any sincerely straight-forward way, this clear-cut patriotic message of hope and national destiny. It has been argued forcefully and with considerable evidence by Onésimo Teotónio Almeida (whose Mensagem: Uma Tentativa de Reinterpretação [1987]) Cirurgião cites) that in Mensagem Pessoa, following the notion of Georges Sorel on the practicality of a functioning belief in myth, one in which those employing the myth to energize and mobilize a nation or a people need hold no credence in the myth at hand, rather ironically offered

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the Portugal of 1934 the myth it wanted. His success in bringing this off—in the first truly ironic epic, perhaps anywhere in the Western world, at least—is attested to by its having taken in even his old friend António Ferro, the head of S.N.I., which doubled the 1934 Antero de Quental prize for poetry in order to honor both the patriotism of Mensagem and the religiosity of Vasco Reis’s A Romaria. In fairness to António Cirurgião, however, this matter can be seen as alien to his own critical intention, which has been to offer us a detailed exegesis of this still vexed but indisputably significant modernist poem that can serve as a starting point for future explications, and for that gift readers of Mensagem can be thankful. For like Eliot’s Waste Land, Pound’s Cantos, Crane’s The Bridge or Williams’s Paterson (to name only works in Pessoa’s own beloved AngloAmerican tradition), Mensagem will continue to inspire conflicting as well as partisan readings. One suspects that Pessoa, the scheming master-builder of a new-yet-old myth for his once and future Portugal, would not have wanted it any other way—the S.N.I. prize notwithstanding. 13. Ellen W. Sapega, Ficções Modernistas: Um estudo da obra em prosa de José de Almada Negreiros 1915–1925. Lisboa: Ministério da Educação, 1992. In Entre lo uno y lo diverso: Introduccion a la literatura comparada (1985), Claudio Guillen puts AImada Negreiros (1893– 1970) in the company of the best-known double or multiple artists in history, a company that includes Michelangelo, William Blake, Hans Arp, and Henri Michaux. In his native Portugal, however, Almada’s paintings, illustrations, and sculpture have always taken precedence over his writing. Lip service is often paid to his handful of modernist titles, but adequate critical study and interpretation has gone largely elsewhere. Such classics of Modernism as the fable-parable “O Cágado” (1921), the novella A Engomadeira (written in 1915, published in 1917). and the novel Nome de Guerra (written in 1925. published in 1938) have played second fiddle, if sheer amount of critical writing is an indication, to the writings of Fernando Pessoa and his various heteronyms. Ellen Sapega’s studies are a welcome step in the attempt to establish the basis for a more equitable reckoning. The book surveys the corpus of Almada’s innovative fiction (following an introductory chapter that serves to place Almada in the context of European modernism) in five compact chapters that proceed from the valid assumption that Almada was, in effect, “o primeiro escritor português

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deste século a ousar incorporar, na ficção, uma visão narrativa caracateristica da modernidade, na qual se destacam as ironias implicitas num mundo que se presenta ao artista como radicalmente fragmentado” (13). Not only does Almada lead the way in grappling with notions of subjectivity in its new and sometimes unidentified relationships with the experience of the “real,” but his fictional experiments led him to a sense of personal subjectivity that would guide his productive life after 1925. A Engomadeira and K4 O Quadrado AzuI are most intelligibly read within the intelligence offered by the sensacionista ideas formulated by Almada’s coeval and fellow-collaborator in Orpheu and Portugal Futurista, Fernando Pessoa. Answers to narrative questions raised by these two novellas are arrived at in the fables “O Cágado” and “O homem que não sabe escrever” (the latter rescued from the “Artigos no Diario de Lisboa” volume of the Obras Completas—the third, for which Ellen Sapega wrote the preface). Here the author points to Almada’s discovery of “ingenuousness” as the future engine for much of his work. Put another way, these parables demonstrate the strong Almadean idea, if they do so obliquely, that modern man must or had best recognize the sanity of pre-logical apprehension of things. Nome de Guerra is approached as a culminating retrospective summary of Almada’s major fictional interests in the ten or so years of his significant literary activity (I915–1925), one which results in a new but constructive literary impasse marking the end of the author’s career as fiction writer. This nuanced, attentive reading of Almada’s always engaging fiction in the context of the modernism he did so much to shape and define should attract further serious attention to the writings of an artist-writer whose place in literature must be defined both within twentieth-century Portuguese culture and well beyond that culture. Whether he had talent (not genius), as the puckish Fernando Pessoa once said, Almada must be given his due as one of the great multiple artists of the modern era. 14. Fernando Pessoa, Lisboa: O Que o Turista Deve Ver / What the Tourist Should See. Teresa Rita Lopes, pref. Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 1992. Of the many surprises that have come from that fabled trunk in which Fernando Pessoa kept papers and manuscripts, nothing is more curious than the guide to Lisbon just published, apparently for the first time. Lisbon: What the Tourist Should See appears in a bilingual edition, English and Portuguese texts on facing pages, accompanied

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by an informative preface by that tireless and energized student of Pessoa, Teresa Rita Lopes. Internal evidence suggests that this guide was prepared in the mid1920s, perhaps in 1925. It is not known, however, under whose aegis the project was undertaken and brought to this advanced stage in which it has survived. Pity it was not available to English-speaking visitors to Lisbon lo these many years, for despite the passage of sixtyfive years and more, the guide will be useful to any tourist who wishes to follow the trail the author so conveniently lays out for him, beginning at the railway station in the Rossio or at the docks—still excellent starting points. There is of course for those who know and value Pessoa’s work the added pleasure of seeing the city as the poet himself might have seen it when he returned from South Africa after his long stay in Durban. It is a shame, however, that today’s reader of the guide, perforce alone on tour, cannot ask the poet some pointed questions. What, for instance, would the author of the poem “Ó sino da minha aldeia” make of that larger-than-life-sized bronze statue in the Chiado, stolidly shilling for “A Brasileira,” that rather disorganized, always dirty tourist trap long since dead to the poets and artists who so long ago made it famous? And would the poet-creator of many poets call attention (approvingly or not) to that polished blunt shaft at Jerónimos which serves better, it might be said, as a tomb for that trinity of famous heteronyms than for the clerk whose English enabled him to ply his translator’s talent in the commercial houses of the Baixa? It will be fun when next I get to Lisbon to spend a day or two following at least one of the trails laid out in this guidebook. Now we come to my caveat. There is no doubt in my mind that Pessoa, whatever one thinks of his consciously disjunctive linguistic experiments in 35 Sonnets and elsewhere, was quite capable of writing strong English poems, as well as a highly serviceable English prose. This is apparent from his schoolboy’s prizewinning essay on the English historian Macaulay as well as his introduction to an English edition of Antonio Botto’s poetry that failed to find a publisher. And most of What the Tourist Should See is written in an English expository prose that is error-free. In the final pages, however, some rather glaring errors occur. What is one to make of the use of “every indication” for “information,” “help,” or “directions” in the clause “for the officials he finds there are invariably polite and ready to give him every indication he may require”? Or the use of “pass” for “past”? Take this sentence (italics added): “These installations are in the ground floor, which also contains fine Persian and Indian carpets as also national carpets, from Arraiolos, Tavira, etc.”

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Elsewhere we find his translation of “Descimento da Cruz” as “Descent of the Cross” (italics added) and a parenthetical phrase rendered as “(in page 80).” (Earlier he gets the idiom right: “on the first floor.”) If all this seems like carping on my part, making much of little, let us return to the paragraph containing the reference to the historic flight from Lisbon to Rio. The author talks of the Tower of Belem. On the second floor used to be the Armoury and the Offices; on the third the Royal Room (Sala Regia), with a magnificent balcony with columns of wonderful design; on the fourth the Refectory, outside which may be seen, in the floor, the holes through which molten lead should be cast in the case of assault to the fort; on the fifth was the Court, and it was here that a short while ago a commemorative stone was placed recording the great Lisbon-Rio de Janeiro air-raid, in 1922, by Gago Coutinho and Sacadura Cabral. There is a sixth floor, which is the terrace, reached after going up 123 steps, and the view from which may be imagined.

Let’s not be picky. Ignore the infelicities of style, which are abundant, and look at one or two solecisms. There is a problem with the molten lead that “should be cast in the case of assault to the fort.” By “should” the writer obviously means “could” or “might” or even “would.” “Cast” seems also to be wrong, if in fact the holes through which the molten lead is to be flung are “in the floor.” If the holes are indeed in the floor, then the better word would be dropped. We shall skip the two-man air-raid perpetrated on the Cariocas and take up the vista from the sixth floor. By “the view from which may be imagined” (as opposed to “seen”?) the author seems to mean something like, “You can imagine the view one gets from the sixth floor, reached after climbing 123 steps.” That Pessoa was responsible for such English prose boggles the mind. I would not go so far as to say that the quality of the writing in spots rules out any possibility that Pessoa was indeed the author of What the Tourist Should See. After all, it might have been understood by its author that the text that survives (and I confess that I have not seen it) would undergo revision. If that author was Pessoa, however, it is difficult to imagine his making errors of this magnitude, even in a first draft. I would go further. I cannot even imagine Pessoa committing most of these solecisms when tired, in his cups, or both. Nevertheless, the typescript was found among his papers, you will remind me. Does that make it his work? Not ipso facto, I would say. We are not told that the text is signed by Pessoa, and we are not told

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anything about the typewriter used to produce it. For instance, was it one of the machines in the offices of the commercial houses who employed Pessoa to handle foreign correspondence? It is possible that the work might not be Pessoa’s at all, save, that is, for the revisions. In short, he might have been hired to “English” someone else’s manuscript (and never got to finish the job). Perhaps an analysis of the text would turn up something regarding revisions and changes. Are there holograph changes? And if so, is there any discernible pattern to them? Do they, for instance, diminish in number or cease altogether after a certain point? Of course one does not want to begrudge Pessoa (and the Pessoanos) this engaging work; it’s just that since during the working week his was a pen (or typewriter) for hire, one cannot always be sure in cases like these. After all, it was not so long ago that that cornucopia of a trunk yielded up a new “find,” one that turned out not to be the poet’s work at all. 15. Fernando Pessoa, Poemas Ingleses, 1: Antinous, Inscriptions, Epitalamium, 35 Sonnets. João Dionísio, ed. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional / Casa da Moeda, 1993. Of the five volumes projected for the so-called Major Series of the definitive textual edition of Fernando Pessoa’s complete writings, Poemas Ingleses is the second numbered volume to appear. To put it more accurately, it is identified as volume 5, part 1, and follows publication of Cleonice Berardinelli’s 1990 edition of the poems of the heteronym Álvaro de Campos as volume 2. Poemas Ingleses collects the English-language chapbooks published by Pessoa in Lisbon: Antinous; A Poem and 35 Sonnets, both printed by Monteiro & Company in 1918; and English Poems I–II (Antinous [revised] and Inscriptions) and English Poems III (Epithalamium), both issued under the aegis of Olisipo (Pessoa’s firm) in 1921. Poemas Ingleses also presents in facsimile Pessoa’s two copies of 35 Sonnets, both much revised. Hoping for a career as an English-language poet, Pessoa mailed his 1918 Antinous and 35 Sonnets to potential reviewers in London and Scotland as well as, apparently, to libraries. One recipient complained directly to the author that Antinous was “a pitiful playing around the most ignoble vices,” but that in the sonnets he found something “really fine and worthy [of] you.” The Times Literary Supplement was of the opinion that Antinous would not “appeal to the general reader in England” and that “Mr. Pessoa’s command of English,” as evidenced in the sonnets, was “less, remarkable than his knowledge of Elizabethan English.” The London Graphic disagreed, finding the

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“blank verse poem on the story of Antinous, the favourite of the Emperor Hadrian,” to be “written in excellent English.” The Glasgow Herald thought the sonnets “well done” and, “but for a certain crabbedness of speech, due to an imitation of a Shakespearean trick, would be excellent.” The London Athenaeum was repelled by Antinous but admitted that “certain passages” had “unquestionable power.” In the sonnets “a pessimistic note predominates,” it reported, “and they end in a minor key. The mystery of being mainly occupies the author.” The mainly negative response to Antinous bothered Pessoa into drafting a defense of the poem, three versions of which—displaying Pessoa’s characteristically involuted logic—are reproduced in an appendix to the volume under review. These drafts appear to be merely beginnings, however, for what should have been a full-blown apologia. By 1921, when he brought out English Poems I–II and English Poems III, Pessoa seems not to have sent review copies anywhere, an inference based on the total absence of reviews or notices. It is as if, having had a change of heart about becoming an English poet, Pessoa had decided not to resume his campaign for English publicity and recognition. He would publish only one other English-language poem. “Spell,” a short lyric included in the May 1923 issue of the Lisbon periodical Contemporânea, complemented “Meantime,” another short lyric, which appeared in the Athenaeum on 30 January 1919. Both poems were culled from The Mad Fiddler, a book-length collection offered to the London publisher Constable in June 1917, but rejected. Interestingly, the work of Pessoa’s English-language heteronyms is not represented in his various English-language publications. He had in hand numerous poems attributed to his early heteronyms Alexander Search and Robert Anon, but the poems he published in the 1918 and 1921 chapbooks were attributed to “Fernando Pessoa.” This was also the case with the unpublished Mad Fiddler poems. The different styles employed in these poems— ranging from the pseudo-Elizabethan spirit of Epithalamium and the sonnets to the Victorianism of Antinous—show less affinity with the styles deployed by his various heteronyms than with the grand models of English literature: Shakespeare and Robert Browning, especially the latter’s dramatic idylls. A final note on primacy. Pessoa’s collection of “Elizabethan” sonnets was printed, bound, and mailed out three years before the English scholar H. C. Grierson published his anthology of English metaphysical poetry, a volume that attracted the attention of the British modernists, following the lead of T. S. Eliot, and established

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the importance of seventeenth-century English verse in the annals of the New Criticism. This curious fact might well warrant a sentence or two in English literary histories. 16. Álvaro de Campos (Fernando Pessoa), Álvaro de Campos: Livro de Versos. Teresa Rita Lopes, ed. Lisboa: Estampa, 1993. Álvaro de Campos—Fernando Pessoa’s manic-depressive heteronym, at times obstreperous and insufferable, at others surprisingly tender and vulnerable—has become of late the locus of some increasingly vexed editorial problems. Several editions of the work of this Scotch-trained naval engineer and modern poet have appeared since Pessoa’s work passed into the public domain in 1985. Among them are full-blown, apparatus-bearing critical editions prepared independently by two of the leading students of Pessoa’s work. Cleonice Berardinelli’s work appears as part of the official textual edition of Pessoa’s work, projected for five volumes, under the direction of Ivo de Castro. Teresa Rita Lopes’s competing edition is the fruit of thirty years dedicated to the study of Pessoa’s manuscripts. Editing Pessoa presents the same myriad challenges and problems endemic to the editing of the work of virtually any major modern poet. Moreover, because Pessoa kept a stable of heteronyms each of whose own oeuvre is not always identified as such by Pessoa, the customary difficulties in preparing a critical textual edition become even more vexed. The result is that Álvaro de Campos’s two editors often disagree not only in their transcription of Pessoa’s handwriting but also in the number of poems that belong to the canon of this the most cosmopolitan of Pessoa’s heteronymic poets. Rita Lopes’s principal charge against Berardinelli’s official edition of Campos’s poems is that it presents as “finished” a number of poems whose surviving fragmentary texts are unmistakably incomplete. This happens not only with minor poems but also with the texts, notably, of “A Passagem de Horas” and “Saudação a Walt Whitman.” As Lopes sees it, the official edition (Berardinelli’s) authorizes “new” poems for which there is no basis beyond that lent to the project by its editors’ collective judgment and taste. She denounces as an “absurdity” the project’s cut-and-paste method of editing into existence otherwise in-existent poems. Such concoctions, fixed on a totally false basis, might be accepted once and for all, she argues, as the final text. Her edition prints discretely each of the surviving fragmentary manuscripts for all such unfinished poems. Still, nothing is cut-and-dried in textual editing, it seems, for even fixing the text of a poem that is incontestably finished has its pitfalls,

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it turns out. The example of “Carry Nation” is instructive. This poem first surfaced in 1990, not having appeared in Poesias de Álvaro de Campos (volume 2 of Obras Completas de Fernando Pessoa), edited by João Gaspar Simões and Luiz Montalvor for Ática (Lisboa) in 1944, or in Obra Poética, edited by Maria Aliete Galhoz for Aguilar (Rio de Janeiro) in 1960. In Berardinelli’s official, full-blown textual edition of 1990 the poem runs to twenty-two lines, beginning “Não uma santa esthética, como Santa Thereza.” In Lopes’s Vida e Obras do Engenheiro, also published in 1990, the poem begins, “Minha Joanna de Arc sem patria!” and runs to thirty-four lines. Berardinelli’s 1992 general reader’s edition reprints the thirty-four-line version issued by Lopes two years earlier but with the last eleven lines rearranged to accord with their appearance in Berardinelli’s own 1990 version. Then something really strange happens to the poem the next time it appears in print: in her 1993 critical edition of Campos’s poetry (under review here) Lopes does not reprint the text of “Carry Nation” as she printed it in 1992; now the first eleven lines repeat those of Berardinelli’s text in the 1990 edition, lines 12–22 repeat lines 24–34 of her own 1990 edition, and lines 35–46 repeat lines 1–12 of her own 1990 text. Whether or not the example of “Carry Nation” is extraordinary I shall leave to others. One inference that can be drawn from this hopscotch of changes and manipulations is that these veteran editors—Berardinelli and Lopes—have tried to learn from each other. (Their 1990 editions of Campos’s poetry hit the Lisbon bookstores at virtually the same time, coinciding with the centenary of its putative author’s birth.) The curious result, however, at least in this instance, is that, working separately, they have added two more texts to the two they had originally put into circulation in 1990. (Lopes does note that Berardinelli’s 1992 reader’s edition appeared when her own 1993 book was in the proof stage.) There are several possible morals to be drawn from all this, of course. I choose only one. The serious reader of Pessoa must now consult the texts for any given poem in no fewer than four collections of Álvaro de Campos’s poems, if he or she is to be aware of all poems now attributed to Campos (including “possibles”) and, within poems, of word and line variants, line sequences, and stanza arrangements. If Campos had no flesh-and-blood historical existence, he nevertheless left several poetic texts that will never be fixed to any reader’s disinterested satisfaction. Something may be said for Lopes’s sequencing of poems in this Livro de Versos. By presenting them chronologically according to the date of composition assigned by Pessoa, she establishes an approxi-

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mate autobiographical record of Campos’s “life-work.” That work is divided into four periods, followed by a “post-scriptum.” These periods, elaborated on in “Este Campos,” part 3 of Lopes’s introduction, break down further: “O Poeta Decadente (1913–1914),” “O Engenheiro Sensacionista (1914–1923),” “O Engenheiro Metafísico (1923–1930),” and “O Engenheiro Aposentado (1931–1935).” Thus the reader is invited to follow Campos’s life-work journey, running from his period of early decadence (before encountering the poetry of his “Master” Alberto Caeiro), through his so-called sensationist and metaphysical periods, right on into his so-called retirement years. Students of Pessoa’s work will welcome Rita Lopes’s latest entry in the heteronymic sweepstakes. They will do well, however, to save a place on their Pessoa shelf for the inevitable update of Livro de Versos, for the 1993 version, the editor warns, is not “final.” It will expand naturally to accommodate the pages of Álvaro de Campos’s work still hidden in the odd recesses of Pessoa’s “Arca,” that fabled repository of manuscripts and papers, awaiting their discovery. 17. Arnaldo Saraiva, Fernando Pessoa: Poeta—Tradutor de Poetas. Porto: Lello Editores, 1996. The great modernist writer Fernando Pessoa called himself a translator, specializing, above all, in commercial correspondence. For several business firms in Lisbon’s lower city he handled Englishlanguage correspondence. But he also tried his hand at translating Portuguese literary texts into English, poems by Antonio Botto and prose by Bourbon e Meneses, for example, and into French his play “O marinheiro.” The collection under review contains only Pessoa’s translations of poetry into Portuguese, mainly from the English, but also from the Spanish, the Russian, and the French. Except for the Russian text (which has not been traced), the non-Portuguese originals are printed facing Pessoa’s translations. Most of these translations were published during Pessoa’s lifetime. Some others, including fragments, are published for the first time. Still others, although published during the poet’s lifetime, are here identified as Pessoa’s for the first time. There are poems here by William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Moore, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Greenleaf Whittier, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, James Russell Lowell, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allan Poe, and Aleister Crowley, as well as poems from W. R. Paton’s English version of the Greek Anthology. With the exception of the translations of poems by Poe and Crowley, and the Greek Anthology pieces, those of poems by the

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others named above are derived from the twenty-four volume Biblioteca Internacional de Obras Célebres, published around 1912. And of those, the translations of poems by Coleridge, Shelley, Barrett Browning, Kipling, and Robert Browning, are here attributed to Pessoa for the first time. This publication of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Catarina to Camoens” now takes precedence over the poem’s publication in Mário de Almeida’s 1919 thesis presented in Coimbra, which students of Pessoa have long accepted as its first appearance in print. Arnaldo Saraiva’s introduction goes into the overall matter of Pessoa’s literary translations. Beginning with a full discussion of the circumstances surrounding the discovery by a Brazilian bookseller in 1990 of Pessoa’s presence in the Biblioteca Internacional, he looks into the publication details of the work, Pessoa’s numerous translation projects, Pessoa’s theories about translation and his practice as a translator, and the likely existence of unsigned Pessoa translations. There are bio-bibliographical notes on the poets translated by Pessoa, and most of the poems, originals and translations, are usefully annotated. This book is a valuable addition to the still growing shelf of Pessoa’s primary work—sixty years after the poet’s early death. 18. Fernando Pessoa, Poesia Inglesa. Organization, translation, and notes by Luísa Freire. Preface by Teresa Rita Lopes. Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 1995. When one thinks about it, this is a rather remarkable literary occurrence. I cannot at the moment think of a precedent, unless one goes back to, say, the Latin poems of John Milton or the Spanish poems of Luiz de Camões and his antecedents. But even in those cases, the matter is different, for surely Camões did not think of himself as a poet of the Spanish language, and Milton’s poems were the fanciful exercises of an erudite poet who put his more ambitious efforts in good seventeenth-century English language. With his late Victorian/early Edwardian Colonial education acquired in southern Africa, Fernando Pessoa first thought of himself as a poet of the English language. His first named poetic selves were English, outstanding among them were Charles Robert Anon and Alexander Search. Even after he had begun to write some of his greatest poetry in Portuguese, with the advent of his three great heteronyms— Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis—he continued to take himself seriously as an “English” poet. In 1917 he offered Constable, a London publisher, a collection of poems he called The Mad Fiddler. Constable, who just a few years later would publish the first

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collective edition of the works of the nineteenth-century American novelist and poet, Herman Melville, passed on the opportunity to publish Pessoa’s book. This rejection did not discourage Pessoa from undertaking the publication, a year later, in 1918, not of The Mad Fiddler, but of two other works. Antinous is a Browningesque poem on the Emperor Hadrian’s love for his young lover, the form of which is a melding of the “dramatic idyll” and the “monologue,” flexibly rhymed, and 35 Sonnets is a sequence which aims to recreate a Shakespearean sensibility in a sequence of poems in a version of Elizabethan idiom that would at once identify Pessoa with the poets of the greatest poetic age, according to Pessoa himself, of England as well as distinguish his work from theirs. Published by Pessoa himself in Lisbon to absolute critical silence among the Portuguese, the poems garnered a handful of brief but generally favorable reviews in London and Scotland. These English-language reviews might have encouraged Pessoa to persist in his efforts to be recognized as an English-language poet, for in 1920 he published “Meantime,” a short poem, in the London Athenaeum, and in 1921, again in Lisbon and at his own expense, he published English Poems I–II (which included a revised version of Antinous, along with Inscriptions, a series of poems intentionally reminiscent of poems in the Greek Anthology, and Poems III, which presented Epithalamium, a new poem obviously reminiscent of Edmund Spenser’s Epithalamium but unprecedented in English in its rather direct centering on the naturalistic qualities of the marriage bed and the bride’s loss of maidenhood. Unfortunately, these 1920 publications fell entirely on deaf ears. It is not known whether they were made available in the British Isles or even to the press in Lisbon. There are no known reviews. Pessoa’s farewell to publication of his English poems comes in Contemporânea in 1923 with the appearance of “Spell,” a three five-line stanza poem. Nothing in English in print after that, as far as anyone knows, but it did not mark the end of Pessoa’s English poetry, for he continued to write poems in that language to the end, just months or weeks before his death in late 1935. Pessoa’s readers since that time have not always agreed on the nature or quality of Pessoa’s achievement in the English idiom. Those who have not cared for the so-called English poems have often faulted Pessoa’s English, claiming that he did not know the language well enough to write serious poetry in it. A convenient recent example of that position is provided in a review of Poesia Inglesa in the Jornal de Letras for March 26, 1997 by the distinguished scholar-poet Y. K. Centeno, who writes: “Por muito que custe a quem defend a excelência do domínio da lingua inglesa do nosso Pessoa (eu e outros continuamos a dizer o contrário), o que Luísa Freire demonstrou,

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nesta sua edição, a excelência da arte que ela própria, aqui, exercitou.” (p. 25) Others, including the poet-critic-fiction writer Jorge de Sena, who also translated much of Pessoa’s English poetry into Portuguese, have argued in favor of Pessoa’s English and his Englishlanguage poems. What has not taken place, however, no matter what side criticism has come down on, is an informed critical debate in the context of Pessoa’s poetic intentions in the English poems—sonnets, dramatic narratives, lyrics or inscriptions. These poems were not the casual, haphazard productions of an inspired but undisciplined writer. That he chose to write Shakespearean sonnets in the second decade of the twentieth century was no radical or innovative decision, after all, the Shakespearean sonnet was very much in vogue, in America, say, where poets as otherwise quite different as the black poet Countee Cullen and, a half-generation later, Edna St. Vincent Millay would devote considerable energy to the sonnet, including, in Millay’s case, the sonnet sequence. What was innovative was that Pessoa, besides working the Elizabethan tricks of inversion and working all round an image or a word for its paradoxes, ironies and overall ludic possibilities (as did Cullen and, to a lesser extent, Millay in her sonnet sequence Fatal Interview in 1931), attempted to forge (ahistorically) a poetic language and syntax that would be a possibility in Elizabethan English that had not been adequately explored by the Elizabethans or Jacobeans themselves. In fact, Pessoa’s Elizabethan English in the sonnets comes closest, in my reading, to the English of a work such as Sir Richard Fanshawe’s translation of Os Lusíadas, published in 1655. Why would Pessoa have chosen to work in an Elizabethan style (in his Shakespearean sonnets or his Spenserian wedding poem)? Part of the answer seems to lie in his essay in A Águia in 1912 on the so-called “new Portuguese poetry.” There he singles out the Elizabethan age as the great age of literature in England, an age that the “new Portuguese poetry” will emulate when it comes into its own. In choosing to write “Elizabethan” poetry in the twentieth century, however, it is as if Pessoa was trying to fill in gaps in the Elizabethan and pre-Elizabethan canon. In the sonnets he would out-Shakespeare Shakespeare and in Epithalamium he would write the other darker side of the marriage poem that Spenser had chosen not to write. Why did he chose to publish his “Elizabethan’ poetry in 1917? After Constable rejected his lyric poetry collected as The Mad Fiddler, he might have reasoned, perhaps, that establishing his poetic credentials by publishing Elizabethan poetry would also serve to smooth the way for his more modern lyric poetry. Of course, it did not work out

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that way, though we will never be sure that he did not make any effort to publish The Mad Fiddler in London after 1917. He kept a great deal in the famous chest in which he kept his papers, but it can hardly be plausible that he kept every bit of business correspondence that came his way. Still, this is only negative evidence, and I would not stress it unduly beyond bringing up the mere possibility. The poems of Alexander Search—not to be confused with those presented under Pessoa’s own name, being therefore so-called orthonymic poems—seem to owe a good deal to English poetry of the pre-Raphaelite movement, Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, the early Yeats, and above all, perhaps, to the poetry of 1890s so-called decadents, exemplified best in the verse of Ernest Dowson and Lionel Johnson. The earliest love poems of Alexander Search mention the whiteness of arms and the gestures and memory of gestures that sustain the lover even as memories of sylvan scenes and flowing rivers sustained the redemptive memory of English Romantic poets (namely Wordsworth) when city life was too much with him and seemingly too much for him to take. 19. Robert Bréchon, Étrange Étranger: Une Biographie de Fernando Pessoa. Christian Bourgois Editeur, 1966. Long a worker in the vineyards of Pessoan scholarship, Robert Bréchon has produced a large, leisurely paced book that the author admits is a highly personal piece of scholarship and appreciation. No doubt about it. This is the culminating work of an intelligent, informed life-long reader of the great Portuguese modernist. The book is also very much a French work in that Bréchon makes most of his literary comparisons to French works, many of which might not have been known to Pessoa, rather than to English works that Pessoa is known to have owned, read, and often annotated. Of course, that Bréchon does that makes good sense since, after all, his book is aimed at the French reader. But Pessoa would have enjoyed the irony that it is to the French (Pessoa thought Paris provincial, more so than Lisbon) that we owe what is, surprisingly, only the fourth biography of Pessoa done so far, counting two by the Portuguese scholar-writer-journalist Joäo Gaspar Simões and another by the Spanish scholar-poet Angel Crespo. There is still no biography of Pessoa in English. If Bréchon has not uncovered any new biographical information, he has made extensive and generally astute use of the vast scholarship on Pessoa now available in Portuguese. Indeed his sources are almost entirely in Portuguese or French, though, it should be noted, some of

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the more important English studies are now available in Portuguese translation. Among those many sources one work comes in for heavy duty—Vida e Obra de Fernando Pessoa, João Gaspar Simões’ pioneering work published in 1950, just fifteen years after Pessoa’s death. Simões’ curiously personal method of psychologizing both the poetry and the poet—a bone of contention among Simões’ readers from the very beginning—is accepted by Bréchon rather uncritically. Indeed, it is only when the French critic launches out on his own, usually in the act of locating lines in a literary context that is particularly French, that his work strikes a note of originality. Étrange étranger is organized chronologically with chapters covering no more than five years and usually only a year or two. In each chapter he not only covers the facts of Pessoa’s external life insofar as they are known, but introduces the poetry that serves to illuminate the salient features of that period, no matter when written or published. Following this scheme, which breaks up the inauthentic rhythms of the fact-driven biography, enables Bréchon to substitute a sustained act of detailed, careful reading for what might have been an account of the poet’s acts of writing, with their starts and fits, interruptions, resumptions, and revisions, so wonderfully emblematized in the vast hoard of manuscripts, outlines, fragments, and notes Pessoa left to posterity. Indeed, the drama in this book is self-consciously performative. The critic-biographer implicitly invites us to watch his lively mind at work, putting facts and poems together, linking one piece of writing to a body of literature that is sometimes coeval, sometimes not. As I have said, Étrange Étranger is very much a French work, one of sympathetic explication, informatively associative, and never supercilious or superior. 20. Maria José Lancastre, Fernando Pessoa. Intr. Antonio Tabucchi. Trans. Simon Pleasance. Paris: Editions Hazan, 1997. This is an English-language version, translated from the Italian, of the revised edition of Fernando Pessoa: Uma Fotobiografia, a volume of photographs and illustrations first published in the early 1980s in Lisbon. The original size of the volume, a quarto, has been helpfully scaled down to pocket size. The author’s original preface, best suited to a Portuguese or even Italian audience needing no introduction to Pessoa, appears here, unchanged, in English translation. What is added, apparently from the Italian version, is an introductory essay by the novelist-critic Antonio Tabucchi that was published in 1978 in the journal Quaderni Portoghesi.

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Just how useful Tabucchi’s introduction will be, or even to whom, can be determined somewhat by one’s response to the following, more or less typical, excerpt: And what if Fernando Pessoa had actually ended up being Fernando Pessoa? It’s just a hunch. Needless to say, we shall never have proof. And for lack of proof all we can do is believe (or pretend to believe) in the biographical data of the man who was the make-believe figment of an impostor identical to himself—otherwise put, Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa, son of the late Joaquim and Magdalena Pinheiro Nogueira, part-time translator of commercial correspondence in import-export companies in Lisbon. In his free time, a poet. (p. 9)

Surely there are readers who continue to savor such critical displays in deconstructing the self, encouraged, no doubt, by Pessoa who himself played games of single selves that cannot hold themselves together and of multiple identities who tumble forth named and tagged for tracking. But what do the adherents of the sort of games Tabucchi favors, one wonders, make of the rather stark black-andwhite, inexorably time-bound, somewhat “realistic” photographs that comprise this “photo-biography”? One need not ask that question, of course, of those who look for the flesh-and-blood Fernando Pessoa, of the typifying bow tie, darkrimmed glasses, and tight topcoat, who borrowed money, set up businesses that failed, or who each working day both walked the streets of the lower city on his various daily errands and talked and drank at ‘A Brasileira’ or ‘O Martinho da Arcada’ where he also set down an occasional note or poem. But it is precisely at those “realists” that Tabucchi has aimed his informed meditation, for he would present a Pessoa who is both apart from (or above) all those dissociations, splits, and contradictory impulses of what might be called both modern and post-modern European culture and, at the same time (paradoxically) exemplary of it in its many crazed variants. Despite its author’s fondness for turning out the sort of Borgesian advertencies that have become standard fare in the fiction of certain writers, this essay continues to offer its real if modest returns. 21. Darlene J. Sadlier, An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa: Modernism and the Paradoxes of Authorship. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998. Darlene Sadlier’s book is both more and less than an introduction to the life and works of Portugal’s great twentieth-century writer

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Fernando Pessoa. It is more in that it intervenes in continuing scholarly debate, especially in its explanation of the nature of the poet’s major heteronymic project but also in its rehearsal of the uses, misuses, and abuses to which the poet and his work have been put, beginning at least in the 1920s with the hurrahs of the Coimbra-based presença group and running to yesterday’s and today’s reports on controversies surrounding the official and unofficial editing of his work. The book is less than an introduction in that it focuses almost entirely on Pessoa’s poetry and then almost exclusively on the poetry of Pessoa’s major heteronyms—Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, and (following the lead of Jorge de Sena) Fernando Pessoa ele-mesmo (himself). Unexamined, then, or given short shrift, is the poetry of the English-language heteronyms and the semiheteronym Bernardo Soares’s Livro do Desassossego, a book constructed editorially from pieces published as “excerpts” during the author’s lifetime, augmented extensively by material found on sheets and scraps among his papers after the author’s death. Limited too, and legitimately so, to Pessoa’s literary work, Sadlier’s study does not go into his extensive writings about Portugal, his literary criticism or theorizing, or his quite remarkable writings about business, commerce, advertising, and public relations. I offer this more by way of description than as a criticism. The book is comprised of an introduction and seven chapters. The first chapter takes up Pessoa’s poetic juvenilia, along with his first attempts at speaking in other voices. The second chapter looks into the sometimes paradoxical relationship between Pessoa’s back-intohistory basis for restoring Portugal’s national glory and his attraction to the new ways, esthetic, thematic, and technical, of the literary and artistic isms now largely covered by the umbrella term of an internationally minded “Modernism.” Chapters 3 through 6 cover first the poetry Pessoa published under his own name, and then, in order, the poetry he attributed to Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. Chapter 7 bears the title “Text versus Work: Constructing and Reconstructing a National Poet.” Surveying events and stages in Pessoa’s constantly growing literary reputation over the last seventy years, it tells, controversially, a story of interested assimilation and questionably motivated appropriation. This efficient book fills a gap in Pessoa studies. In direct, orderly, and unencumbered prose it presents the English-speaking reader with a clear sense of many of the salient features of Pessoa’s remarkable literary achievement. It is, in a sense, the book that Roy Campbell started to write in the 1950s but which was left unfinished at his death and the book that João Gaspar Simões tried to write after Campbell’s

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death but which never made it into English. What takes this study out of the category of the basic introduction is that it is replete with acute, fresh, sometimes highly original observations and analyses. In short, Sadlier’s Introduction to Fernando Pessoa will be useful both to newcomers to Pessoa and to old hands who continue to labor in the vineyards of Pessoa scholarship. 22. Enrico Martines, Cartas entre Fernando Pessoa e os directores da presença. Edição Crítica de Fernando Pessoa. Colecção “Estudos,” Volume II. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional / Casa da Moeda, 1998. Founded in Coimbra in March 1927, the literary and critical journal presença undertook the formidable task of recalling Portugal to the lessons and possibilities of modernism that emerged first with the publication of the two issues of Orpheu in 1915. Early on, the journal’s young editors invited Fernando Pessoa, the most famous living poet associated with Orpheu, to help them in their task by contributing to its pages. The older poet agreed to do so. It is his correspondence with the various editors of presença, running through the last eight years of the poet’s life, that is the subject and provides the substance of this book. Much of the primary matter in Cartas entre Fernando Pessoa e os directores da presença has appeared previously, some of it, as long ago as 1957 in the case of the correspondence of Fernando Pessoa and the young João Gaspar Simões, his first critic and, later, his first biographer. Yet there are over fifty previously unpublished letters here, and the conjoining in one place of the letters exchanged between the great modernist poet and the so-called “men of presença”—José Régio, Gaspar Simões, Adolfo Casais Monteiro, and (in an appendix) Adolfo Rocha [Miguel Torga]—along with a few other documents, makes this a useful production for anyone interested in the literary history of the twentieth-century in general or, more particularly, the role played by presença in championing the centrality of the poet the journal’s editors themselves called the “Master” of modern Portuguese letters. Of the “new” letters published here, those comprising the José Régio–Fernando Pessoa correspondence are the most surprising for their relative paucity and the comparative brevity of the letters themselves. The editor speculates that José Régio’s interest in Fernando Pessoa cooled off somewhat after his and Gaspar Simões’s meeting with the “Master” in Lisbon at the Café Montanha in June 1930 when “he” failed to show, sending in his stead the obstreperous heteronym, his “own engineer,” Álvaro de Campos. They

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exchanged only two rather business-like letters after this awkward and, to José Régio apparently, unpleasant encounter—both in 1934. Even though Fernando Pessoa continued to send his regards to the older editor of presença in his far more frequent letters to Gaspar Simões, the latter’s replies offer no indication that José Régio was in any mood to reciprocate. Of course it was Gaspar Simões who maintained, until December 1934, presença’s closest connection with Fernando Pessoa. Their correspondence came to a halt, however, when Gaspar Simões left Coimbra for Lisbon, a removal that also seems to have diminished his role in the management of the journal presença. His function seems to have been assumed, to a lesser or greater extent, by Adolfo Casais Monteiro, the young poet who joined presença’s editorial staff after the defection of Branquinho da Fonseca, the journal’s third founding editor. It is to that change in management, incidentally, that is owed the fortuitous exchange of letters between Fernando Pessoa and Casais Monteiro that extracted from the poet of Orpheu the now celebrated account of the genesis of his heteronyms and his explanation of their “personal” and intertextual relationships. Re-reading that letter in the context of all the letters in this collection might even tempt one to think that in his last years the wily poet was improvising still another unfolding drama, this time involving the young men of presença. As he warned Casais Monteiro, in the year of his death, “behind the poet’s involuntary masquerade as a reasoning being or what have you, what I am essentially is a dramatist.” In keeping with the rules laid down for the “Critical Edition” that has been under way in Lisbon for the last decade, Cartas entre Fernando Pessoa e os directores da presença, the second volume in that major edition’s “Studies” series, is a full-scale performance. Among other matters, it includes, besides a substantial introduction, a record of variants and cancellations in the letters, the details of their prior publication, and ample annotations that serve to contextualize and to explain references. 23. Fernando Pessoa, Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith. New York: Grove Press, 1998. Fernando Pessoa & Ca. Heterónima is Jorge de Sena’s inspired title for his collection of essays on the great Portuguese poet who has only recently been accorded his rightful place among the great twentiethcentury moderns. That title has now been appropriated for the Selected Poems now before us. It is a title upon which certain things can be built or, better said, developed. “Company” was perfectly

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acceptable when the whole shebang of orthonym, heteronym, semiheteronym, pseudonym, named personalities, and whatever else was still largely a private and privately owned affair, run for friends and fellow poets in Lisbon and stray critics and readers as far away as Coimbra or Oporto. But the private owner has long since disappeared into his own creation, into that heteronymic company that is now far more recognizable as a public corporation. As such, it trades in the open market and, of late, has made serious gestures of becoming a transnational. Pessoa, whose surviving photographs conflict fascinatingly with the myriad of paintings and sketches that the poet has accrued posthumously to his biography. I would amend Sena’s title (and Richard Zenith’s homage to Sena) accordingly: Pessoa Co., Inc. I suspect the Old Artificer might have taken to that. Late in life Pessoa did say that there was no longer any need to keep up the pretense of the individualized heteronyms, that all his poetry could be collected and printed under his own name. But virtually no one has paid attention to his late stated preference (if one can call it that), not from the very beginning of his posthumous life when his first editors decided to render unto Caesar what was Caesar’s insofar as the poems could be apportioned out to Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, Alberto Caeiro, and the orthonymic Pessoa. The last named, of course, would serve a very useful function and purpose. What did not go with the others would go to Pessoa himself, taking a place alongside the work he published in his lifetime over his own name. From the start Pessoa’s readers have marveled at the quality and beauty of Pessoa’s poetry at its best, whether that poetry be attributed to one of his major heteronyms or to himself. But the most powerful attraction Pessoa’s work holds lies in his astonishing tour de force in individuating his conceptions of Caeiro, Reis, and Campos by providing each of his poets with a distinctive and innovated body of work that, with the exception of Caeiro, extends beyond the poetry to prose. It may well be, as George Steiner says now as so many saw and said over the past sixty years following the poet’s death, that Portuguese literature was enriched by the birth of four major poets on a single day. But it was Pessoa’s theatricalizing genius that led him to describe his hydra-headed creation as a “drama-en-gente,” one in which the drama lies in characters, not in action. This, of course, is the three-ring circus that has been playing to ever increasing crowds since he coached the critics at presença (who claimed to have “discovered” him) to see things his way. One wonders what an anthology of Pessoa’s work that did not recognize the heteronymic boundaries would look or sound like. Surely its

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extremes would foster thoughts of contradiction not dialectic, confusion not richness, and there is no doubt that such a book would puzzle those readers who look for centralizing, integrating voices. It is precisely these qualities that one can find in the oeuvre of each of the clearly delineated heteronyms. In Caeiro, Reis, and Campos we have evidence that the self, though embodying contradictions or (as Whitman said, craftily) containing multitudes, in some realm or other, stands created. It is, moreover, the existence of those discrete selves that establish, in a sense, the possible existence of Fernando Pessoa’s own poetry-making and outwardly functioning self. In this way, by creating other selves (biography, oeuvre, temperament), he made space for himself as the self who created them. He provided points of contrast not only among his heteronyms but between each and every one of his heteronyms and himself. By his creations shall you know him, just as some has said about God. Pessoa is not the ideal creator, as the still callow Stephen Daedalus imagines him to be—apart, aloof, paring his fingernails—but as one who, like the Greek gods, mingles and interacts with the lesser (or grander) beings of his creation, mixing memory with desire, anger, frustration, and occasionally sorrowful joy at their antics, shenanigans, postures, gestures, and accomplishments. And, as we know from Álvaro de Campos’ freedom to criticize, boss and bully, the game between creator and creations is tit-for-tat, Anyone in this company (corporation) is susceptible to praise, vulnerable to attack. There is still another interesting matter in all of this. Pessoa seems not to have allowed his heteronyms to have heteronyms of their own. That sport Pessoa reserved for himself, and there is no evidence that he would have tolerated poaching. Creating such heteronyms by the heteronyms was the logical next step for Pessoa, but he seems never to have taken it. 24. Fernando Pessoa, Message. Jonathan Griffin, tr. and intr. Helder Macedo. London: Menard / King’s College, 1992. Fernando Pessoa’s only Portuguese-language book published during his lifetime, Mensagem appears here in a new English translation by one of the author’s most efficient translators. Its publication follows by six years Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown’s strong version of Mensagem, included in their Ecco Press edition of Poems of Fernando Pessoa (1986), and by two years the death of Jonathan Griffin in 1990. Many decades after its publication in 1934, Mensagem remains problematic. It has vexed many critics, enlisted fiercely partisan

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support, and turned off many otherwise receptive readers of Pessoa’s poetry. The disagreements over the book have settled on its formal properties and its authorial intentions. Was it intended to be a single poem or merely a selection of intricately-related poems? Is Mensagem’s overall tone hortative (patriotic) and nationalistic—nay, imperialistic—or is it essentially ironic? Is the poem buoyantly prophetic of a glorious future for a hitherto sadly diminished Portugal, or is it remindful of a long, static posturing over a history that had no reality until its nothingness was undeniably past? Does the poet build a new myth hoping to galvanize the Portuguese into a belief in the future in which the poet might not himself believe? Or is the poem darkly constructed around occult secrets available only to the similarly initiated believers in the occult? Does the poem bring a “message about the end of nations, the other side of History, in which all nations are heteronyms of the ‘time-beings’ whose lives are lived in timeless poetry,” as Helder Macedo asserts in his introduction to Griffin’s translation? Drawing as Mensagem does on the legendary and quasi-mythic figures from Portugal’s past, moreover, should it be read less as a successor to Camões’s sixteenth-century epic Os Lusíadas than as a series of Greek Anthology-like inscriptions and historical lyrics, a medley of more or less plangent voices themselves speaking from the watery graves of history and those other voices assumed by the poet in whatever mood he might affect? It will be noted correctly that in several places the disembodied and uncharacterized voice brings hope, sings out in a clarion call for the Fifth Empire (as, say, in the poem entitled “Segundo / Antonio Vieira”). The question is whether it is intended that these bracing voices carry the day for the entire poem or whether they are really there because they are part of the larger drama realized through this mosaic of dramatic monologues and lyric views and assessments. Not all the facts are known, and the sequence of events is not always clear; but we do know that in Mensagem the author juxtaposed and more or less ordered a clutch of poems that seemed to go together and published the book—pace Pessoa’s denial that it was so—in time to qualify it for the Antero de Quental prize for poetry in a competition sponsored by the António Ferro-led S.P.N. (Secretariado da Propaganda Nacional). We also know that technically the book did not qualify for the prize but that it too was given an award—surely because Ferro intervened—after the jury had conferred its prize on Vasco Reis’s A Romaria. The survival of early proofs for Mensagem show that until rather late in the printing process the poem was entitled Portugal and that at that early stage the various poems did not carry the compositional dates which,

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following the practice adopted by Maria Aliete Galhoz in her 1960 volume for the Brazilian publisher Aguilar, this bilingual edition provides for many of the poems. Undoubtedly, other readers have given thought to what significance for interpretation of the author’s and the poem’s intentions those compositional dates might have, but I have seen in print nothing substantial along those lines. How important is it that the poem “Segundo / Antonio Vieira” bears the date “31–7–1929” or that the last poem written but one—“Quatro / As Ilhas Afortunadas”—dates from “26–3–1934”? Or why is “Quinto / Nevoeiro,” a poem dated “10–12–1928,” placed last in the book, after poems bearing later compositional dates? Did something happen on or near those dates to effect the writing of the poem or, at least, to affect its contents or give it its tone? How did Pessoa feel about the dictatorship’s decision to call out to Antonio Oliveira Salazar in 1928? On 10 December of that year did Pessoa already think that the Fifth Empire was imminent? It will be recalled that earlier in the year—in January—Pessoa had published his apologia for the necessity at that time in Portugal of the military dictatorship, O Interregno: Defeza e Justificação da Ditadura Militar em Portugal. Did this poem, written later in the same year, purport to express the hope that now was the lime for Portugal to emerge from the fog that had long enveloped the nation? The answers to these and other questions become complicated when the mix includes a second poem inserted further back in Mensagem but also written on “10-12-28.” “Third” (“Terceiro”) reads, in Griffin’s translation: By the waters of heartbreak I write this book. My heart has nothing of its own. Through hot tears my eyes look. I live, Lord, on you alone. To feel you, think you, alone has power To fill and golden my bare days. But when will you want to return this way? When is the King? When is the Hour? When will you come, to be the Christ Of a man to whom the false God is deceased, And wake from the evil which I exist The New Earth and New Skies? When will you come O Hidden One, Vision of the Portuguese eras, To make me more than the gust, which veers And falls, of a longing by God begun?

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When will it be your will, returning Here, to make, of my hope, love? All, when, out of this mist and yearning? When, Dream in me and Lord above?

It is not certain that an investigation taking its cue from the known compositional dates for other poems—especially those written in 1928, 1929, or 1934—will produce further links between public occurrence and private expression. Such an investigation, however, will be worth the try in those quarters that still value disinterested scholarship. 25. Barão de Teive (Fernando Pessoa), A Educação do Estóico. Ed. Richard Zenith. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 1999. The return of Fernando Pessoa’s work to copyright and the acquisition by Assírio & Alvim of the right to publish Fernando Pessoa’s writings for the next few years has so far resulted in the appearance of seven volumes in an attractive uniform series. New editions of Mensagem and Livro do Desassossego have been published, along with the first of two volumes of Pessoa’s letters, and four additions to the published canon—A Hora do Diabo, A Língua Portuguesa, Ficções do Interlúdio, and A Educação do Estóico. These last four titles appear in Pessoa’s notes for projects and on lists of planned publications. Many of the new works remain unfinished by the author. Texts have been cobbled together from drafts that are sometimes in themselves incomplete and arranged in an order that does not have Pessoa’s authorization. The notorious example of this is the unruly Livro do Desassossego, which in 1982 was first organized thematically by Jacinto do Prado Coelho and others and which has since appeared in several variant editions, organized (sometimes with additional material, sometimes with less) along quite different principles by Teresa Sobral Cunha, Leyla Perrone-Moisés, and Richard Zenith. In fact, after working with the Pessoa papers for well over twenty years, Teresa Sobral Cunha has followed up her two-volume edition of Bernardo Soares’s Livro do Desassossego with an edition of some of the same earlier material now attributed to a different fictitious person, Vicente Guedes. It is still another creation, Álvaro Coelho de Athayde, the Barão de Teive, that Richard Zenith brings to center stage in A Educação do Estóico. Gathered here are the passages and fragments that remain of that Prufrock-like aristocrat’s final, only, and far from complete

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manuscript—both intentionally so, from Pessoa’s and the Barão’s points of view, and unintentionally so, since it is clear that neither the real-life nor the fictional author has brought his work to completion. The fragmentary texts compiled and arranged by Zenith tell of the Barão de Teive’s decision to commit suicide because he has come to realize that he cannot do the ideal work he has set out to do (“a impossibilidade de fazer arte superior”). Even with generously wide spacing between entries, the Barão’s “text” runs to only forty-four pages. To these pages are added an appendix of passages that go over material already covered in the primary text, five additional pages on editorial principles and criteria, and a twenty-four page essay entitled “Post-mortem.” In this essay, distinguishing usefully between the aristocratic Barão de Teive and the petty burgher Bernardo Soares, Zenith ventures the notion that in killing off the heteronymic Barão, Pessoa exorcised that part of himself—the sexually crippled rationalist—that he found difficult to live with. Here, as he has done elsewhere, Zenith offers a psychology for understanding Pessoa, especially his creation and manipulation of heteronyms. This is well and good, though I for one, find it depressing to think that the old pretender was so much less objectively Shakespearean in his creation of those players who stroll his world and so much more personally needful in the details of the dramas he worked out for his characters. As for the Barão de Teive, let it be said that he is not Caeiro, nor Campos, nor Reis, nor Bernardo Soares, nor even Vicente Guedes. He is not a principal player in Pessoa’s global drama, but an attendant lord who might serve to swell a scene or facilitate a progress. Perhaps had Pessoa lived longer he would have been able to flesh out his Barão so as to make him more meaningfully engaging. (After all, only after one has read a good deal of what is attributed to Bernardo Soares does one get the hang of his character or personality.) But it just might be the case that the little that survives is all that Pessoa chose to give us anyway. Like the American historian and writer Henry Adams, who left us several diary entries in which he recorded his having reread the diaries he kept as a student at Harvard University only to end up by destroying them, the Barão de Teive has left us a manuscript of fragments that tells us, among other things, that he has destroyed his earlier, fragmentary writings. Although it is minor work, in my opinion, A Educação do Estóico now settles into the canon, the latest piece in the puzzle called Pessoa.

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26. Irene Ramalho Santos: Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism. Foreword by Harold Bloom. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2003. “The one great act of Portuguese history—that long, continuous, scientific period of the Discoveries—is the one great cosmopolitan act in history. The whole people stamp themselves there. . . . There is something American, with the noise left out and the quotidian omitted, in the intellectual temper of this people.” These sentiments emanate from Fernando Pessoa’s futurist-modernist heteronym Álvaro de Campos in 1916. Atlantic Poets probes into that “something American” (and English) that characterizes Pessoa’s own intellectual or poetic temper. Atlantic Poets can be described as an extended meditation on Fernando Pessoa, the poets of modern America (beginning with the writers of the so-called American Renaissance), and the notion of— borrowing Henry Adams’s phrase—”an Atlantic system.” It is the record, and its consummating expression, of an ambitious, risktaking search for the over-reaching spirit—something akin to a poetic over soul—that can be found manifestly and independently at work in Pessoa’s heteronymic poetry (and elsewhere, too), Whitman’s archetypal democracy of the emotions, Hart Crane’s transnational nationalism (Crane was the true cis-Atlantic expatriate who mostly stayed away from Europe), and Wallace Stevens’ stay-at-home metaphysics as the ars poetica of his audacious ambition. A generation before Shakespeare mythicized his England—”this scept’red isle,” “this earth of majesty,” “this other Eden”—Pessoa’s great predecessor, Camões, had written the first modern European epic of Western expansion, one that defined the lasting myth that his country has not ceased telling to this day. No one has told it more passionately, or with greater edge, than has Portugal’s great modernist, destined as he was at the age of seven to replicate the great journeys of the Portuguese navigators along the western contour of Africa, from the river Tagus to the southernmost tip, almost, of the continent, rounding Badajor along the way, a voyage Fernando took, possibly, even before he knew much about the story that Camões had fashioned three centuries earlier. Indeed it was voyage he would take again before returning to Lisbon, permanently, in 1905, at the age of seventeen. Indeed it can be rightfully asserted that Pessoa knew more of the Atlantic Ocean than did any of the American poets whose names grace the pages of Atlantic Poets. Nowhere in the sea and shore poems of Whitman, including the great poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” for instance, do

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we have anything quite like Pessoa’s elemental bit of foundational history, “Mar Portuguez,” one of the charged lyrics of Mensagem (1934). At some point, great poets speak to other great poets, in a great language that is almost theirs exclusively, opaque or nearly so to all other less uncommon readers. How much of their discourse is finally available to other mortals is indeterminable, perhaps. Only to the extent that a poet’s given reader is himself willing to think poetically will he share in such rare and rarified talk, the highest possible conversation. Yet the possibility is always there. As Thomas Carlyle affirmed in On Heroes and Hero-worship, “We are all poets when we read a poem well.” The same may be said, I suspect, for criticism, though this message might not be the one “meant” or “intended” by the author. Atlantic Poets is a sustained flight, full of fruitful insights and suggestive readings. It puts Pessoa in the company of many of those romantic poets who most matter, Coleridge, Whitman, Hart Crane, etc. The link between Coleridge’s bent of mind and that of Pessoa in Livro do Desassossego, once suggested, seems inevitable. The same is true of the application of the metaphor of “interruption” (invented by Coleridge, who might or may or may not have “lost” the now and perhaps even then non-existent rest of his poem through the convenient offices of the man from Porlock) as a key to understanding the oddities and seeming anomalies of the modern lyric. Oddly, this critical work itself proceeds uninterruptedly and virtually seamlessly toward a single, unified, integrated whole representing, ironically, a single, integrated critical-poetic self. If I am permitted to dip one oar into the beautiful flow of this book, it is that Pessoa had at least to pretend to an acceptance of the existence of the “self” in order to create his heteronyms. Alberto Caeiro is a case in point. Even when he contradicts himself, he does so when he is least himself, that is, when he is ill and therefore writing “pathetically” (if not pathologically). One must accept him at his word (as Pessoa seems to do) in order to accept his statement that he can be himself. To the pragmatist in me (I’m much too loyal to the things of this world to care very much whether a pure poetry is achievable, let alone desirable) Caeiro’s stance—contrary though not opposite to those of Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis or Fernando Pessoa himself—on when and where he is not being himself speaks eloquently. In the early years of the twentieth century, the American historian Henry Adams wrote that the “energy center of the world” stretched from the Rocky Mountains to the Elbe, he was not talking about poetry. It was war, he argued, that would ultimately institute “an

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Atlantic system.” The poets featured in Atlantic Poets thought differently. Their work defines “an Atlantic system” shaped by an imaginary that is as spiritual as it is cosmopolitan. To this idea this book speaks eloquently, its visionary reach and scope, its transformed knowledge and transforming scholarship (sample the footnotes), promising to make it a benchmark for all future studies of Pessoa’s rightful place in Anglo-American literature. 27. Ricardo Daunt, T. S. Eliot e Fernando Pessoa: Diálogos de New Haven. São Paulo: Landy Editora, 2004. There is no scholarship to speak of on the joint subject of the two modernist giants, T. S. Eliot and Fernando Pessoa, save for, notably, Adolfo Casais Monteiro’s essay in 1969 on the theme of impersonality in the poet, and John Kinsella’s piece a decade or so ago, and several pages and paragraphs scattered throughout Irene Ramalho Santos’ Atlantic Poets in 2003. Therefore, it goes without saying that the study under review is, on the whole, a useful addition to the comparative study of literary modernism. The author has mined critical and theoretical writings of these two giants of literary modernism for passages (usually similar in thought or thrust) that will serve as a testing ground for primacy in thinking Modernism itself. Just the sequence of juxtaposed passages will often be enough to engender a strong sense, not of direct influence (for there seems to have been none, either way), but of the ambiance of certain fetching ideas during the period in which high modernism made its mark. The author describes his book as a work of comparative literary study aimed not at the denizens of “academia” but at poets and writers. It is not to be read as a thesis or dissertation presented for a degree, he warns, but as the record of an energetic “dialogue” between two poets in their guise as theorists, in the company of a third, the author, of course, as theorist. Since Eliot and Pessoa, born in the same year, 1888, left no explicit signs of knowing each other’s work, the term “dialogue” must be seen to operate as something of a metaphor. Nor does the fact that book’s title locates the place—New Haven—where the two principal essays of this work were written give us much to work with in interpreting this book as a work of comparative study. Its two main essays (dated New Haven, December 1996; São Paulo, November 2003) take their cue from Eliot’s critical writing: tradition, originality, and the individual talent or artistry, and metaphysical poetry, flourishing among the Elizabethans and continuing, in France, throughout the nineteenth century (with Laforgue,

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Corbière, and Baudelaire, particularly), as a viable resource for modern poetry (including Eliot and Pessoa). The second of the essays is the more suggestive, far-ranging, and, by far, the more daring in its tracing of literary genealogies. Along the way, the author also turns to the aesthetic and thematic difficulties facing readers of Pessoa’s English-language poetry—35 Sonnets and Antinous—as well as the erotic import of Álvaro de Campos’ central poem, in this regard, “Saudação a Walt Whitman.” The collection concludes with an essay in the manner of a postface that is not a postface actually since it soon turns (as he claims) into an essay. Hence the two pages of “postface” are merely the pretext for a twenty-two-page reading of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” drawing generously on links between Eliot’s poem and those of his acknowledged French predecessors—such as Laforgue and Baudelaire. Although Daunt’s reading of individual lines and images is interesting, he no longer follows the comparative thrust of his two main essays—the so-called dialogues of New Haven. I, for one, would have welcomed a comparison, detailed and nuanced, of the voices of Eliot’s early poems—“Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” “Portrait of a Lady”—with that of Álvaro de Campos, especially as expressed in “Tabacaria.” By this point, however, Pessoa has disappeared from Daunt’s dialogues. Underscoring the importance Eliot’s poem seems to have to his understanding of Eliot’s work, the original of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is given in the book’s one appendix. Unfortunately, the text is marred by errors and introductions that are followed inconsistently. In the line, “For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse,” the last word appears, unfortunately, as “reserve.” “Is it perfume from a dress” becomes “It is perfume from a dress.” Eliot’s text is turned ungrammatical when in the line “And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!” The word “afternoon” is pluralized: “And the afternoons, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!” Eliot’s spelling of “etherized” is changed to “etherised,” accompanied, curiously, by an explanatory footnote that doesn’t explain that “etherised” is the preferred British spelling, which appears even in American editions of Eliot’s work. Not only is Eliot’s indentation of certain lines not only not always followed but sometimes indentation is introduced, usually at the beginning of stanzas, without authority. In one place “toward” becomes “towards”; in another a comma is dropped, later a comma is inserted. Curiously, too, the epigraph from Dante suffers several changes or, more accurately, “corrections” in accordance with recent textual editions of Dante’s poem.

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An odd feature of this book is that it starts out with three separate, highly idiosyncratic, and somewhat defensive prefaces, each of them dated, either prior to or shortly after the writer tells us he began to set down his thoughts about Eliot and Pessoa, followed by a short introduction that is mainly a bibliographical account of texts available and texts used. Most readers would do well, in my humble opinion, to save for last these three dozen or so pages. 28. António Botto, The Songs of António Botto. Trans. Fernando Pessoa. Ed. with an intro. Josiah Blackmore. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) did many strange and extraordinary things in a relatively short lifetime. Though less striking than his claim that on a given day in 1914, inhabited by hitherto unknown heteronyms, he wrote right off the whole of Alberto Caeiro’s O Guardador de Rebanhos and some of Álvaro de Campos’s powerful poems, and less sensational than his part in the caper involving the disappearance of the English necromancer Aleister Crowley into the boiling and howling seas of the Boca do Inferno, there stands out for me the lasting mystery surrounding his decision in the early 1930s to translate his friend António Botto’s Canções into English with the intention of creating, at the least, a succès de scandale. Knowing that there was no homoerotic poetry among the offerings from any of the British publishing houses, he would provide some in the form of his ‘inverted’ friend’s explicitly homoerotic verse to an unprepared and certainly unsuspecting English audience. Botto’s poems in Pessoa’s translations would have filled what Pessoa must have considered to be a void in twentieth-century British poetry. He was trying again, even though his distribution to English journals and newspapers in the British isles of Antinous, an original poem in English, in 1918 (and again in 1921), had failed to get him the recognition and acclaim for which he had dared to hope. Not surprisingly, however, there would be no such publication of Botto’s poems, not in 1933 or at any time during the remaining years of Pessoa’s lifetime. In fact, although the manuscript, complete with Pessoa’s translator’s foreword, was ready for the press in the early 1930s, it was not until 1948, thirteen years after Pessoa’s death, that it finally achieved publication, and then it did so in a scarcely distributed privately printed edition. The book is now printed for the second time in the splendid edition under review. As early as 1922, invoking Winckelmann’s authority that ‘the supreme beauty is rather male than female’, Pessoa had published an

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elaborate apologia for Botto’s frankly homosexual poetry, arguing that the poet was the only true esthete of contemporary Portuguese literature, the only one dedicated, as he was in his very being, to the highest possible form of beauty. The bitter polemic exchange initialed by Pessoa’s essay boiled down to a conviction on the part of those opposed to Botto (and now Pessoa) that the essay ‘António Botto e o Ideal Esthetico em Portugal’ was nothing more than a scarcely veiled defense of sodomy. Interestingly, Pessoa did not avail himself of this essay in his preparing his edition of Botto’s Songs in 1933. (It is, however, included in the book under review.) Instead, he provided a relatively short translator’s preface in which, after mentioning that Botto had come ‘into his own’ (3) after surviving his initial bout with notoriety, he talks about the principles of translation he has followed in translating Botto’s poems, as well as explaining how the poetry relates to traditional Portuguese popular poetry, the significance of the word fado, and the import of António Nobre as referred to in the fourteenth poem of the collection. Only once does Pessoa mention homosexuality, and that comes in a reference to Botto’s António, a novel that, as Pessoa avers, in the final words of his preface, ‘handles in a sad, subtle, dignified way a case of frustrated homosexual love’ (96). My notion is that somewhere in Pessoa’s mind was the idea that the late-nineteenth-century English poets—‘decadents’ such as Lionel Johnson, John Davidson and Ernest Dowson—had missed opportunities, especially after the justice system had crushed Oscar Wilde—to speak frankly, in all of its varieties, of the sex of their times. The English 1890s saw the publication of another first book by a young poet who is not customarily recognized as a ‘decadent’ poet of his times because he successfully buried his desires and sexual proclivities in quietly congenial romantic poems that a general reading public, at first few in numbers, took to its bosom over time. A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad (1896) is the reticent gray eminence that Pessoa found in Botto’s poems and that he as translator exploited. If António Botto could not have begun to translate himself and his poetry into English, there was another poet who could act as something like a cultural mid-wife to bring a new openness to ‘English’ poetry—an openness that in the first three decades of the twentieth century no English poet had dared to. This was a time, it will be recalled, when an English writer like E. M. Forster decided to keep Maurice, his ‘homosexual’ novel, hidden away, not daring to allow its publication during his lifetime. Let me conclude with the idea that the suggestion that Botto’s poetry (as Pessoa intends to show) provides the sexual explicitness lacking in the English poetic tradition in Pessoa’s time can

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be tested by comparing Housman’s poem ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’ and its intentionally but only partially veiled sexual meaning with the Botto poem leading off the section he entitles ‘Olympiads’, which celebrates ‘those bodies / Which are sculptures / In their muscles and their grace. / Holy flesh / Without the taint / Of any woman’s embrace, / which would make it / Sick, dull, hard to understand’ (99). This handsomely designed book, well-edited with a well-informed introductory essay by Josiah Blackmore and a useful selected bibliography, should be welcomed warmly by the many students of Fernando Pessoa. Perhaps it may even bring to the poetry of António Botto the English-language readership Pessoa desired for him almost ninety years ago. 29. Fernando Pessoa, Provérbios Portugueses. Ed. Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari. Lisboa: Ática, 2010. Fernando Pessoa, Argumentos para Filmes. Ed., Intr., Trans. Patricio Ferrari and Claudia J. Fisher. Postface by Fernando Guerreiro. Lisboa: Ática, 2011. Provérbios Portugueses and Argumentos para Filmes are the first volumes in Obras de Fernando Pessoa, a new series of texts under the general editorship of the redoubtable Jerónimo Pizarro, a thorough and accomplished investigator of all things pertaining to Pessoa. If most of Fernando Pessoa’s plans and projects for books—editions, translations, anthologies, collections of his own poems and those of others—remained unfulfilled, registered here and there in various stages of completion when he died in 1935 at the age of forty-seven, their existence offers, in many instances, challenges to the scholars who would bring together often widely scattered materials that survive in bits and pieces that, with intelligence, can be set together and thus given a meaningful order. The existence of such plans for books and projects provides license for books like Argumentos para Filmes. This constructed volume, in the words of its compilers, “reúne, pela primeira vez, todos os escritos pessoanos directamente relacionados com cinema. Dividida em quatro secções, a edição apresenta o conjunto de argumentos para filmes redigidos em três línguas diferentes (secção I), breves apontamentos/bibliográficos sobre cinema (secção II), projectos nos quais o cinema figura como um dos elementos integrantes (secção III) e correspondência na qual se faz menção ao cinema (secção IV)” (23). In addition to the book’s main text, there are appendices containing documentation from the poet’s library of his interest in film: (1) titles of books, articles, and reviews; (2) a table of the detailed announce-

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ments for films playing in Lisbon that the poet collected; and (3) a list of cinema references in presença, the modernist journal which regularly published Pessoa’s work beginning in 1927. Regarding presença and its editors’ interest in film, it is interesting to note that in 1929 Pessoa at first promised to contribute an “inquerito” on film but then reneged with a prevarication: “Não sei o que penso do cinema” (12). Argumentos para Filmes concludes with Fernando Guerreiro’s informative “postface,” a substantial, thirty-four page essay in which Pessoa’s interest in cinema is located within the larger context of the attention paid to cinema by Portuguese and French critics and theorists during the poet’s lifetime. Not among Pessoa’s incomplete or sketchy projects, however, is Provérbios Portugueses, his collection of 300 proverbs, selected and translated for the “National Proverbs” series published by Frank Palmer (later Frank Palmer and Cecil Palmer) of London and elsewhere. Although the final typescript was sent to the publisher on April 30, 1914, Pessoa’s text seems never to have been set in type. The sad fact is that his book became a casualty of the war that broke out in Europe in mid-summer. On October 29, 1914, Frank Palmer wrote: “I am sorry to tell you that owing to the War it is impossible for us to publish the Portuguese Proverbs for this year. Other things being equal we shall hope to publish in the Autumn of 1915, but, of course, we cannot be certain about anything at this juncture” (139). Moreover, Palmer explained, he could not accede to Pessoa’s request for payment of the five guineas that Pessoa was to receive for preparing the book, the loss of which, as he complained to others at the time, was personally a great calamity. By an odd coincidence, only two days after Pessoa wrote to Palmer requesting a new delivery date for his selection of the sayings from the “vox populi” of Portugal, this work for pay was interrupted by the sudden appearance “within him” on a single, specific day, of major heteronyms and their distinctive, clearly voiced poems. It might be said that the birth of his heteronyms more than compensated for Pessoa’s having lost his chance to have his collection of proverbs published, for the outbreak of war in August 1914 gave Frank and Cecil Palmer sufficient reason to put a stop to the “National Proverbs” series. In any event, by the end of the Great War, which had dragged on for more than four years, Palmer’s “National Proverbs” series was a thing of the past. Pessoa never again mentioned his own contribution to the series, as far as anyone knows, and if he retained a copy of the typescript he sent to London in 1914, no one as yet has turned it up. What has survived, however, besides various lists and notes referring to the collection—the payment he expected to receive, for instance—and the

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letters he received from Frank Palmer, is a listing in typescript in Portuguese of all the proverbs to be included in the compilation, along with handwritten listings of many of those proverbs, though not all of them, in Pessoa’s English versions. For those versions that are missing from the surviving lists, the editors of Provérbios Portugueses have provided literal translations. The editors have also consulted Pessoa’s known sources for most of the proverbs he chose to include, noting variations in phrasing and orthography. Pessoa explained that his selection of 300 representative proverbs “should be such as to give the reader a clear idea of the character of the Portuguese and of their characteristic attitude towards life and men” (131). Given this aim, it is notable that he chose to bookend his collection with proverbs that tell us that “God is good, but the Devil is also not a bad fellow” (Deus é bom, mas o Diabo também não é mau) and that “God writes straight with crooked lines” (Deus escreve direito por linhas tortas). He is careful to explain, too, that “with one exception,” he has “inserted no saying of a literary or cultured cast; and the exception referred to has, I think, the excuse of originality.” His appeal to “originality” begs the important question for the student of the proverb of how “originality” (or its opposite, whatever that may be) factors into a consideration of the very nature of the proverb. In fact, the specific proverb Pessoa has in mind is “Deus te guarde de párrafo de Legista, e de Infra de Canonista, e de Etcetera de Escrivão, e de Recipe Matasão” (no. 208). Pessoa’s translation does not appear on the surviving list, but the editors render it as “Shall God protect you from the Legist’s Paragraph, the Canonist’s Infra, the notary’s Etcetera, and the Quack’s Prescription.” It is difficult to imagine this expression’s ever having been voiced by the people. It goes without saying that it is good to have Provérbios Portugueses added to the still growing list of editions of Pessoa’s work, multifarious and often hitherto unpublished. Equally welcome is the scholarship involved in the making of this book as evidenced by its useful notes, its identification and consideration of Pessoa’s sources, a table of variations, and a dossier of the surviving correspondence between Pessoa and his London publisher. The ever resourceful scholars who have given us Provérbios Portugueses and Argumentos para Filmes are to be commended for their dedication, intelligence, and efficiency. 30. Principais Poemas de Edgar Allan Poe. Intr. Fernando Pessoa. Trans. Fernando Pessoa and Margarida Vale de Gato. Ed. Margarida Vale de Gato. Lisboa: Guimarães, 2011.

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The title of this book is of Fernando Pessoa’s own devising and it pertains to a book that early in his literary career he planned to do but which, as it turned out, he either abandoned or just did not live to carry out. Dead in 1935, at the age of forty-seven, this master of European Modernism, with his wide-ranging interests—poetry, fiction, drama, and translation, as well as literary theory, philosophy, sociology, history, commerce and public relations—along with the need to support himself on what amounted to a day-to-day basis, made many workable plans and managed to accomplish many things, though not nearly as many as he expected to bring to fruition. Several of Pessoa’s plans involved translating many of the great works of English-language literature. He intended to bring all of Shakespeare’s major plays into Portuguese, for instance, offering to deliver them to publishers, one play at a time, on a monthly basis, as well as bringing out periodically the works of other writers, such as Charles Dickens or O. Henry. Poe’s poetry, to which he was not entirely committed to “liking,” he would bring into Portuguese in a selection, what he considered to be the American’s “principal” poems. A few of them, finished to his own satisfaction—“The Raven,” “Ulalume,” and “Annabel Lee”—Pessoa published in early issues of Athena, a Lisbon journal he co-edited, in 1924–25. Others he left in various stages of translation, some running to a stanza, a few to just a line or two. In still other instances, he left evidence of which Poe poems he would include in his Principais Poemas by ticking off titles in the table of contents in his copy of the Choice Works of Edgar Allan Poe, a handsomely presented collection published in London in 1902, that he had chosen as part of the Queen Victoria prize awarded to him in 1904 as the author of the best essay in the competition for admission to the University of the Cape of Good Hope. It was this situation—Pessoa’s mere lick and a promise towards publishing a selection of Poe’s poems in translation—that confronted the poet, scholar, translator Margarida Vale de Gato. As the accomplished translator of Poe’s complete poetry and the author of a doctoral dissertation in which she defines and explores the Portuguese literary context into which Poe’s work was introduced, she has bitten the apple and joined Pessoa as his collaborator to bring to fruition his plan to offer a wider Portuguese-language readership the best of Poe’s poetry. To flesh out Pessoa’s original plan she has dared not only to “finish” a few of Pessoa’s unfinished (sometimes barely started) translations but to introduce her own translations of the Poe poems that Pessoa indicated he would translate but left no evidence that he had even begun to do so. Fittingly, moreover, the authorship of each trans-

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lation in Principais Poemas is identified as Fernando Pessoa himself, Fernando Pessoa and Margarida Vale de Gato in “collaboration,” or Margarida Vale de Gato alone. In the interests of something like full disclosure, one imagines, she has also included, as documentation in facsimile, a clutch of illustrations taken from the surviving loose sheets, scraps, and book pages pertaining to Pessoa’s plans for Principais Poemas as well as his various tries at translation. To these she has added a few other short texts by Pessoa relating to Poe’s poetry that might or might not have been intended for the specific book he proposed, along with a useful bibliography of Pessoa texts and scholarship on Poe and Pessoa, and a substantial editor-collaborator’s preface, one which discusses Pessoa’s long-standing interest in Poe’s poetry and poetics, as well as stating the editorial and scholarly principles followed in the making of the book. Viewed from any vantage, Principais Poemas de Edgar Allan Poe, the product of a rare kind of imaginative scholarship, is a model of its kind. 31. Fernando Pessoa, Prosa de Álvaro de Campos. Eds. Jerónimo Pizarro and Antonio Cardiello, with the assistance of Jorge Uribe. Lisboa: Ática [Babel], 2012. “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh,” warns the Preacher of Ecclesiastes (12:12). Yet from his lips to the ear of God, I say, for the making of books is something to rejoice in, and if much study wearies the body, it is a welcome weariness. This is true overall, but it is particularly true of the books that continue to emerge from the seemingly bottomless trunk in which Fernando Pessoa kept what could be called, with not entirely unintended morbidity, after his death in 1935 at the age of forty-seven, his literary remains. Taking its place now among the books emerging from Pessoa’s word-hoard is Prosa de Álvaro de Campos, in which previously published materials are combined with hitherto unpublished materials from the trunk. More about the makeup of the book later on. But first a word about the lasting figure of the putative author of these materials. As the Spanish scholar Américo Castro would insist on the subject of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, much has been said about this book but there is much more still to be said. About the Knight himself, Jorge Luis Borges wrote in the essay “Partial Magic in the Quixote”: “Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or specta-

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tors, we its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.” I would add a question: why is it for readers that Cervantes’s imagined creature or Shakespeare’s hero rival their friends, neighbors and relatives, for a prominent place in their thoughts, perceptions, and continuous “reality”? Pessoa himself anticipated this triumph of imagination over actuality in his own case. “Pode ser que, se houver verdade a revelar-nos, nem atravessar-mos perpetuamente, de vida em vida ou de planeta em planeta, estados differentes da mesma illusão, eu verifique que eu só fui a ficção, e Caeiro, Reis e Campos, e outros que venha a haver, sejam as verdadeiras realidades de que eu não fui mais que o paiz ou a estalagem.” (74) No wonder that one prominent scholar confesses gladly that she has been in love with Álvaro for decades. Speaking for myself, I have known “Álvaro de Campos” for decades and would be surprised if I encountered him in the Baixa only because I have assumed that the living Campos went to his great reward long ago—though the day’s newspapers failed to notice. Following David Mourão-Ferreira’s observation years ago that most of the best work by Pessoa and his heteronyms he put into print during his lifetime (the great notable exception being the Livro do Desassossego) and with João Rui de Sousa’s indispensable Fotobibliografia de Fernando Pessoa (1988) to guide me, I organized my Pessoa seminar not conventionally by themes, subjects or heteronyms, for example, but in line with the chronology of Pessoa’s publications in the order in which readers first encountered them during his lifetime. Of course, this put the focus in the seminar on Fernando Pessoa as a working man of letters, who, to a greater or lesser extent, controlled how his readers were to take him as he revealed how he took himself and (importantly) his active roles in the cultural and political life of his times. Thus after attending to his first published poem at the age of fourteen and his high school publications (along with a piece in the Natal Mercury by C. R. Anon, his first English heteronym), we took up his two great essays in A Águia, Teixeira Pascoaes’ journal, in 1912, both of them signed by Pessoa himself. So, importantly, we affirmed that he started out as a critictheorist, a sort of John the Baptist announcing a new dawn for Portuguese poetry. A handful of pieces follow, including an intervention, some reviews, and “Na Floresta do Alheamento,” which later he would identify as belonging to the Livro do Desassossego, but at the time identified as being by Fernando Pessoa himself. The first significant poem that Pessoa published is “Impressões do Crepusculo,” which appeared over his own name in A Renascença in February 1914. Not until the first issue of Orpheu in early 1915 did

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Álvaro de Campos first make it into print, with “Opiário” and “Ode Triunfal,” the latter becoming, as Campos is made to reveal, the engineer-poet’s favorite poem. In Orpheu 2 Pessoa publishes Campos’s “Ode marítima,” followed by, over his own name, “Chuva oblíqua.” Over the next few years, Pessoa publishes some poetry over his own name. Campos next surfaces in his spectacularly defiant outcry, “Ultimatum,” in Portugal Futurista in November 1917. Over the next years he publishes numerous poems over his own name, as well as his novella O banqueiro anarquista in 1922. In that same year Campos, writing from Newcastle-on-Tyne, addresses an expatriate’s letter to the journal Contemporânea, as well as his famous “Soneto Já Antigo.” More of Campos appears in subsequent years. The point of this rehearsal is that Campos was the first of Pessoa’s three major heteronyms to appear in print and he did so fairly often well before the other two major heteronyms—Ricardo Reis and Alberto Caeiro—were introduced to Pessoa’s readers in the journal Athena (which Pessoa co-edited) in 1924–25. Campos was also the last of the three heteronyms whose work appeared in print. His quintessential poem “Tabacaria” appeared in presença in 1933, and the note “Nota ao Caso” was included in Almada Negreiros’s Sudoeste in the year and month of Pessoa’s death. One more fact. By the time Pessoa released the poetry of Reis to Athena, Reis had already disappeared in the urban wilds of Brazil, a political dissenter, and when he printed the first poems of the un-philosophical philosophical Caeiro—the poet Campos called his master—he was already dead. Only Campos had an ongoing life that Pessoa could monitor as it developed and changed over actual time. He was Pessoa’s alter-ego, surrogate, big brother (though putatively younger by three years), scolding conscience, and literary competitor—all rolled into one bi-polar side-kick. Pessoa left so much more material his heirs preserved in the seemingly bottomless baú that even now, after decades of its being mined, there are still books being constructed out of what in an earlier age would have been deemed the author’s literary remains. Complete works, more or less finished, such as Pessoa’s translation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, his own book-length translation of Antonio Botto’s Canções into English, and, in English, his translations of 300 Portuguese proverbs for a London publisher who did not bring out the book, and a guide to Lisbon for English tourists (which may or may not be considered Pessoa’s original work, in part or whole). Others have been constructed, such as Pessoa and his interest in film or Poe in translation, comprised of Pessoa’s published translations of the American poet, fragments of unfinished transla-

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tions, and translations by the creator of the whole text of poems Pessoa marked (it is assumed) for translation but that he did not get to. Now we have, at last, Prosa de Álvaro de Campos, edited by Jerónimo Pizarro and Antonio Cardiello, with the assistance of Jorge Uribe. Taking its rightful and worthy place next to the many and various editions of Campos’s poetry (which in themselves constitute a whole area needing close investigation), this collection of prose is a harvest of riches. In this book Álvaro de Campos’s prose is divided up and apportioned out to seven sections in this order: 1. “Não publicada”; 2. “Entrevista”; 3. “Notas para a recordação do meu mestre Caeiro”; 4. “Publicada em vida”; 5. “Correspondência”; 6. “Outros textos”; and 7. “Projectos.”’ To these—the main text of the book—are added a good deal of useful editorial material organized: 1. “Notas genéticas”; 2. “Bibliografia”; 3. “Indice sequencial”; “Indice topográfico”; and 5. “Indice onomástico.” The editors do their best “to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s” by , for example, printing the hitherto unpublished notes intended for “Notas para a recordação do meu mestre Caeiro,” the important essay published in 1931 in presença (issue 30), to accompany, in the same issue, Caeiro’s “O oitavo poema de O Guardador de Rebanhos.” This book will be mined over and again by those readers seriously interested, not only in Campos and Pessoa himself, but in European studies, especially modernist theory, poetry, and criticism. Much of it is new to print, including Campos’s intellectual pyrotechnics and unexpected pirouettes, when so much of what he thinks and insists upon depends, as he readily acknowledges, on his understanding of and commitment to “engineering.” It was not just his vantage point; it was, to change the metaphor, his rock. In conclusion, let me offer instances of the great wit, hitherto not so aphoristically displayed, that helps us to appreciate even more keenly “the world according to Álvaro de Campos,” the beau ideal Englishman that Pessoa imagines for himself, the young student in Durban whose Portuguese nationality kept him from attending Oxford or Cambridge on fellowship. Among my favorite examples of Campos’s wit are his perversions of well-known proverbs (58): 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Mais valem dois passaros na mão do que um a voar. Nem tudo que é ouro é luz. Candeia que vae adeante allumia duas vezes. Deus escreve os tortos por linhas direitas. Deus é um conceito economico. Á sua sombra fazem a sua burocracia metaphysica os padres das religiões todas.

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6. Mais vale nunca do que tarde. E o santo portuguez, como diz o dictado, é S. Nunca. No less snippy are such observations as these: 1. O historiador é um homem que põe os factos no seu devido logar. Não é como foi: é assim mesmo. (60) 2. Não consegui nunca ser inteiramente desconnexo. Delirar, sim, mas com juizo. 3. Sem querer, amo a França, porque sabe saber escrever. (61) 4. É verdade. Quem é que reveria as provas do Livro do Destino? (61) 5. O monotheismo é uma doença da civilização, um stigma da sua decadencia. (138) To these he adds pithy “definições” of a bevy of cultural luminaries (62–65): Mallarmé (“A musica de metade das palavras, e metade das palavras da musica”), Victor Hugo, Musset, Vigny, Rousseau, Goethe, Shakespeare (“Tudo, excepto o todo”), Milton, Flaubert, Montaigne, Homer, Nietzsche (“Deshumano, demasiado humano”), Camões (“A nau a meio carinho”), Voltaire (“A malicia da malicia”), and a few others. And circa 1932, he sums up “Álvaro de Campos” in an epitaph: “Foi o unico Grande Resultado do Futurismo. Não foi um resultado do Futurismo.” (65) There is no doubt about it. This book is a keeper, one to be savored. 32. Fernando Pessoa, Eu sou uma antologia: 136 autores fictícios. Eds. Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari. Lisboa: Tinta-da-china, 2013. Edgar Allan Poe, one of Pessoa’s two great American masters (the other one was Walt Whitman) begins his tale, “The Man of the Crowd,” with the mysterious statement that “it was well said of a certain German book that ‘er lasst sich nicht lesen’—it does not permit itself to be read.” That’s not entirely true of the book under review, but, modifying what Poe’s narrator said about that German book, I would come close to saying that it “does not permit itself to be reviewed”—at least not readily. From childhood Pessoa was the creator of fictitious beings. He himself, in his famous letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro dated January 13, 1935, named the Chevalier de Pas as “o meu primeiro heteronymo, ou, antes, o meu primeiro conhecido inexistente.” He also recalled that the Chevalier had a rival, though he could not at the moment recall

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his name. Interestingly, this hinted-at interplay between these childhood inexistent acquaintances seems to foreshadow what would become for the adult Pessoa the fruitful way of extending his notion of “drama-em-gente” to a “drama entre” those fictitious beings. As he wrote in “Tábua Bibliográfica” (1928), prepared at the request of José Régio in his capacity as one of the editors of presença, “As obras heterónimas de Fernando Pessoa são feitas por, até agora, trez nomes de gente—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos. Estas individualidades devem ser consideradas como distinctas da do auctor dellas. Fórma cada uma uma espécie de drama; e todas ellas juntas formam outro drama.” Let us single out the words até agora. Never mind that Pessoa chooses to ignore here his numerous other heteronyms, such as Alexander Search, Antonio Mora or the Barão de Teive, to name but three. What stands out here for me is the hint that besides the possibility that other heteronyms might participate in the drama that has been created by the big three, there might be other heteronyms whose individual dramas might form a separate cluster, that is, a drama played out among themselves. There’s a chicken and egg question here. Given Pessoa’s lifelong fascination with the names and signatures of all sorts of fictitious beings of his own making, along with multiple and varied signatures of those names (including his own), one can legitimately ask if the existence of a given heteronymous being preceded his naming or viceversa. I suspect that it could go either way. Yet an answer to this mystery might well contribute to our understanding of how the complex creative mind of Pessoa actually worked, especially given the all-but-professional interest Pessoa took in the character analysis of signatures and all handwriting. Recognizing this, the editors of Eu sou uma antologia reproduce such signatures, sometimes, when they are available, in generous quantities. One-hundred-thirty-six fictitious authors. That is the number the editors have settled on as the so-far identifiable body of writers barely named, shadowy and sketchy or, in the cases familiar to all Pessoa’s readers, bodied forth substantially with a body of writing of their own. Besides presenting the facts and comments that give the “fictitious author” an identity, the editors offer samples (when they exist) of that author’s writing. This combination of biographical dictionary and anthology makes Eu sou uma antologia a valuable resource for future scholarly work on the nature and extent of Pessoa’s heteronymous project. There have been other compilations of the names of Pessoa’s fictitious persons, but the authors of this “anthology” have honored the listings of those predecessors by applying a simple test. Was the ficti-

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tious name set down that of a “writer”? The editors allow, moreover, that their list (or compiled evidence) is not to be considered definitive. After all, in many cases, there is presented no more than a name and the title of a work that was merely projected and as far as anyone knows (at least até agora) not even begun. No doubt that Pessoa, despite the sheer quantity of his writing that has survived, was the victim of the old adage: “his eyes were bigger than his belly.” Well, I must confess that, despite my initial reservations about the possibility, this is a book that can be read. In fact, this part-reference book, part-anthology, made for compelling reading. Its length militated against my usual sort of sit-down, straight-ahead reading; my gradual fascination with this anthology kept me interested in just what name, old or new, would be taken up next, all the way through its more than 600 pages. For the scholar, moreover, há pano p’ra mangas here—that is, leads that call for further exploration. I, for one, am grateful once again to Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari for coming up with the idea for this book and then providing scholars with such an excellent tool for future scholars researching this phenomenon that is Fernando Pessoa. 33. Fernando Pessoa, The Transformation Book or Book of Tasks. Edited by Nuno Ribeiro and Cláudia Souza. New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2014. When, sight unseen, I agreed to review the latest Pessoa book, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. Although I’ve kept up pretty much with all the books presenting collections of materials, largely previously unpublished, I was not prepared for the put-together collection of materials comprising The Transformation Book. After a first quick perusal of the volume, I was exacerbated enough (or, perhaps, only puzzled enough) to dash off these lines: The songwriters called them “sectional” introductions that created a bridge in a musical between the prosaic action of the play and the “real” song, easing the response to what otherwise might seem to be an abrupt break in the action of the play. Not in all its senses or its wider implications, but so, too, might one see the poet’s overall plan. Set many hares running, projects described, books given titles, tables of contents (set down in flux) of works still in the works, few near completion, most destined to languish in the optative mood, with nary a hope that anyone might live long enough (or have the energy) to bring them to book. Thus how lucky then to inherit a bevy of selfreproducing workers who would bring order to the remains, even to

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the point of producing materials that the Master, in their opinion, would have without a doubt have come up with to fulfill a reach if not a grasp. But then there is a shibboleth about “the making of books.”

Of course, to settle for this as one’s response to The Transformation Book would hardly qualify as compliance with the due diligence required of any reviewer. So, a couple of weeks later, I took a deep breath and once again picked up the book. Once more into the breach, I told myself. In a long introduction the editors offer a rationale for putting these many seemingly disparate works together, following hints embedded in sample pages featuring tried-out titles, followed by lists of works, some written, other announced but barely started, or reminders of pieces that would, at Pessoa’s death, not have been started at all or, for all one knows, abandoned or forgotten along the way. Pessoa’s idiosyncratic ways of thinking are parodied in a quasisyllogism that the editors of this Transformation Book quote in their introduction: 1. Jesus was either God, or man, or both God & man. 2. Being man, Jesus was an abnormal man. 3. Being an abnormal man, he was either a genius, or a madman, or a criminal 4. He was not a genius, nor a criminal 5. Therefore he was a madman. The “therefore” that line 5 calls for is priceless. Fortunately, the creators of this Transformation Book are clearer about their intentions and more traditionally logical in their description of what they have produced. Conceived by Pessoa in 1908, a year of great social and cultural transformation in Portugal, The Transformation Book was designed to reflect and advance social & cultural transformation in Portugal and beyond. Moving between a number of literary forms, including poetry, fiction, & satire as well as essays on politics, philosophy, and psychiatry, The Transformation Book marks one of the fundamental stages in Pessoa’s elaboration of a new conception of literary space, one that he came to express as a “drama in people.” Alexander Search, Pantaleão, Jean Seul de Méluret & Charles James Search are the four “pre-heteronyms” to which the texts of The Transformation Book are attributed. These four figures constitute a plural literary

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microcosm—a world that Pessoa makes, but that is occupied by a multiplicity of authors—& clearly anticipate the emergence of Pessoa’s heteronyms.

If my final judgment borders on something like a Scotch verdict: not proven, it begins with the problem I have with seeing in this Transformation Book a constructed version of a unified entity that Pessoa never managed to come close to putting together in anything resembling its final form. Nor is this book acceptable as a collection made up of scattered writings on a given subject or on a theme that might be put between the covers of a book, for everything pertaining to Pessoa has become of interest. No, when someone has tried to piece out a project that was, perhaps, half-baked to begin with, then present it as the book that Pessoa somewhere indicated that he would construct, it is annoyingly unsatisfactory. And that, I’m afraid, is the case with The Book of Transformation.That said, it must be acknowledged that The Book of Transformation now exists and must be reviewed. It is divided into 4 parts: 1. Alexander Search, 2. Pantaleão, 3. Jean Seul de Méluret, and 4. Charles James Search—Fragments of Translations. The first section is made up of The Portuguese Regicide and the Political Situation in Portugal, The Philosophy of Rationalism, The Mental Disorder of Jesus, Delirium and Agony; the second, A Psychose Adeantativa, As Visões de Sñr Panteleão, and A Nossa Administração Colonial; the third, Des Cas d’Exhibitionnisms, La France en 1950, and Messieurs les Souteneurs; and the fourth, Anthero de Quental’s ‘Complete Sonnets,’ Sonnets (chosen) of Camoens, Guerra Junqueiro—Choice. These four sections are followed by Addenda running to some ninety pages (keyed to the four sections comprising the body of the book), along with a bibliography. Throughout there is a lot of numbering to buttress the order in which the items are presented and to suggest (I presume) that the effect overall may be incremental. But if so, to me the order is inconsequential and the intended incremental effect escapes me. If we take the book to have resulted from efforts to flesh out titles that appear on a list of tasks for the future, one can only decide that the finished product delivers much less than it promises. Furthermore, for every text that the average reader of Pessoa encounters for the first time in this book there are many that he or she has become familiar with elsewhere in a different and, usually, more apppropriate context. It is good to read once again the poetry of a mainly whining Alexander Search, stretching out his lines and digging away at rhymes in the orthodoxy of the sonnet, but their new context in this book adds little or nothing

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to our understanding of Search or his poems. Moreover, Pessoa would live to do much better than any of this. Take Search’s “A Day of Sun,” which runs to 8 quatrains, beginning: “I love the things that children love / Yet with a comprehension deep / That lifts my pining soul above / Those in which life as yet doth sleep,” and ending, 7 quatrains later: “And in a strange way undefined / Lose in the one & living Whole / The limit that I call my mind, / The bounded thing I call my soul.” Set it alongside Alberto Caeiro’s untitled poem: “É talvez o último dia da minha vida. / Saudei o sol, levantando a mão direita, / Mas não o saudei, dizendo-lhe adeus. / Fiz sinal de gostar de o ver antes: mais nada.” One is an exercise; the other an achievement. It is pretty much accepted that Pessoa was an accumulator, almost exclusively, it seems, of sheets or scraps of paper on which he had written something or other. Had he lived long enough to look over his accumulation, it is curious to ponder how much of what makes up this Transformation Book would have made the cut. As it stands before me, I will venture to say that this publication is at best a concoction that will try the patience of even the most committed, the most rabid of Pessoa’s myriad readers—I stop short of calling us “junkies”—for whom everything by the Master seems worth parsing and, sooner or later, packaged for consumption.

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The First Symposium Actas do I Congresso Internacional de Estudos Pessoanos, published in September 1979, presents the papers delivered in Porto, Portugal, on April 3–5, 1978. Its title is misleading, for the fact is that the very first international Pessoa conference had taken place more than six months earlier and on a different continent. The “actas” for that first international symposium were published by Gávea-Brown, Providence, Rhode Island, in 1982, under the title The Man Who Never Was: Essays on Fernando Pessoa. What follows herewith is an account of the Brown University symposium on October 7–8, 1977, drawn from the introduction to the published “actas,” followed by seven letters from Jorge de Sena pertaining to the symposium.

I. The Symposium On October 7–8, 1977, Brown University was privileged to serve as the host to what turned out to be the first international symposium on Fernando Pessoa held anywhere in the world. When in 1976 it first occurred to the faculty at the university’s Center for Portuguese and Brazilian Studies to sponsor and organize such a meeting, it did not strike us that when held ours would be the first such symposium. It could not then have been foreseen that our symposium would anticipate by almost six months to the day the congress held by the Centro de Estudos Pessoanos, Oporto, Portugal, in the spring of 1978. Those who planned and organized the symposium were motivated by the desire to call attention, particularly in the United States and other English-language countries, to the major poetic achievements of one of the world’s great Modernist poets. Of the stature of the work of Valéry, Rilke, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot, Fernando Pessoa’s work remained, we felt then, terra incognita in the United States. Matters were a bit better in England, perhaps since Pessoa’s first significant publications, Antinous and 35 Sonnets (originally in English) and

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Inscriptions, appeared in London (the first two in 1918 and the last in 1920) and since the Englishman Roy Campbell, who knew of Pessoa’s early years in South Africa, had translated some of his poems. But even in England Pessoa’s reputation was slight indeed; and although the translations of Pessoa by Jonathan Griffin, F. E. G. Quintanilha, and Peter Rickard—all in 1971—were giant steps in redress, there was still a long way to go. In the same year, it should be pointed out, the American publisher Alan Swallow brought out its bilingual edition of Edwin Honig’s selected translations of Pessoa. Still, apart from an occasional essay in the Luso-Brazilian Review, in the United States Pessoa was relegated entirely to the classroom and to national and regional meetings of the various modern language associations. Yet it cannot be said that even in academia Pessoa had fully arrived. There was then no Prentice-Hall Twentieth-Century Views volume on Pessoa, no Twayne World Authors series study, no G. K. Hall bibliographical guide—some of the tell-tale signs of academic acceptance. These simply did not exist. But soon the weather in Pessoa studies began to turn around. In The Poet’s Work: 29 Masters of 20th Century Poetry on the Origins and Practice of their Art, edited by Reginald Gibbons (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), several excerpts from Pessoa’s prose, collected under the title “Toward Explaining Heteronymy,” were given a featured place early in the volume, second only to a short poem, “Ars Poetica?” by Czesław Milosz. As more and more of Pessoa’s work—prose as well as poetry—was translated into English, the clearer it became that his contribution to modern literature and thought was enormous. At any rate, since Pessoa was not well enough known to Englishspeakers in 1977, it was decided that the program at our symposium would be conducted mainly, if not entirely, in English. Those invited, with one exception, were asked to present papers and lectures in English, and they agreed to do so. As a result we were able to present, over a two-day period, the following program: Poetry Reading Jean Longland (Hispanic Society of America) Nelson H. Vieira (Brown University) Opening Lecture João Gaspar Simões (Lisbon, Portugal) “As relações de Fernando Pessoa com a revista presença” Lecture Hellmut Wohl (Boston University) “The Short Happy Life of Amadeo de Souza Cardoso”

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Lecture Alexandrino Severino (Vanderbilt University) and Hubert D. Jennings (Republic of South Africa) “In Praise of Ophelia: An Interpretation of Pessoa’s Only Love” Colloquium Catarina Feldman (Universidade de São Paulo) “The Sun vs. Ice Cream and Chocolate: The Works of Wallace Stevens and Fernando Pessoa” Gilbert Cavaco (Providence College) “Pessoa and Portuguese Politics” Ronald W. Sousa (University of Minnesota) “Ascendant Romanticism in Fernando Pessoa” Closing Lecture Jorge de Sena (University of California at Santa Barbara) “Fernando Pessoa: The Man Who Never Was” Poetry Reading Edwin Honig (Brown University) Lisa Godinho (Harvard University)

It was a great privilege and, as it turned out, a unique opportunity to include among the participants in the symposium two of the indisputable giants of Pessoa scholarship, João Gaspar Simões and Jorge de Sena, with Simões giving the first lecture (the only one delivered in Portuguese) and Sena the last and culminating one. The program of lectures and colloquium was framed by poetry readings of Pessoa’s Portuguese originals and their English translations by the translators themselves, Jean Longland on the first day and Edwin Honig on the second. For the rest of the lectures and papers, with the exception of Hellmut Wohl’s (he lectured on Pessoa’s contemporary, the artist Amadeo de Souza Cardoso), we chose to invite then-younger scholars—American and Brazilian—who could offer a new generation’s perspectives and interests on the subject of Pessoa: Gilbert Cavaco on Pessoa within the context of Portuguese politics, Alexandrino Severino (working in collaboration with Hubert D. Jennings) on Pessoa’s one known romantic relationship, Ronald Sousa on the question of Pessoa’s romanticism, and Catarina Feldman’s comparison of Pessoa to the American poet Wallace Stevens. The symposium was attended by three hundred people, including the Ambassador of Portugal to the United States, Dr. João Hall Themido, and Dr. José Stichini Vilela, then the Consul of Portugal in Providence, Rhode Island. From the beginning the symposium’s sponsors intended to publish the papers presented on the occasion, and, happily, all but one of those

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appeared in The Man Who Never Was. We were unable to include the Severino and Jennings paper, which could not be published at the time because Ofélia Queiros’s permission to quote from her letters to Pessoa was withheld. To the book, it was later decided to add interviews with Jean Longland and Edwin Honig, Pessoa’s earliest American translators, as well as papers by two other young students of Pessoa: Francisco Cota Fagundes (on Álvaro de Campos’s “Ode Marítima”) and Joanna Courteau (on Pessoa’s orthonymic poetry), and a biographical-bibliographical essay prepared by the noted Portuguese novelist and critic José Martins Garcia.

II. The Jorge de Sena Letters Planned originally for the spring of 1977, the Pessoa symposium was put off until later in the year to accommodate Jorge de Sena, who had prior commitments. During that period Sena was kept apprised of our evolving plans and the necessary changes in their specifics. This resulted, over the months, in an exchange of letters. Sena’s side of the correspondence amounted to seven letters. They are reproduced here with the kind permission of Mécia de Sena. 1. University of California, Santa Barbara Department of Spanish and Portuguese Santa Barbara, California 93106 January 7, 1977 Professor George Monteiro Director Center for Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Brown University Providence, Rhode Island 02912 Dear Professor Monteiro Excuse me for only now answering your most kind letter of December 2, which I received by the middle of that month, when already being overwhelmed not only with the usual bureaucratic work of two big departments but also with scores of applications for a vacancy in Spanish that we have advertised. To screen eighty candidates, and brace myself to interview some thirty of them at the New York MLA convention, as I did, kept me busy until the end of the month. Here I am now, thanking you very much for your letter and your invitation

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which highly honors me, and congratulating you and your Center for the initiative of a Fernando Pessoa Symposium. If I answer in English to your Portuguese letter it is because I suppose that, for administrative purposes, it will be more convenient to you. To be invited to deliver the closing lecture of the symposium, after the distinguished names who precede me in the tentative program, is a great honor that I cannot refuse. And so, I accept formally your invitation. But there is a problem that may be solved, if you accept me in just word and spirit (and not in “carne y hueso”, like our old Garcilaso translating Petrarch would say). In April-June I will have my sabbatical leave, which I was supposed to enjoy last year when struck by a serious illness from which I am recovering very well. My research plans and other contacts require me in Europe by then, since the middle of April to the middle of June. I can send you my speech— and I would like to know if we are supposed to talk in English, as it seems better to me, or in Portuguese. That speech would be read there by someone, or distributed among the attendance. As soon as I have your answer I will concentrate on some theme and inform you of it. You ask me about suggestions concerning other scholars who, either in Portugal or in the United States could be invited. In the United States Dr. Jean Longland, librarian of the Hispanic Society of America, has been a distinguished pioneer in translating Pessoa. In Germany Georg Rudolf Lind, who has published also in Portugal, has contributed widely to the study of some aspects of Pessoa. As a matter of fact, for instance, Anne Terlinden, a doctoral candidate, who came from Belgium to study here under me, wrote there a splendid masters thesis on Pessoa’s English poems (having worked with many of the unpublished ones, which Lind was kind enough to lend her). As to Portugal, I must say – even if for decades I have not had any personal contact with him – that it seems to me extremely unjust not to invite, as no. 1, Dr. João Gaspar Simões, who is in fact in this world of ours, the dean of Pessoa studies whether we like it or not, and moreover, the critic who first, nearly fifty years ago, proclaimed Pessoa the great poet that even Pessoa himself by then was and was not quite sure of being. As far as I know, Dr. Gaspar Simões is in good health and spirits, and can perfectly well fly to the United States. I have no doubt that the Gulbenkian Foundation (whose administrator, my good friend Dr. José Blanco is, being at the same time a great bibliographer on Pessoa, and whose director of the review Colóquio-Letras, Professor Prado Coelho is, besides being another outstanding “fernandista”), will give the best support to such an idea of mine. Other names of the highest category in Pessoa studies among

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Portuguese critics are Professor Eduardo Lourenço, of the University of Nice, and Professor José Augusto Seabra, I believe of the University of Porto now. Expecting to hear from you, and sending to you and all the members of your Center my best, I remain, sincerely yours, Jorge de Sena Professor of Portuguese & Comparative Literature Chairman, Spanish and Portuguese Department Chairman, Comparative Literature Program JS/ps 2.

University of California, Santa Barbara Department of Spanish and Portuguese Santa Barbara, California 93106 January 14, 1977 Professor George Monteiro Director Center for Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Brown University – Rhode Island Dear Professor Monteiro You must have received in the meanwhile my previous letter, thanking you for your kind invitation and accepting it (as I say, in word and Spirit, as it cannot be otherwise). This one is just a continuation, to redress a forgetfulness of mine. When I was giving you names in the U.S. – and I may be forgetting some really worthy ones – I should have mentioned Professor Joaquim Francisco Coelho, Stanford University, who can very well and in the most distinguished way represent Brazil and the good criticism of Pessoa produced there and here (in his case, also with articles printed in Portugal). Excuse me for bothering you again, but I felt that it was my duty to add this excellent name of a Brazilian critic who lives and teaches in the U.S. Sincerely yours, Jorge de Sena

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3.

University of California, Santa Barbara Department of Spanish and Portuguese Santa Barbara, California 93106 March 5, 1977 Professor George Monteiro Center for Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Brown University – Providence – Rhode Island 02912 Dear Professor Monteiro Please forgive me for only now more than three weeks after receiving your kind letter of February 9, answering it. But my life as double chairman in a crucial moment of several changes which must be enacted before I start my leave of absence, has been a perfect hell, with the collapse of my entire personal work and correspondence. Thank you very much for having accepted my suggestions about a meeting which I hope it will be the great success which Pessoa deserves and as not yet found in this country so deaf to what does not come with the blessings of France or Mittel-Europa. So, I will send you, to be read as the closing speech of your symposium, a paper written in English – you can read it yourself, doing me such favor, being so willing. Before I leave, my paper will reach you. What an excellent idea to have the papers published! I believe that, in good time, a biobibliographical note about each of the contributors will give to the book some “pessoana” authority. Of course you have already my authorization for such an enterprise. And I expect that the Gulbenkian Foundation will help you as I think that they should, and that the invited people may come (one or another may not, either because one never knows how things are worked out in Portugal, or just because they may feel that to come to the U.S. may tarnish their socialist paint – for many, you know, quite fresh). Keep me posted on any developments, call for my poor help if you think that I may be useful, and count on my remaining Sincerely yours Jorge de Sena P.S. – I would appreciate very much your announcing or advertising our prosperous (but in need of even more students) Summer Session, with Gulbenkian grants, at the Symposium, and around you. Here follow some leaflets. The brochure can go, if you wish.

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4.

University of California, Santa Barbara Department of Spanish and Portuguese Santa Barbara, California 93106 September 3, 1977 Personal Address: 939, Randolph Road Santa Barbara, Ca. Professor George Monteiro Chairman Center for Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Providence, Rhode Island 02912 Dear Professor Monteiro I was going – asking your forgiveness – to answer your letter of July 29, which had the Program of the Symposium attached, when I received your phone call. Here I am now, answering the letter, confirming what I told you in our conversation, and providing you with the information that you have asked for. My silence was the result of, overwhelmed with work, having to write in good time and acceptable Spanish, the opening speech of the convention of the Asociacón Internacional de Hispanistas, which I had been invited to deliver. Then, from the 21st to the 29th I was travelling or being in Toronto. Round-trip – price and schedules It seems that it is not quite easy from LA to reach Providence, and that there are more than one combination of routes. Anyhow, my travel agency came to the following conclusion: We will fly (my wife goes with me) from Santa Barbara to LA, from LA to Cleveland, from Cleveland to Providence (always United Airlines), Thursday October 6, arriving there at 8.34 p.m. And I will fly back. The 9th, by the 8.40 a.m. flight to New York (?). The price of one round-trip is 431.00. Allow me to tell you (and it is up to you and your budget to come to a decision on such question) that if the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation is, as I believe it is, sponsoring your symposium, they know that I do not travel alone because I cannot, and not just because I like to be with my wife; and so, the Foundation, in inviting me to go to Europe, giving me any grant, etc, accepts the provision of my wife’s round-trip being paid by them or included in the foreseen expenses covered by the grant.

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Almeida Faria – I was going to mention this point in my letter, but I took the opportunity of talking to you on the phone. He is one of the most admired and respected among the younger Portuguese writers (b. 1943), having published two novels of outstanding quality, and being a cultivated and intelligent mind. The proposed essay on Pessoa (Pessoa thinks Campos feels) is scheduled to be published as the opening text of the 2nd issue, also dedicated to Pessoa, of Quaderni Portoghesi, published by the Universities of Rome and Pisa. If you could extend to him an invitation, he will come on his own or with some kind of support which he may obtain having received the invitation, and he could then tour a few universities around the country. I know for sure that Stanford University will have him, like mine here. Looking at your schedule, quite crowded to be true, I feel that – even if you have to find a place for Octavio Paz, if he really will be there – it could be done, and I would be extremely pleased. Mr. Almeida Faria has been in the USA .before (as a special guest and resident at Iowa writers’ gathering, held some years ago for several months); and his address is Travessa Nova de S. Francisco de Borja – 5 – 1o – Lisbon. It was most kind of you, in sending me the flier for your recent series, “Roads etc,” to tell me that my person and my works were mentioned by several of your lecturers. Apart from the fact of some subjects not allowing such mentions to be made, I know perfectly well who would and who would not mention me in such a list of names. In general, scoundrels and mediocre people have always been my sworn enemies, not because I have hindered them (on the contrary, many of them even owe me the money that I do not have), but just because I exist as a kind of shadow of decency falling upon then all the time (and the shadow will remain, they know, even if I die, becoming even darker). I was extremely pleased with the possibility of Octavio Paz being present – and I do not think that he will prepare a lecture for the occasion, and perhaps you could have some special “round-table” with him and a couple of us, the others – , since I never had any occasion of meeting a poet and an essayist whom I respect, and who has been among the rare high ranking persons for whom Pessoa has been a discovery – to be made. Our globe-trotters’ paths never crossed – will they now? Certainly for people who have written on Pessoa for around half-a-century like Gaspar Simões or 35 years like me it will be a special pleasure to meet with an illustrious “convert,” whose fame can do for Pessoa more than millions writing in Portuguese, a language that Spanish-speaking people or hispanists are not supposed to know; for fear of losing their status in a world ignoring

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them altogether, since a big part of that world believes that God himself speaks also only English (a language which Pessoa could write too well for not being too literary in writing English poems). Above, I forgot to reiterate the title of my lecture, as I told it to you over the phone: Pessoa, the man who never was. Most truly yours Jorge de Sena P.S. – For sure, we will be in contact before my arrival. Anyhow, a tall, lean (not too much) man, with glasses and a dark beret on, and a wife at his side – it will be me. 5.

University of California, Santa Barbara Department of Spanish and Portuguese Santa Barbara, California 93106 22 September 1977 Professor George Monteiro, Chairman Center for Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Brown University – Providence – Rhode Island Dear Professor Monteiro Thank you very much for your letter of the 15th, which reached me yesterday (mail is using again stagecoaches, and the old country roads, I believe), and for all the copies of other letters that you were kind enough to write on behalf of my wife going with me, and about Almeida Faria’s possible visit to this country and your symposium. I expect that the Gulbenkian Foundation will say yes, what will be quite a relief for me. As to AF I think that the letters of yours, the two, will help him to solve the problem. I am glad to hear that you liked my idea of a “round-table” with Octavio Paz, and that your efforts to get him there are going ahead. It came to me (and the idea of the “table” to make things easier) the awful news – are they true? – that he had just undergone some cancer surgery. But it is possible that his condition may be by then already normal, as far as it can be. Sad thing, my God. We are looking forward at being there and meeting with you. I would appreciate, just in case, to know the name of the motel where everybody will stay. If there is any misunderstanding, delay in flights, wrong flights, etc, I will know where to go from the airport, if, in spite of your and my efforts, we do not find each other. By the way: a tall and rather lean white man, with glasses and a béret on, and a wife at his side, that’s me.

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Most truly yours Jorge de Sena Chairman P. S. – From now on, use my private address to speed matters (univ. means a delay of a couple of days): 939, Randolph Road, Santa Barbara, CA. 93111 6.

University of California, Santa Barbara Department of Spanish and Portuguese Santa Barbara, California 93106 September 28, 1977 Professor George Monteiro Director of the Center for Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Brown University Dear Professor Monteiro I have just received your letter of the 26th, giving me, just in case, the name and address of the motel where we will be staying, and asking for my social security number. Thank you very much for that information which I had asked for and here is that number: 391-52-9446 Looking forward to be there, and expecting our symposium to be a success, with all good wishes, Jorge de Sena 7.

University of California, Santa Barbara Department of Spanish and Portuguese Santa Barbara, California 93106 November 10, 1977 Professor George Monteiro Director Center for Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Brown University Providence, R.I. 02912 Dear George Monteiro Thank you very much for your letter of October 31, sending me the checks. You have not to apologize for the delay, since delays are becoming our daily bread in this era of super-sonic speeds, in which

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the mail service, it seems as I usually say, has returned to or revived stage-coaches: in fact, this letter of yours arrived only a couple of days ago. Be sure that in good time I will claim back the money that unduly was taken from my check by your bureaucracies, even if, nowadays, returned money is always money coming too late for such poor people, heading for the workhouse like we, scholars and teachers. As to the Symposium, which was such an excellent event, I received from Dr. José Blanco a letter, just yesterday, in which he tells me how happy they were about the success reported to them (it seems that Gaspar Simões has talked – urbi et orbi about our meetings etc), and how they – meaning the Foundation are prepared to help with the publication of some actas perpetuating the event. It was for me and my wife a great pleasure to visit your University, to have (unfortunately the time did not allow very much) the opportunity of visiting a most interesting area for me, which I had never seen before, and, the last but not the least, to make your acquaintance and to meet with your most kind and dynamic staff (please, extend to them all our best “saudades”) – so you have nothing to thank me for. My pleasure and a great honor for me. I hope that one of these days we may have the occasion of getting together again. Cordially Jorge de Sena, Chairman PS – Have you seen in the Fall River newspaper the attack to my wife, incredibly stupid, launched by that crazy doctor whom you have had in those parts, I suppose, since the time of the Corte-Reais, and as uncertain in his mind as they have been in their historical physicality around there?96

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Notes for a Review At first I planned to title this unwritten piece “More in Sorrow than in Anger: Notes toward a Review of the So-called (and Misnamed) Portuguese Issue of Translation, 25 (Spring 1991); or Half a Loaf is Better than None, though not Everyone would Agree.” Richard Zenith was the guest editor of the special issue of Translation, a journal published at Columbia University under the general editorship of Frank MacShane and William Jay Smith. The piece, never offered for publication, appears here for the first time. Apparently, the mere act of setting down these numbered notes in 1991 either was sufficient to satisfy my sense of disappointment (and annoyance) at this “Portuguese Issue” (and thus the review itself was no longer worth writing) or, as Robert Frost says famously about the wood-cutter who has not come back for his wood (“The Wood-Pile”), I turned to “fresh tasks.” I like to think it was the latter. In any case, here are the notes, unchanged, except for corrections of typos and the insertion of the inadvertently omitted word. I have resisted the temptation to eliminate those observations that are examples of nit-picking and thus meretricious. So, here are the notes, warts and all. 1. An opportunity to introduce English-language readers to an energetic, highly attractive contemporary literature—squandered through editorial mismanagement, arrogance, condescension, carelessness, what have you. These jokers have done it all. 2. The illustrative photographs perpetuate a sentimental, outdated view of a country benefiting and suffering from its membership in the European community. Quaint fishing boats, women scarved in black, foreground men in black with more contemporary garbed men off to the side in the far background, a fish-monger standing behind her upright display of sardines or carapaus, a woman balancing a large drum on her head as she leads a calf, both woman and calf being trailed by a farmer

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carrying a stick or a hoe. Oddly, though appropriately, perhaps, three of the photographs carry erroneous attributions, seemingly corrected by a card sent along with the volume. Such carelessness is not new to Translation, apparently, for the editors print a third of a page of “Errata” covering three mistakes in earlier issues, including the statement that Donald Keene’s translation of “Mademoiselle Hanako” by Mori Ogai in the Fall 1990 issue was from the French. What, by the way, is the mark over the “r” in the name “Franco” of “António Franco Alexandre” in the table of contents (viii)? It looks like a superscripted comma. Is it a diacritical mark? Will the editors apologize for it in the next issue of the journal? In a two-and-a half-page, eight-paragraph essay entitled “The World of Fernando Pessoa,” Richard Locke spends four paragraphs talking about José Saramago’s novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. And a good thing, too, for what he says about Fernando Pessoa and his heteronyms fails to go beyond the commonplace. And that’s when it is not misleading. Although it is true that Pessoa translated “commercial correspondence,” it is not so that he was “a clerk in a Lisbon business office.” It was not after Pessoa’s death that it was revealed that he had created three other bodies of work under the names of Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro, and Álvaro de Campos. He had been publishing their work over their discrete names for decades. He had even published some of the Livro do Desassossego under the semi-heteronymic name “Bernardo Soares.” But Locke would rather talk about Saramago anyway. An unsigned note, preceding the translation of Pessoa’s “static” drama, “The Mariner,” asserts that this play is “a fundamental text for understanding Pessoa’s work,” but fails to tell us in what way this is so. Álvaro de Campos’s “Letter to Fernando Pessoa,” which is given, testily asks the questions that have not yet been answered to anyone’s satisfaction. What is the principle of selection? Why choose Lobo Antunes and not João de Melo, Ruy Belo but not Jorge de Sena, Pedro Tamen and not Pedro da Silveira, why João Miguel Fernandes Jorge and not Joaquim Magalhães, why Carlos de Oliveira and not Vitorino Nemésio, why Fátima Maldonado and not Natalia Correia, Antonio Botto, Maria Velho da Costa, Lidia Jorge, Olga Gonçalves, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Mário Cesariny, Ruy Cinatti, Tomás Kim, Miguel Torga, José Martins Garcia,

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Adolfo Casais Monteiro, José Régio, Bernardo Santareno, Alberto de Lacerda, David Mourão-Ferreira, José Rodrigues Miguéis, Graça Moura, and on, and on. Virtually any reader of twentieth-century Portuguese literature can make up a formidable list of omissions. The point is that I cannot think that anyone will be satisfied that the editor(s) have done even an adequate job of representation in this issue of Translation. There is an unsigned disclaimer following the guest editor’s note of introduction to the effect that “Because of space limitations, this issue of Translation was unable to include work by some authors that the Guest Editor considered important, such as Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Mário Cesariny, Vitorino Nemésio, José Cardoso Pires, and Jorge de Sena.” Note that it is the “guest editor” who thinks them important. Do the two editors of the journal also consider them important? Do they know their work? If they do legitimately consider them significant, why exclude them when the volume published contains only 185 pages devoted to Portugal, the theme of the issue as announced, when the entire issue numbers 286 pages? And why when space is so short are nearly twenty pages at the end of the section—an emphatic place—given over to an overly generous excerpt from an essay by the Englishman V. S. Pritchett, an essay that has been in print for thirty-five years? It just won’t do. 8. Pity that Vergilio Ferreira, the author of Manhã Submersa (a novel that decades after its first publication was still considered good enough to win the 1990 Prémio Femina), and of later novels such as Aparição and Para Sempre, not to mention his Conta-corrente series of journals, should be represented by “The Hen,” a rather slight and atypical tale. It’s a good thing that Americans do not vote on the Nobel Prize. Reading this story by itself would be enough to sink this candidate’s chances. 9. On the verso of the back cover are listed six names of writers represented in this issue: two of them are Portuguese— Fernando Pessoa and José Saramago—so far so good; the other four—not so good—are V. S. Pritchett, Václav Havel, Nina Cassian, and Eugenio Montale. 10. This Portuguese Issue is “dedicated to the memory of Graham Greene and Max Frisch.” Secret lusophiles? If so, silent ones as far as I know. 11. The guest editor concludes: “Yes, Portugal is a land of poets . . .” Well, I doubt that many readers coming upon twentiethcentury Portuguese literature for the first time in this issue of

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Translation will find the statement especially convincing. And we are not talking entirely about quantity. The running title at the bottom of pages 28–29 should read “Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa),” not “Alberto Caeiro (Fernando Pessoa).” Beware the dangling modifiers (1) “Embittered by the reception he received from the French Academy (1845) and by political failure, the little he published towards the end of his life lamented the solitude to which genius must resign itself.” (23) Cronyism: Ruy Belo’s poetry is represented (in a translation by William Jay Smith, one of the continuing editors of Translation). Of Belo, the guest editor says; “Critical estimation has been increasing for the poet (Belo) since his death in 1978, and a critical edition of his work is nearing completion.” (7) Who is the editor of Belo’s critical works? Joaquim Magalhães, who three pages later, is given the last word on Agustina Bessa-Luis as poet almost despite herself. And who is João Miguel Fernandes Jorge, whose work is represented, but Magalhães’s close friend? The guest editor misleads when he says that Pessoa “did considerable work on Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, never published . . .” Never published in Pessoa’s lifetime, perhaps, but published by Dom Quixote in 1988. And there is evidence to indicate that a version of Pessoa’s translation was serialized in 1926–27, several years before Pessoa’s death in 1935. The guest editor publishes Pessoa’s “Prose Poem” (in Portuguese and English). He says of it, “[T]he translations are quite good as translations, whereas the texts themselves tend to be flowery and trite.” This remark strikes me as exactly contrary to what is there. It is good to see Eduardo Lourenço represented, and by a short piece on Pessoa, though it deserves a better translation. This one is awkward and stiff in ways that Lourenço’s work never is. There is a mistake in Gregory Rabassa’s translation of Vergilio Ferreira’s story, “The Hen.” If the asking price is at first $20,000 and the woman buys a second hen just like the first one for $7,500, it seems strange to say, “My mother was indignant because she’d haggled but had only managed to get the woman down to twelve thousand two hundred. . .” Editorial inconsistency: Why are we told that Ruy Belo’s poem “Muriel “ derives from Toda a Terra (1976) when the

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same is not done for any other poem by any other author? 20. Is it not curious that the poet Herberto Helder should be represented only by two short stories—that are quite short, but even so are too long for their intentions? “Style” starts out well but slips into unprogressive repetition. “Dogs, Seaman” depends upon a conceptual reversal—seamen do not keep dogs, dogs keep seamen—and proceeds to an obvious conclusion. José Cardoso Pires, who is not represented here, does much with the same sort of stuff. 21. Antonio Lobo Antunes thrives on being excerpted. The problem with his long novels is that he writes them all at the same shrill pitch. This excerpt is quite effective for a few pages, but then becomes rather tiring and ultimately boring over the long haul of his typical recent novel. 22. The excerpt from José Saramago’s novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, taken from the beginning of the novel, reads very well indeed. Saramago may well be the Portuguese novelist of the twentieth century, but Sena’s Sinais de Fogo, incomplete and unfinished though it is, rivals the best of Saramago. As do the best of Sena’s stories, such as “O Papagaio Verde” and “As Memorias do ex-criminoso de Guerra.” 23. Pritchett’s 1956 piece, one that was surely calculated not to offend anyone in the oppressive Salazarist regime that had run the country for nearly three decades by that time, is a skillfully written travel poem. It applies a fresh coat of paint on commonplace notions about Portugal and Portuguese character. It is travel writing at its competent best. The writing is as fresh as it was thirty-five years ago. But the view it offers of Portugal is out-dated, and that is paradoxical since Pritchett’s view feigns reality, passes for reality, but is really more like the women’s mariner’s dream of reality in Pessoa’s static drama. Why, then, reprint this piece in a special issue on modern and contemporary Portuguese literature? Were it of Portuguese authorship it might have qualified for consideration on that basis. But it is by a foreigner, and if it belongs to any literature, surely it cannot be Portuguese literature. As a matter of fact, were it written by a Portuguese, it would be held in something less than the implied high esteem singling it out for inclusion in this “Portuguese Issue” confers upon it. Even had there been space enough and time enough to include a full representation of modern Portuguese literature—three hundred pages could have gone

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a long way toward doing the job—there still should have been no point in including this well-written piece that is not out-dated only because it always was nothing less, nothing more than a few dozen pages out of the obligatory book all Englishmen of a certain stripe write on either on assignment or out of the need to improve the time spent on holiday. I suppose the essay’s recent reprinting in a collection of Pritchett’s essays (a volume recently remaindered) brought it freshly to the mind of editors about to put together such an issue as this one. Some foreign ballast would have helped, say Mary McCarthy’s incisive essay of her train journey from Lisbon to Porto. If the editors wanted to give the reader an up-to-date view of what really is going on in Portugal today—not the postcard views that Pritchett’s essay barely transcends but which the photographs capture precisely—they could have included something from Eduardo Lourenço’s timely book, Nós e a Europa ou as duas razões, the third edition of which appeared in January 1990. By the way, is it Pritchett (or his editors) who insists on referring to the province in northeast Portugal as “Trasosmontes”? Somebody should have known better—then and now. The illustrative photographs chosen fit to a T not the Portuguese literature reproduced—not Lobo Antunes, Saramago, or even Pessoa—but Pritchett’s travel essay. Where is Jorge de Sena when you need him? Not in this issue. The editorial note introducing Pritchett’s essay reads: “Although written thirty-five years ago, V. S. Pritchett’s portrait of Portugal, which is published here with minor alterations, is as telling today as it was then. Portugal has undergone political and social changes, but the spirit of the country has remained essentially the same as it preserves its separate and independent character.” Tell it to the marines. Or, better, to Eduardo Lourenço, whose essays on the implications of Portugal’s entry into the European community are required reading for anyone interested in the Portugal that is—now—Portugal. Lourenço sim, Pritchett não. The Portuguese Book Institute supported this issue. It says so on the verso of the back cover. On an attached sticker. Something should be made of this. I don’t know what exactly. I’m sure Havel, Pritchett, Montale (wherever he is), and especially the Italian Anna Bardi, whose thirty-page story is the longest thing in the issue—these are grateful. Or should be.

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28. Upon receiving a copy of Contemporary Portuguese Poetry (1978), José Gomes Ferreira, whose own poems lead off the volumes, complained to his diary that the selection of poets was not right, that the poems selected from the right poets was not right. And that such works would always be like that. Yet one should not be entirely dismayed if the barrier between languages was not entirely broken down by wellmeaning anthologies such as these. 29. It is good to have some of the more unusual Pessoa translated here. O Marinheiro, something from the Livro do Desassossego, a section from Álvaro de Campos’s A Passagem Das Horas. But none of these represents Pessoa at his best, not some snippets from what is admittedly a key work or a fragment of a poem. And what is the logic in including a single interview with a poet, even if that poet is Sophia de Melo Breyner? And what is one to make of the interview itself, one that is pleasant enough and even mildly informative (see her tunnel-vision charges against the Americans and Russians in Portuguese Africa) but which certainly does not earn its space in a section that purports to bring news of modern Portuguese literature. 30. Otherwise, a handsome production.

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The Bat and the Raven Born in Lisbon and educated in South Africa, Pessoa returned to Portugal as a young adult never to leave again. Co-founder of the important journals Orpheu and Athena, he contributed to all the major literary and cultural genres. Writing both in Portuguese and English, Pessoa published much of his best work under heteronyms. During his lifetime he published one book of poetry in Portuguese, Mensagem [Message], in 1934, and, early on, several chapbooks in English, leaving behind, at his death, a large body of unpublished and uncollected work. Among the five books Fernando Pessoa chose as part of the Queen Victoria Memorial Prize awarded him for the best essay on his college entrance examinations was the Choice Works of E. A. Poe, Poems, Stories, Essays (1902). An introductory essay by Charles Baudelaire provided Pessoa with the context in which he would from then on view Poe’s life and read his work. In the table of contents of his copy, which survives as part of the poet’s library at the Casa Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon, Pessoa marked his favorite stories, including “The Gold Bug,” which he translated into Portuguese.97 “Poe had genius,” he said. “Poe had talent for he has great reasoning powers, and reasoning is the formal expression of talent.”98 Pessoa was interested in all aspects of Poe’s work. He valued the American writer as a theorist of poetic composition, as the inventor of the ratiocinative tale, as the practitioner of the horror story, and as a poet. He incorporated Poe’s ideas into his own critical thinking, not only on the detective story (a critical history of which Pessoa intended to write but did not get beyond a brief beginning or two) but also on the mode of “horror” in fiction and the question of length in the detective story. Pessoa remarked that “It was one of Poe’s critical triumphs that he foresaw the necessity of the shorter poems. This was one of his visions of a future, as the detective story was one of his anticipations of it.”99 “The detective story must be short,” insisted Pessoa, “for there never is a problem that need take up very much space.

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Length in one of these stories is only admitted, when the reasoning demands it. Such is the ‘Mystery of Marie Roget’ of Edgar Allan Poe. Yet even this story is not long proportionally with its reasoning.”100 No detective story could be written “in the style of Tom Jones.”101 Pessoa also followed Poe in noting the impossibility, especially in modern times, of the long poem. “The tendency to brevity in modern literature—poetry—Poe,” he noted on a surviving scrap of paper, “our aesthetic sense is less keen than that of the ancients, but our intellectual sense keener.” He projected and wrote versions of a dramatic poem entitled “Ligeia.” Imitating Poe’s fiction, he based his story “A Very Original Dinner” (which he attributed to his early English heteronym “Alexander Search”) on Poe’s little known story, “Thou Art the Man.”102 He began a story of his own, one clearly indebted to “The Man of the Crowd,” written in the third person but centering on the old man pursued by Poe’s narrator: “I became a man of the crowd. I never trusted myself to be alone.”103 Poe’s text reads: “[He] is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd.” In the first issue of Athena (October 1924) Pessoa published a magnificent translation of “The Raven,” which, he prided himself, “conformed rhythmically to the original.”104 In the fourth issue (January 1925) he published, under the title of “Edgar Poe’s Final Poems,” his versions of “Annabel Lee” and “Ulalume.”105 Two years earlier he had published translations of several stories, including “The Masque of the Red Death” (O Baile das Chamas) and “William Wilson.” A note in the former states that Pessoa’s translations of “The Gold Bug” (O Escaravelho de Oiro) and “Ligeia” had also been published in the same series (by Editorial Delta), although there is no evidence that these stories actually came out.106 In addition to these poems and stories, there is evidence in Pessoa’s papers (now at the Instituto da Biblioteca Nacional e do Livro in Lisbon) show that he tried his hand at translating “The Bells,” “The Haunted Palace,” and “MS. Found in a Bottle,” while in his copy of Poe’s Choice Works there are samples of his attempts at translating “For Annie” and “The City in the Sea.”107 Pessoa speculated on the reasons for Poe’s meager poetic production, ignoring Poe’s explanation that his constant need for money forced him to turn to prose. Poe wrote “little poetry,” answered Pessoa, because in him “the critical faculty was developed at the same time as the poetic propensity. He wrote verse with ease while at college, but then neither his true imagination nor his intellect were [sic] developed. These were developed at the same time. Hence the critical faculty, the analytic mind, being ever on the watch, allowed

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not inspiration to take its free course.” Although Pessoa once said that “not many are the poems of Edgar Poe, and of those few not all of them are good” (“The Raven” not being among the good ones), he took Poe as poet seriously enough to speculate on what essentially differentiated him from Shelley: “Both Poe and Shelley were poets of the spiritual, but they have a great difference. Shelley describes the spiritual as the spiritual; Poe describes the spiritual as the not human. Shelley sees the grandeur, the joyous greatness of the problem of life; Poe sees this greatness also, but he sees none the less its horror. Shelley puts the great problem before us in reference to the soul that is warmed by its joyousness and its limitless love; Poe puts the problem before us in reference to the mind, which is crushed by its insolubility.” Two different but related aspects of Poe’s temperament and work caught Pessoa’s interest. He tried to define the peculiar kind of fear that characterized Poe’s work and the American poet’s almost preternatural fear of noise as well as his concomitant predilection for silence. This time he couched his comparison in terms of the French poet Maurice Rollinat. They are, he wrote, “both poets of fear yet each in a difft [sic] way. With Poe fear is more ethereal, more spiritual; it spiritualizes all things by its touch. With R. it materializes them, (distorts them at best). With P, however great his fear might be, it is but the chief manner of manifestation of his spirituality. With R, whatever spirituality he shows is a mode of manifesting of his fear. This is why with P. fear is spiritual, & with R. spirit is material. Both are intensely dominated by the sentiment of terror.” Pessoa attempted to explain elsewhere how this sentient terror resulted from Poe’s obsession with silence and noise, as we see in “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “The Fall of the House of Usher,” for example, and how Poe pervasively employs “silence.” In a fragment labeled “Poe,” he writes that closely linked to “the sentiment of fear” is “the auditory sensation”: “A nervous person is startled, very little by touch & sight, and much by sound. To one who fears the storm . . . the thunder is the more terrible part. A child that blinks at a bright light cowers at a sharp sound. Musicians are of all men the most nervous. . . . A very great susceptibility to music is accompanied . . . by a very great susceptibility to fear. . . . We know sufficiently Poe’s sensibility to music & his perpetual dwelling on the rhythmic side of poetry.” What is most suggestive in this fragment is the connection Pessoa makes between the musician’s nervous susceptibility to music and humankind’s generalized fear of noise. One thinks immediately of Roderick in “The Fall of the House of Usher” and of “Ligeia.” But of equal importance in the matter of Poe’s influence on Pessoa is the reference to the notion

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that to those who fear the storm “the thunder is the more terrible part.” Pessoa feared thunder, even when one such storm inspired him, apparently, to write a story based on “The Man of the Crowd.” Related to this fear of noise, for Pessoa and Poe, is their preoccupation with madness. “Poe has of the world a view such as a man with senses perturbed, buoyant,” writes Pessoa. “There is a sensation of surfeit in ecstasy. And a pain . . . . So to the eyes of the madman Poe the world is dilated, horrible.” That Pessoa felt akin to Poe and his madmen is undeniable. “One of my mental complications—horrible beyond words—is a fear of insanity, which itself is insanity,” he wrote clinically. “Impulses, criminal some, insane others, reaching, amid my agony, a horrible tendency to action.” Pessoa’s interest in the American poet extended to the details of Poe’s life that he learned from Baudelaire. Notably, Pessoa was struck with the French poet’s apology for Poe’s alcoholism. Poe’s death occurred, decided Baudelaire, when, at thirty-seven, he was “conquered by delirium tremens.”108 Just before his own death, Pessoa wrote “D. T.,” a poem about his own alcoholism that is not unrelated to “William Wilson” or “The Black Cat.” His more characteristic view of alcohol, however, was that it had its good uses. “A stimulant is something that excites us to be ourselves; thus whisky has led many men to deeds wholly unconnected with barley,” he wrote, echoing Baudelaire’s defense of Poe as an alcoholic martyr to his work.109 If he admired Poe’s work and was attracted to certain notorious aspects of his life, Pessoa also seemed to emulate that life. Baudelaire’s words about Poe might be applied to Pessoa, that “the poet had learned to drink as a laborious author exercises himself in filling notebooks,” for “the works that give us so much pleasure to-day were, in reality, the cause of his death.”110 Appropriately, this is the theme of the painting used on the cover of the standard bibliography of Pessoa’s work, in which appears a black bird perched atop an open chest containing the poet’s books and, presumably, manuscripts.111 When asked about this linking of poet, poetry, and bird, Pessoa’s bibliographer explained that ravens held a strong personal meaning for Pessoa. The poet often did his drinking at shops run by galegos (Galicians), who customarily kept ravens in cages. As he drank their distinctive red wine, Pessoa amused himself by talking to their Poesque birds. “Disse o corvo, ‘Nunca mais’“ [Quoth the raven, nevermore].

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Ofélia’s Lovers Pessoa insisted that Poe was not a great poet. “There are not many poems by Edgar Poe,” he wrote, “and among those few there are not many good ones.”112 Even Poe’s masterpiece, “The Raven,” Pessoa found to be “no very remarkable poem.”113 Yet Pessoa chose to include “The Raven” in the first issue of Athena: Revista de Arte, published under the co-editorship of Ruy Vaz and himself. In the October 1924 issue appeared Poe’s poem—translation by Fernando Pessoa, “in rhythmic conformance to the original,” as he himself boasted; and three months later, in the January 1925 issue (which turned out to be the journal’s penultimate number) Pessoa once again included Poe. Under the rubric “Edgar Poe’s Last Poems,” he published his versions—once again calling attention to the fact that his translations were “in rhythmic conformance to the original”—of “Annabel Lee” and “Ulalume.” These translations of three poems dealing in some way or another with the death of a beautiful young woman were to be the only translations of Poe’s poetry that Pessoa would publish. It was not only Poe as poet, however, that Pessoa attended to. He knew him as a critic (he thought “The Philosophy of Composition,” particularly his account of how he wrote “The Raven,” to be a selfdelusion) and he knew him even better as a writer of fiction, both the ratiocinative and puzzle tales (which resulted in experiments of his own along similar lines) and his stories of love and horror. In 1924, for instance, he brought out an edition of ‘The Masque of the Red Death,” and a year later a volume containing “The Gold Bug,” “William Wilson” and “Ligeia. The last named story had been on his mind for some time. As early as 1916 the legend Ligeia had appeared on a list of Pessoa’s projects, including works of theory, poetry and original prose. And it had emerged in still another way a year earlier: as a short poem that would not achieve publication until 1956 when it was included in Poesias lnéditas (1919–1930). Unrhymed and composed as a single stanza of eight lines, Pessoa’s “Ligeia” reads:

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I do not want to go where there is no light, Beneath the useless earth, never to see Flowers and flowing rivers in the sun, Or the seasons renewing themselves As they reiterate the land. Already The hollow fear of being nothing weighs On my trembling eyelids, of no longer Having the ability to see and taste, Feel warmth and love, life’s good and life’s bad.114

Pessoa’s title instructs us to read the lines dramatically. The voice is that of Poe’s dark heroine—which is not the case in the story. Poe’s tale is also told in the first-person but by one who has first married Ligeia and then, after her death, the blue-eyed Lady Rowena. It is this male narrator who retells retrospectively the story of his passion for Ligeia, which, after the death of his second wife, leads to Ligeia’s “hideous drama of revivification,”115 in which she returns by usurping the body of the Lady Rowena. Never in Poe’s story are we made privy to Ligeia’s thoughts, her wishes, or, for that matter, her fears, as we are in Pessoa’s poem. Poe’s Ligeia is described as “tall, somewhat slender, and, in her latter days, even emaciated,” with hair that is “blacker than the raven wings of midnight.” But the narrator’s obsession is with her eyes—eyes not made for the dark tomb to which she must descend even, perhaps, before her death. Pessoa’s poem gives Ligeia the opportunity to speak of her fears, this side of interment, that Poe and his narrator have denied her. It permits Ligeia to define what she dreads, what it is, in Poe’s story, that impels her to return from the tomb “where there is no light.” In 1919–20, just about midpoint in that stretch of eight years between his first mention of Ligeia and the writing of the poem, Pessoa went through his one documented affair of the heart. How often did the specter of Poe, his young cousin, and her early death occur to Pessoa in those months of courtship, especially when he met his Ofélia outside her place of employment, the offices of the firm Dupin? Or when he signed his letters “Ibis” and incestuously called his lover “Ibis” as well? And was he not condemning to the tomb, if not his corporeal lover herself, at least his image of their love when, feigning madness (or merely using his genuine madness), he wrote Ofélia that last letter bringing their affair to a close? For a decade after their separation in 1920, Pessoa and Ofélia had no direct contact. But there would be a second phase in their relationship. It lasted only a few months, from September 1929 until January 1930. Yet it reached its own high pitch. In one letter, directed to the

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‘Terrible Baby,” he admits, in a mixture of lover’s prattle and rather deadly serious self-revelation, “I feel sad, and I’m crazy, and nobody likes me . . . and I’d like to kiss you on the mouth, right on the mark, voraciously, and eat up your mouth, and eat up all those kisses you’ve got hidden in there . . . ”116 Discernible here is the obsessed lover’s desire for vampiric fusion with his beloved. The lover’s vampirism was now closer to the surface than it had been a decade earlier when Pessoa had taunted Ofélia with the notions that she was a “small pink pillow just right for planting kisses (what foolish talk!)” and that his “Baby” was “good for biting!”117 When Pessoa decided to bring his renewed courtship to its close, this time for good, he again resorted to playing on his fear of renewed (or constant) madness. “The old automobile crank I carry around in my head,” he warned, “and my mind, which was no longer in existence, went r-r-r-r-r.”118 This time Pessoa chose to dismiss not only their chances for marriage but even the mere continuation of some sort of relationship. He sent her a poem, just composed, that would have the effect of certifying his mental instability. White House—Claypit A (Trough poem) Everyone with cold hands Should put them into the troughs. Trough number One, For those who mess with their ears before breakfast. Trough number Two, For those who drink their beefsteaks. Trough number Three, For those who sneeze only half a time. Trough number Four, For those who flare their nostrils at the theatre. Trough number Five, For those who eat the latchkey. Trough number Six, For those who comb themselves with cake. Trough number Seven, For those who sing until the roof melts. Trough number Eight, For those who crack nuts when it’s daring. Trough number Nine, For those who look like collard greens. Trough number Ten, For those who stick stamps to their toenails. And, since the hands are no longer cold,

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Cover the troughs! HUSH* *Silence in the station at the customer’s pleasure.119

“Cover the troughs,” indeed, for the customer, who is no longer interested in the custom. And as if the poem were not sufficient to get Pessoa’s point across—that he has washed his hands of her and her threatening love—he had the temerity to instruct her: “This poem should be read at night and in an unlit room.”120 He could not have gone much deeper for evidence of his subliminal death wish for Ofélia or even for her premature burial, like Ligeia’s—a wish that just a few weeks earlier had surfaced unmistakably, if in different form: ‘I’d like it if my Baby were a doll, and I would do with it as a child would: I’d undress it, and that part ends right here. It seems impossible that this has been written by a human being, but it written by me.”121 Pessoa left us an epitaph to his love for the death of his love for the beautiful young woman—his Ofélia, his “Baby,” his Ligeia. On August 26, 1930, he set down a simple, if disingenuous, quatrain: Let there be a tomb Or dusty attic. Baby has gone away. My soul is all alone.122

This quatrain is disingenuous, I would argue, because Fernando Pessoa’s hunger for love, like Poe’s, as both of them knew, had been unrealizable; and that was the way, down deep, Pessoa had always wanted it to be. The fact, moreover, is that “Baby” had not gone away. Even after their first break in 1920, and a hiatus of nearly ten years, Ofélia was apparently still willing to resume their courtship. In both instances it was Fernando Pessoa who orchestrated the courtship but it was Álvaro de Campos who engineered the rupture. Beginning with a mere mention and waxing to the point that Campos would actually write to Ofélia, Pessoa’s most faithful heteronym served him as the agent for getting out of his relationship with Ofélia both in 1920 and in 1930. Ofélia feared the “bad” Álvaro de Campos, and Fernando Pessoa played on that fear to extricate himself from the love affair that he no longer wished to continue. In his letters to Ofélia he quoted Campos and he deferred to him, sometimes announcing that what he was doing at the time he did with Campos’ permission. Indeed, there is a direct ratio between the decline of Pessoa’s interest in continuing

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his relationship with Ofélia and the growing presence of Campos in the correspondence, beginning as early as April 5, 1920, less than three weeks after Pessoa’s first letter to Ofélia, with a parenthetical mention of “Álvaro de Campos.” His heteronym authorizes his not having a third reason for the fact that his handwriting in this particular letter is somewhat strange. “Don’t be surprised that my handwriting is a bit funny,” he writes. There are two reasons for it. The first one is that the paper (the only one available at this time) is very slick and my pen passes over it very quickly; the second is that I have discovered here in the house a splendid port wine, a bottle of which I have opened and of which I have already drunk half. The third reason is that there are only two reasons, and therefore is no third reason. (Álvaro de Campos, engineer).123

It is interesting that Álvaro de Campos should make his first appearance in these love letters just at the time that Pessoa has confessed to having drunk half a bottle of port. Would Pessoa have surmised in some oblique way that intoxication and Campos went well together, especially in those times when he would not pursue his courtship of Ofélia with the innocence (feigned or not) of his first letter?124 Was there operative somewhere in his subconscious the example of Edgar Allan Poe, who also had employed his drunkenness to break off an amorous alliance? Baudelaire told the story that Poe “went hopelessly drunk to scandalize the neighbourhood of her who should have been his wife, having this recourse to his vice to disembarrass himself of a perjury towards that poor dead spouse whose images always haunted his mind . . . ”125 Pessoa knew the story. But it is not just that Campos’ presence makes itself felt increasingly, but that Fernando Pessoa fades away as Álvaro de Campos takes over his thoughts, his feelings, his very body. It is as if Pessoa dies as Campos comes to life. This uncanny usurpation is revealed in the letter of October 15, 1920, the penultimate letter in the first phase of the Fernando/Ofélia courtship: My little baby: You have thousands—you have millions—of reasons for being angry, irritated, offended. But the blame has hardly been mine; it has been the fault of that fate which has just condemned my brain, I shall not say permanently, but to a state, at least, that calls for careful treatment such as I am not sure I can get.

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I intend (without now invoking the celebrated decree of 11 May) to go to a mental hospital next month to see if I can find there a certain treatment that will enable me to resist this black wave that is falling over my spirit. I don’t know how the treatment will turn out— that is, I cannot foresee what good it might do me. Never wait for me; if I show up it will be in the morning, when you are on your way to the office, on Poço Novo. Don’t worry. After all, what was it? I was exchanged for Álvaro de Campos! Always very much yours, Fernando126

In his place—that is, Fernando Pessoa’s—stands Álvaro de Campos. It is as if Pessoa has died away before the vampirish burgeoning of the engineer-poet and love’s executioner that is Álvaro de Campos. On October 21, 1935, less than a month before Pessoa’s own death, Campos wrote what was possibly his last poem. It was also a final word on his involvement in the Fernando/Ofélia affair, which by all rights, should be described as a threesome: Fernando Pessoa— Álvaro de Campos—Ofélia. All love letters Are ridiculous. They would not be love letters if they Were not ridiculous. In my time I too wrote love letters, Like the others, Ridiculous. Love letters, if there is love, Have to be Ridiculous. But, finally, It is only children who have never written Love letters That are Ridiculous. Oh how I wish I were back in the time When I wrote (without being aware Of it) ridiculous Love letters. The truth of it is that today It is my memory

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Of those love letters That is Ridiculous. (All singular words, Like singular feelings, Are naturally Ridiculous.)127

Although Fernando Pessoa had initiated the affair with Ofélia, it will be recalled, it was Álvaro de Campos who broke it off both times; and it is Campos who has the last word on the matter. As he claims, he too has written love letters—not that he has written them for himself will he assert (that matter remains ambiguous) but merely that having written them, he knows what he is talking about. Had Campos, in the last years of the poet’s life, once again taken over his thoughts, his feelings, his body? Had he, in short, replicated the vampirish triumph of Poe’s Ligeia over the Lady Rowena? As Poe’s narrator says, “I shrieked aloud, ‘can I never—can I never be mistaken—these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes—of my lost love—of the Lady—of the Lady Ligeia.’”128 It is merciful, no doubt, that Ofélia Queiroz was at the last spared that final vision of the complete takeover of her beloved Fernando by the very “bad” Álvaro de Campos. This chapter has a post-scriptum. In the Jornal de letras for Nov. 12/18, 1985, Maria da Graça Queiroz published a most interesting interview with Ofélia. Therein, in Ofélia’s own words, appears an account of the way in which Fernando Pessoa’s courtship of Ofélia was renewed in 1929, a decade after it was first broken off. The story had been told originally in Cartas de amor, but as she acknowledges, it bears repeating: In 1929, as I have already told the story, we began again by way of a photograph that my nephew brought home. It was he, drinking at Abel Pereira da Fonseca’s place. I found it very amusing and told Carlos that I too would like to have one. A few days later I actually received a photograph with an inscription: “Fernando Pessoa in flagrante delitro.” I wrote him a letter of thanks, he replied, and thus we resumed our “courtship.” This second phase is well described in the book Cartas de Amor and as I said, F. was very much different. He was much older and nervous. He drank a great deal.129

Scarcely hidden here, in the anecdote regarding the photograph of Pessoa drinking, is Ofélia’s own attraction to the Pessoa who was

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Álvaro de Campos, the “bad’ one who had usurped the more innocent lover’s very being at the end of the first phase of their courtship in 1920. Finally clear is the message Pessoa sent Ofélia in the inscription to the photograph: “Fernando Pessoa in flagrante delitro.” She was amply forewarned. As Pessoa, in the very first letter of this second phase—that of November 9, 1929—asked perceptively: “So, a drunken shadow occupies space in your memories?”130 Once again their relationship was doomed from the outset.131

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Poe Spiritualized Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had tried to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore— For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore— Nameless here for evermore. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Raven” Como eu qu’ria a madrugada, toda a noite aos livros dada P’ra esquecer (em vão!) a amada, hoje entre hostes celestiais— Essa cujo name sabem as hostes celestiais, Mas sem nome aqui jamais! Fernando Pessoa, “O Corvo”

Dead at the age of forty-seven, Fernando Pessoa, a master of Western Modernism with wide-ranging interests—poetry, fiction, drama, and translation, as well as literary theory, philosophy, sociology, history, commerce and public relations—accomplished more than a few literary feats, though not nearly as many as he expected to complete. One of Pessoa’s more ambitious plans was to bring to Portugal many of the great works of English-language literature in his own translations. He must have felt that since he was the beneficiary of an all-English education in South Africa, he was more than qualified as a bilingual, bicultural translator familiar with English-language literary tradition. For instance, he intended to bring to Portugal the Elizabethan Shakespeare’s major plays, promising to deliver them to the potential publisher—one play per month. At the same time he had intended to bring out, periodically, prose works by such diverse writers as the English Charles Dickens and the U. S. writer O. Henry.132 Included among the poets Pessoa singled out for translation was Edgar Allan Poe. Strongly influenced by the American’s poetry, he also took great interest in his tales, especially the ratiocinative ones, which Pessoa used as models for his own mildly successful attempts

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in the genre, but also “The Man of the Crowd” (written from the point of view not of the pursuer but of the pursued) and “Stolen Document”—a “corrective” of “The Purloined Letter.” He drew upon Poe’s major theoretical statements about literature, particularly “The Philosophy of Composition” and its ideas about poetic effect in verse and tale and the impossibility of the existence of a socalled “long poem”—something, in this last instance, to keep in mind when deciding whether Pessoa’s Mensagem (1934) is better viewed as a single long poem or as a collection of closely related historical or elegiac poems.133 For his collection of Poe translations, Pessoa had even gone so far as to settle on a title. Principais Poemas de Edgar Allan Poe (The Major Poems of Edgar Allan Poe) would be something of a cornerstone, one surmises, of Pessoa’s grand edifice of translations reflecting the vibrant and glorious traditions of English-language literature. As it turned out, he abandoned the plan, possibly because he had found no publisher interested in publishing such a book or, just as likely, because he himself turned to what he may have considered to be fresher tasks. In fact, his plan for a book of Poe translations only partly carried out in his lifetime, did not come to (surprising) fruition until three-quarters of a century after the Portuguese poet’s death. When Principais Poemas de Edgar Allan Poe did appear, in 2011, it can be said that it filled a lacuna in Pessoa studies barely perceived as such until then. A useful and suggestive compilation of the Poe poems Pessoa considered most worth translating, it argues by example for a canon of Poe’s major poetry, one suited, implicitly, to a Portuguese-language readership.134 Of the American poet’s “principal” poems, Pessoa managed to translate in their entirety only a handful. Finished to his own satisfaction, three of Poe’s poems—“The Raven,” “Ulalume,” and “Annabel Lee”—were published in 1924– 25 in Athena, a Lisbon journal he co-edited with the artist Ruy Vaz.135 Translations of other poems he left behind in widely varying fragmentary stages, some running to a stanza, and a few to just a line or two. In still other instances, he left evidence of which Poe poems he would include in his “Principais Poemas” by ticking off titles in the table of contents in his copy of the Choice Works of Edgar Allan Poe, the handsomely presented collection published in London in 1902, that he had chosen as part of the Queen Victoria prize awarded to him in 1904 as the author of the best essay in the competition for admission to the University of the Cape of Good Hope. It was this situation—Pessoa’s little more than a lick and a promise towards the task of publishing a selection of Poe’s poems in translation—that confronted Margarida Vale de Gato. As translator of Poe’s

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complete poetry and author of a doctoral dissertation in which she defined the nineteenth-century Portuguese literary context into which Poe’s work was introduced, she teamed up with Pessoa to bring to fruition his plan to offer a wider Portuguese-language readership the best of Poe’s poetry. To flesh out Pessoa’s original plan she “finished” a few of Pessoa’s incomplete (sometimes barely started) translations, complemented by but translations of the Poe poems that Pessoa indicated he would translate but left no evidence that he had even begun to do so. The author of each translation in Principais Poemas is identified with clarity as Fernando Pessoa himself, Fernando Pessoa and Margarida Vale de Gato in “collaboration,” or Vale de Gato alone. In 2011 as well there appeared a second book relevant to the matter of Poe’s poetry in translation, this time limited to translations of “The Raven” in Portuguese: the Brazilian Claudio Weber Abramo’s O Corvo; Gênese, Referências e Traduções do Poema de Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven: Genesis, References and Translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s Poem). Loyal to the principle that any translation of a poem must be above all semantically accurate, the translator Claudio Weber Abramo has surveyed those many Portuguese-language avatars of Poe’s “The Raven” that have come his way. Not surprisingly, he finds cracks and faults in most of them, including those of the Brazilian Machado de Assis as well as Fernando Pessoa, not to mention those versions of lesser lights. Particularly deplorable are translation choices made to accommodate the metrics of the entire poem down to the single line. It is this principle that perforce devalues Pessoa’s boast to have translated “The Raven” in “conformance, rhythmically, with the original” (rhythmicamente conforme com o original).136 Abramo concludes that to most of its translators (including Pessoa, presumably), Poe’s great poem has been their Waterloo.137 There are, of course, many possible ways in which the translator of “The Raven” risks meeting this Waterloo. Not all of them involve poetic technique or semantic choice, for there are often cultural matters to be taken into account. Usually the challenge is to honor in a translation these often subtle and elusive matters of culture embodied in the poem’s original tongue and language. But for Pessoa in his translation of “The Raven,” the cultural problem lay elsewhere. It lay in a question. Put simply, what would the effect be on the informed Portuguese reader if, in his translation of Poe’s poem, he employed the name of the lost heroine? His final decision to replace the name—Lenore—with a circumlocution, was, in my opinion, the right one for his Portuguese audience. By contrast, for example, in his translation of Poe’s “Annabel Lee” he retains Poe’s title, but unlike

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Poe, he erases the lost lover’s name entirely from the body of the poem.138 Here, though, I see less a gesture toward “spiritualizing” Poe’s heroine than the effort of a translator to solve more mundane problems of language, rhyme or rhythm as best he can, all the while maintaining an adherence to the Portuguese writer’s (and reader’s) aversion to the repetition of words and phrases. I could adduce personal examples of this, but I prefer the American poet Elizabeth Bishop’s account of her own experience with a Brazilian translator of her work. He “translated a sestina of mine, infinite labor, without repeating a word,” she wrote. “(They’re taught not to, in school— not for two pages, or hours, or something.) And yet come to find out he knew all about sestinas and could recite some old Portuguese ones.”139 Pessoa’s translations are not nearly so egregious, but he was not entirely free of the prejudice against repetition. Sometimes he could even turn it to his advantage. In an ingenious effort to avoid repetition in his early translation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “Catarina to Camoens” for the Biblioteca Internacional de Obras Célebres, circa 1911,140 when in the Browning original the heroine calls herself by her own name, Pessoa opts for “Natércia,” an anagram for “Catarine,” the ancient form of ‘Catarina.”141 The case I make for the logic of eschewing the name “Lenore” in any Portuguese translation of “The Raven” begins, as so much does, in Portuguese literary history since the sixteenth century, with Luís Vaz de Camões, particularly his most famous sonnet “Alma minha gentil, que partiste” (Oh gentle spirit mine that didst depart). But first, there are other things to consider. In his poems about beautiful women who often die young (or “disappear,” as the Portuguese sometimes prefer), Poe usually provided them with names—Annabel Lee, Helen, Annie or Lenore—so did Camões when, like Poe, he was writing about what have been taken, usually, to be flesh and blood friends or lovers with roots in Camões’ supposed biography (though the only evidence for this lies in the poetry itself). When Camões was treating his own soul as if it were a lost “lover,” he did not resort to giving his soul a name, as we shall see below. Thus, Poe’s use of a specific name in “The Raven” (though, significantly, not as his title) became a problem requiring a solution for the poet who would bring the poem into Portuguese. That he chose to erase the name “Lenore” from the poem was crucial for his intention. That this was a conscious choice is evident from the fact that in the initial draft that survives Pessoa has written the lost lover’s name “Leonor,” as it would be written in Portuguese.142 Margarida Val de Gato avers that the omission “accentuates the idealization of the loved one” (acentuando a idealização do objecto amado), and she expands on her understanding of the impli-

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cation of the omission, on another occasion, by claiming that “the unwillingness to name acquires philosophical undertones related to the impossibility of discourse to surpass the realm of this world and hence attain ontological intelligence: Essa cujo nome sabem as hostes celestiais / Mas sem nome aqui jamais” (She whose name is known to celestial hosts, / But nameless here for evermore).143 Vale de Gato also calls to our attention Manuel Tângier Correa’s explanation that the disappearance from the poem of the name “Lenore,” “se pode dever à dissonância entre a tradição lírica do nome Leonor em português e a figura da amada presente no poema de Poe” (may be attributed to the dissonance between the name Leonor in the Portuguese lyric tradition and the figure of the lover in Poe’s poem).144 There is nothing I can disagree with in these explanations by Margarida Vale de Gato and Manuel Tângier Correa. Against this background, we can now look into the matter of Pessoa’s demonstrable interest in “Alma minha gentil,” Camões’ great sonnet, and how it affected his decision to erase “Lenore” from his translation of “The Raven.” His public interest in Camões, quite naturally, dated from his early days as a theorist of the future of Portuguese poetry and the form it must take. Pessoa first broached his ideas about Camões and the necessary emergence of an epic poet who would surpass even him, in essays he published in 1912 in A Águia, Teixeira de Pascoaes’ journal founded on the basis of a projected “new renaissance for Portugal.” At about the same time, Pessoa echoed Camões the lyricist in an untitled poem that oddly enough sounds more like Poe in its decrying of dolor and despair than it does Camões: “Que morta esta hora! / Que alma minha chora” (How dead is the hour / that my spirit bewails).145 Certainly no alert reader of Portuguese poetry could fail to detect the reference in the second line that the speaker makes to “alma minha” an intended echo of the opening line to Camões’ most often quoted and certainly most greatly revered poem, one committed to memory by many a schoolchild throughout the land. Alma minha gentil, que te partiste Tão cedo desta vida, descontente, Repousa lá no Céu eternamente E viva eu cá na terra sempre triste. Se lá no assento etéreo, onde subiste, Memória desta vida se consente, Não te esqueças daquele amor ardente Que já nos olhos meus tão puro viste.

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E se vires que pode merecer-te, Alguma cousa a dor que me ficou Da mágoa, sem remédio, de perder-te, Roga a Deus, que teus anos encurtou, Que tão cedo de cá me leve a ver-te, Quão cedo de meus olhos te levou.146

Beyond echoing Camões’ revered poem in his own poetry, as evidenced by its “presence” in the “new renaissance” poem quoted above, but he took upon himself the task of translating “Alma minha gentil” into English: Oh gentle spirit mine that didst depart So early of this life in discontent. With heavenly bliss thy rest be ever blest While I on earth play wakeful my sad part. If in the ethereal seat where now thou art A memory of this life thou do consent, Forget not that great love self-eloquent Whose purity mine eyes here showed thy heart. And, if thou see aught worthy of thy light In the great darkness that hath come on me From thine irreparable loss’ spite, Pray God, that made thy year so short to be, As soon to haste me to thy deathless sight As from my mortal sight he hasted thee.

Not shy to name his lovers when he wrote carnal love poems, in this poem—“Alma minha gentil”—Camões names no carnal lover, for his allegorical poem is about the spiritual loss of the now departed “gentle spirit” that will only be erased when the spirit is once again united with the earthly non-spirit. In Poe’s darker poem, one must never forget that the lost one is the carnal “Lenore,” whom the speaker, if the disabusing raven speaks truth, will never be seen again. Poe is talking about two physical bodies. What knowing Camões’ poem did for Pessoa, when he came to revising his ambitious translation of “The Raven,” was to encourage him to erase the name “Lenore” from his version, thereby transforming the original from a poem about an instance of exclusively carnal love into, much like “Alma minha gentil,” a strongly spiritual poem about the lost spirit itself. This is important because in Poe while the “raven” is emblematic of death and thus speaks to the narrator that “nevermore” will he see

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the carnal “Lenore,” the ominous bird also speaks as the herald of the news that resurrection itself is dead. The somewhat uncanny result is that in Pessoa’s translation we are given a more “spiritualized” poem, one evading the carnal death fact and the carnal idea of resurrection. In this way it is appropriately reminiscent of Camões’ essential lyric and thus closer in meaning and tone to one of the truly canonical Portuguese poems and its literary tradition, to which Pessoa himself contributes.

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Álvaro de Campos: Note Of the well over a hundred heteronyms, semi-heteronyms, and pseudonyms imagined by Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), three poets, comprising what he called an “inexistent coterie,” stand out, each in his own right: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. Each is the author of a substantial body of work that is sufficiently elaborated and original enough to insure each one of them his own unique place in Portuguese literary history. While Pessoa wrote poetry and prose in English and considered himself intermittently (though always seriously) to be a poet in the English tradition, the English-speaking Álvaro de Campos writes almost exclusively in Portuguese, though occasionally displaying his knowledge of English by assigning an English-language title to poems such as “Lisbon Revisited (1923)” and “Clearly non-Campos.” Credited with some of the most strikingly original lyrics in modern poetry, he is also a master of the long poem. His “Tabacaria,” one of the striking poetic meditations of the twentieth century, and his “nonAristotelian” odes, the rollicking, sometimes savage “Ode Marítima” and the unfinished “Saudação a Walt Whitman” (a 1915 poem in which the American poet is described as a “great pederast brushing up against the diversity of things”) made poetry “new’ even as the poetry promotor Ezra Pound was formulating his famous cry. Unpublished during Pessoa’s lifetime, Campos’s sonnet sequence “Barrow-in-Furness” first surfaced in 1944 in Adolfo Casais Monteiro’s edition of Poesias de Álvaro de Campos. There, and in all subsequent printings, this sequence bears the title “Barrow-onFurness.” Since these poems appear not to have survived in manuscript and Casais Monteiro does not identify his copy-text, it is now difficult to determine with certainty whether the mistake in the title is to be charged to the poet or to his editor. That it is probably not Pessoa’s mistake, however, is strongly indicated by the fact that elsewhere he refers correctly to Barrow-in-Furness, the English shipbuilding center along the western coast. As the locale chosen for the

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five sonnets, it accords with the fictional biography imagined for Álvaro de Campos. A naval engineer trained in Glasgow, he finds himself at the end of a job at the Barrow-in-Furness shipyard, anticipating his return to Lisbon. Of Pessoa’s many fictional companions, it was Álvaro de Campos who was the closest to his creator, even participating, at times, in the actual events, public and private, of the poet’s day-to-day life. Pessoa assigns to him a date and hour of birth, October 15, 1890 at 1:30 p.m. The adult Álvaro de Campos is, as his creator sees him, “tall (l meter, 75, two centimeters taller than myself), lean, with a tendency to stoop,” and a complexion that can be described as between “white and swarthy.” He is “vaguely of the Portuguese Jewish type, with straight hair, therefore, normally parted to the side.” He wears a monocle. It was from this description that Almada Negreiros took his cue for the portrait of Álvaro de Campos he engraved on the face of the outside wall of the Faculdade de Letras at the University of Lisbon. Nowhere does Pessoa indicate that he had ever met either Ricardo Reis or Alberto Caeiro. He did, however, become something of an intimate with Álvaro de Campos. His extroverted but moody poet was trustworthy enough to be entrusted with important tasks. As Pessoa’s alter ego, he sometimes intervened in public debates with letters and polemical articles in the Lisbon newspapers. Sometimes he took on tasks that Pessoa found potentially unpleasant or tricky. After meeting with the poet in a Lisbon café, two of the young editors of the journal presença who were trumpeting Pessoa as Portugal’s greatest modern poet, were convinced that they had met not with Fernando Pessoa, but with the unpleasant Álvaro de Campos. Nor were the befuddled João Gaspar Simões and Adolfo Casais Monteiro the only ones to suffer the slights and sarcasm so characteristic of unpredictable Álvaro de Campos. Even more curious is Álvaro de Campos’s involvement with Ofélia Queiroz, Pessoa’s only known lover. At a crucial moment in their affair he deputized the engineer-poet to inform Ofélia that his mental illness was such that he could not meet with her as planned. (Interestingly, Pessoa, who had a Hamlet complex, preferred the older spelling of his lover’s name, referring to her, diminutively, as “Ofelinha,” because, I think, it anglicized the name and reminded him of Shakespeare. She naturally spelled her name “Ofélia,” the preferred Portuguese spelling, as did Álvaro de Campos.) So upset was Ofélia with Pessoa’s messenger that she insisted that he never again send that “bad boy” to visit her, often to do some bit of his “dirty” work for him. If she could do no more than damn Álvaro de Campos to the very “Mouth of Hell,” she wrote, Pessoa could at the least

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banish “Sr. Eng. A. C.” to a long stay in England. But even Pessoa was not exempt from Álvaro de Campos’s often-splenetic behavior. His most modernist heteronym even went so far as to criticize publicly his creator’s only published play. In lines published in the mid-1920s, he complains that twelve minutes into his reading of Pessoa’s one finished play he agrees fully and impatiently with the character who wonders why it is that none of them will shut up. At the end of Pessoa’s life only Álvaro de Campos, of all his imagined companions, had not left him. Alberto Caeiro’s death had long since been announced, the politically disaffected monarchist, Ricardo Reis, had years earlier disappeared into Brazil, and the many others had slipped away into silence. Possibly because the unmarried Pessoa had hinted at the unmarried Álvaro de Campos’s bi-sexuality, it has occurred to the occasional reader to believe that there are indications that there is a homosexual bond between the flesh-and-blood poet and his imagined poet, and that it was jealousy of Ofélia that motivated Álvaro de Campos’s disruptive behavior when Pessoa was courting the young woman.

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“The Bishop” and Edwin Honig Classmates referred to Elizabeth Bishop, the budding poet among them, as “The Bishop,” while, later, her neighbors in Brazil called her “Saint Elizabeth of Petrópolis.” But Ezra Pound, housed in a Washington, D.C. hospital for the mentally and criminally insane (St. Elizabeths Hospital), took to addressing her on her visits as “Lis Bish”—this last, an example of Pound’s wit that she did not appreciate. Had I ever met Elizabeth Bishop, I would have undoubtedly have addressed her as “Ms Bishop,” though I am inclined to think that that form of address would not have pleased her either. In 1972 “Lis Bish” read her poetry at Brown University, where I was on the faculty. There’s a story to be told about this visit. At Brown that day it was Edwin Honig, the poet and translator (notably of Fernando Pessoa), who introduced Bishop at her reading. His introduction of her was, to say the least, very strange, as Bishop complained. As the head of Brown’s writing program, Honig had spent the day tending to the desperate needs of a graduate student, who was wildly hallucinating and had to be taken to the hospital for treatment and, as it turned out, admission. To mollify him, to quiet him down, Honig had read him Bishop’s poetry, with the unexpected, and certainly unintended, result that the troubled student began to believe that he had written the poetry himself. All this went into Honig’s introduction of Bishop that evening, which she, of course, found strange and disconcerting. She told her friend, the poet James Merrill, about it in a letter dated January 8, 1973: “I recently went to Brown and no one cracked a smile, even. However, that may have been because of a very odd introduction,” she explained. “I don’t want to be mean about Mr. Honig because I like him—and he was so upset he probably didn’t realize quite what he was saying—but he introduced me by saying he’d spent the whole day with a graduate student who’d gone mad, trying to get him to go to a hospital, I

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think.” Then, perhaps desperately, “To calm him, he had read him my poetry,” writes Bishop. “Well, that was all right, I suppose, but then Mr. Honig added that the young madman had become convinced that he—the madman—had written my poems. Then “Ladies & Gentlemen, Miss B.” and I said, “Thank you, Mr. H.,” feeling that if only I were quick-witted there was probably a wonderful remark to be made—although it scarcely seemed the occasion for humor.” Now, although she does not say so at this time, Bishop and Honig shared a past, so to speak, and thus there is what is sometimes called a back-story. In the 1950s Honig—eight years younger than Bishop— had been recruited by Philip Rahv, as editor of the Partisan Review, to comment on several books of poetry, including Bishop’s Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring (1955), her second book of poems. His review of Bishop’s poems was unfavorable, perhaps even a bit snarky. Of Honig’s discomforting piece (published as “Poetry Chronicle”) Rahv wrote apologetically to Bishop, vowing that while he had to print the review, he would probably forego asking Honig to do any more reviewing for the Partisan Review. On January 15, 1956, Rahv had written: “I am sorry to tell you that a young poetry critic by the name of Edwin Honig bears down rather heavily on your latest book in the Winter issue of PR. I was appalled by his remarks and dismayed by his taste, and I don’t think we’ll want to assign him any more books for review. We like to try out new reviewers from time to time, though sometimes we pull a boner, inevitably.” Rahv then goes on to attempt to mitigate the bad news he has just conveyed by bestowing on Bishop his own praise for her poetry: “I think some of the new poems in your book are masterful. Your writing is better than ever, and I do wish you’d ‘liberate’ some of them from the New Yorker’s grasp and send them to us. The younger poets are pretty feeble, to my mind; they are not imitators rather than originators. There is no one younger than you and Cal [Robert Lowell] that I really admire.” He seems never to have thought of killing Honig’s review. It appeared in the journal’s winter 1956 issue. Rahv’s praise must have pleased Bishop but it did not keep her from awaiting Honig’s “hostile” review with great anxiety and trepidation. On January 26, 1956, a worried Bishop warned her friend Pearl Kazin not to look at the upcoming issue of the Partisan Review. The editor, Philip Rahv, she explained, had written her to tell her their reviewer, Edwin Honig, had attacked her. “It certainly was kind of Philip to say what he said, and I am steeling myself, but feeling pretty low about my own work at the moment,” she wrote. “I’ve never minded criticism a bit, strange to say—but what if this reviewer (I haven’t seen it yet) says the TRUTH?—does point out all the awful

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faults I know are there all right? Well, I’ve been just too lucky and spoiled. I know, so I must grit my teeth and write another poem, that’s all.” Yet, as it turned out, the review was not as bad as she had prepared herself to expect. After seeing the review, she wrote to the poet May Swenson on February 5, 1956: “The last two weeks or so, I am ashamed to say, I did work up a sort of state of nerves—imagining all the awful things Mr. Honig could say if he wanted to. I’m relieved that I don’t mind him a bit! I even agree with his general thesis, I think—but he didn’t quote the disastrous things he could have, easily, to prove it. He really should have kept that thought at the end to himself—that maybe some people do like poetry like that.” The next installment of the story occurred several years after Bishop had first read at Brown University and had been awarded an honorary degree by the same institution. Her sponsors were Honig and the poet Michael Harper, the latter of whom, I am told, wrote the citation. Honig’s remarks about Bishop’s poetry being a thing of the past, he did what younger poets (and older ones, too, I imagine) have always done: he sent her some of his books, including his translations of Pessoa, just published in 1971. What Bishop thought of Honig’s books, including his Selected Poems by Fernando Pessoa, or what she said about them when she acknowledged them (she was keen to acknowledge such “gifts,” even if the act was sometimes done pro forma), I do not know. But American reviewers had been kind to the publication, including, notably, Gregory Rabassa, who reviewed Honig’s translations for Parnassus, a New York journal devoted to the criticism and review of poetry, founded and edited by Herbert Leibowitz. (I offer these details because they will play a small part in the overall story I am trying to tell.) It was several years before Honig’s translations evoked the ire, not that of an Englishlanguage reader, but of Pessoa’s Dutch translator, the poet August Willemsen, who published a critique of Honig’s translations in a Dutch journal. Not satisfied with criticizing Honig’s translations and impugning his credentials in the Portuguese language for a Dutch audience, Willemsen also got himself a translator who would put his Dutch critique into English. Eager to bring discredit on Honig in United States itself, Willemsen (whom Mary McCarthy must have met in Holland when she was doing research for her novel Cannibals and Missionaries) managed to persuade McCarthy to take up his cause with American journals who might publish his essay on Honig’s translations, possibly the Partisan Review. McCarthy, a classmate and friend of Bishop’s at Vassar College, turned to Bishop.

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“You might like to have a look at the enclosed,” wrote McCarthy on August 17, 1979, from Paris. It’s by a Dutch friend of a Dutch poet friend, who has showed it to me in two stages. The English still needs some rectification; I’ve made a few little changes and have written to the author proposing a few more. Lizzie [Elizabeth Hardwick, novelist and essayist?] has read it and doubts whether it’s publishable in the U.S.—it has already come out in a Dutch literary magazine. She thinks Pessoa would need further presentation to an American public, which would barely have heard of him, also that the tone is too grumpy. She’s probably right on both counts, but, though Pessoa had been only a name to me, I got a distinct sense of him from the piece, which I found interesting. To her mind, too, the mistakes cited don’t appear so egregious, and there I don’t agree. I was able to make out the Portuguese pretty well and was appropriately scandalized. The critique is the kind of thing Edmund [Edmund Wilson, a former husband] used to do, with more urbanity, and that nobody bothers to do any more.

On August 27, 1979, from North Haven, Maine, where she was spending the summer, Bishop replied: It was nice to hear from you—& thank you for sending me the article about Honig’s translations of Pessoa—the attack on Honig, I should say! I think I have that book at home; he sent me several things some time ago. But I don’t think I’ve ever read it or looked at it at all carefully. The mistakes that Mr. Willemsen points out are really bad ones. Honig apparently didn’t recognize some of the commonest every-day idiomatic phrases—“Sei lá” for example . . . I don’t know if it’s ignorance or sloppiness—or both.

She then moves on to referencing “equally awful translations all the time,” offering as examples those of Ben Bellitt and Robert Bly (a particular bête noire), before returning to the subject of August Willemsen’s essay. I agree with Lizzie that the piece is a bit “grumpy”—and in one or two cases he may even be wrong (I don’t have my dictionaries here)— but it’s something that should be printed, I think. I haven’t written sooner because I’ve been trying to remember the name of a magazine that publishes nothing but poetry criticism—I think it’s PARNASSUS but I’m not sure. Lizzie might know. Pessoa isn’t very well known in this country, of course, but I have seen quite a few translations or

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pieces about him lately—and Pessoa aside, it’s a good idea to give translators something to think about. Another idea—would be to have the article translated into Spanish and send it to Octavio Paz’s magazine REVUELTA. It’s a good magazine and there have been pieces about Pessoa in it—and the readers would understand it easily, in Mexico.

Then, having thought about the essay’s ready availability to a Spanish-speaking audience, Bishop turns to what further information an English-speaking audience might require to understand Pessoa and his poetry adequately or properly. Probably in English it would need a bit more introductory material. He [Pessoa] was a weird man—although worshipped by the Portug[u]ese, I gather, and also in Brasil, his poetry has always struck me as about thirty years behind the times—the times when it was written. He wrote some ghastly poetry in English, too. But some of the personae (I hate that word) are quite wonderful. Four have been published, I think, but I was told last year that several more have been discovered—two or three other personalities, with complete sets of poems written by them . . .

She then adds (the parentheses are hers): “(The English poetry is very Swinburnian and decadent. Pessoa was educated first at English school—He even took up with Alistair [sic] Crowley before he died.)” This letter could have brought their exchange over Willemsen’s essay on Honig’s Pessoa to an end, but—to Bishop’s credit—it did not. For after returning to her home at Lewis Wharf in Boston at the end of the summer, she looked again at Honig’s translations of Pessoa. On September 17, 1979, she again wrote to McCarthy. “I’m at home again at last and have had time to go over the Honig translation—I wouldn’t say word for word, but fairly carefully. It now seems to me that Mr. Willemsen is really much too hard on Honig . . . I hadn’t really looked at the book since I was sent it—in 1971—and then I remember thinking he’d got quite a few tenses mixed up, and lots of accents were missing.” Yet some of the things Willemsen points out must just be due to carelessness, or bad proof-reading. After all, Honig did work with a Lisbon scholar for ‘six years’, he says—but of course the Portug[u]ese English may not have been all that good.” Writing from personal experience, she explains: “The grammar is so tricky—I know I’d be at a loss as to how to translate some of the short phrases with 2 or 3 verbs in them. . . . Then—I hadn’t realized that Octavio had done the introduction—and it seems to me that Honig

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has made several very weird mistakes in that.” “HOWEVER— compared to most translations I see these days it doesn’t seem bad at all! And he does get the movement of the four different personalities rather well, I think . . .” Bishop could have ended here, but obviously knowing the determination of her correspondent, she continues: “PARNASSUS is the name of that magazine that publishes nothing but criticism of poetry & that wd. be the place to send it, I think. But for American readers I think there should be quite a bit more material, explanation, etc. Who knows—perhaps Honig shd. be given a chance to correct his mistakes—there may be a later edition but I don’t know of any.” “These are my simple thoughts on the subject,” she concludes, “and I do feel now that the critic was a bit too rough . . . or it’s too concentrated.” McCarthy replied to Bishop’s two letters, still from Paris, on October 28, 1979. “Good of you to go to so much trouble over that Dutch-uncle critique, which nevertheless convinced me that there was cause for making a fuss,” she begins. Willemsen, I must say, wasn’t well served by his translator. It seems that the piece has come out in Dutch in a Dutch periodical that deals with Spanish and Portuguese literature. For the U.S., I shall follow your advice and, having made a few more corrections in the English, send it to Parnassus, when I can find out its address.

As it turned out, Bishop never saw this letter, for she died three weeks before McCarthy posted her letter, on October 6, 1979. I do not know if McCarthy followed through on her intention to submit Willemsen’s essay to Herbert Leibowitz for his editorial consideration at Parnassus, as Bishop had suggested, neither one of them knowing, in all probability, that Leibowitz had once been a graduate student in English at Brown University, in the late 1950s, and would certainly have known of Honig as a faculty member of the department; nor did they know that Parnassus had years earlier published a favorable review of Honig’s translations by the muchhonored translator Gregory Rabassa. In any case and for whatever reason, Willemsen’s attack on Honig never did appear in Parnassus or, so far as I know, in any other American journal. But it did appear (in English!) in the Porto-based journal Persona, founded and edited by the well-known Pessoa scholar Arnaldo Saraiva, sparking a brief polemic in the journal, one in which Honig played his part by contributing a rather idiosyncratic response to Willemsen’s broadside attack. Years later, at meetings held at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon to commemorate Pessoa’s centenary, I saw Honig and

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Willemsen circulate throughout the hall ever so carefully so as not to risk an encounter. They did not meet, not that day, or, as far as I know, ever. At the time there had been a considerable buzz among Pessoa scholars in Portugal and elsewhere over Willemsen’s charge that Honig was a poor translator of Pessoa’s work, such that when Honig later asked Henriqueta Madalena, Pessoa’s sister, for permission to translate additional poems, he received the following letter, granting him permission but with a caveat. Her reply on November 17, 1982 (quoted here from the copy in my possession) is unstintingly forthright: I have been placed in a very difficult position after receiving your first letter, asking permission to translate more of Fernando’s work. My family, who I always consult in such matters were very badly impressed with Mr. Williamsen’s [sic] article on your work where grave mistakes were pointed out. I have always aimed at the disclosure of my brother’s work & have been very grateful to those who have done so, but as I’m sure you agree, we cannot betray him. To every ones [sic] knowledge translating poetry is a very difficult task—firstly one has to master the language that is being translated. Fernando’s work has great difficulties—he’s not easy to be understood even in his own idiom—the way he manipulates words, sensations & ideas! An English scholar of the greatest integrity said—referring to translators of Fernando— the great mistake is to try to put in English rhymes—after all more than half Fernando wrote has no rhymes at all. I find it a very daring enterprise translating such a large number of Fernando’s poems! I shall gladly give you the required permission on condition that all shall be well revised & no doubts will occur as to the meanings and beauty of Fernando’s work. Hoping I haven’t been too unpleasant—Best regards . . .

More than once Honig told me that he was finished with Pessoa, that after the published translations of the 1980s, he would no longer do anything involving Pessoa. But, as it turned out, he could not keep away from the subject of Pessoa. He appeared at conferences, read usually short papers, and generally followed things Pessoano. Let’s move on now to the next time that I came close to meeting Elizabeth Bishop. That opportunity also dates from 1972, the year Brown University awarded the poet an honorary doctorate during commencement exercises that for some reason that I cannot now recall I was compelled to miss. The fourth and last time I missed my

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opportunity to meet Bishop was when Susanne Woods (a colleague in the English department), and I invited her to participate in a small conference on poetry and poetics, providing her with an opportunity to read her poems and talk about her translations from Brazilian poetry or, for that matter, any topic of her own choosing. That was in 1978. On September tenth I sent off our letter of invitation, addressing her as “Doctor,” a not-too-subtle, actually ham-fisted reminder that Brown University had honored with a doctorate. Of course it didn’t work. On the twenty-second Dr. Bishop replied, writing from 437 Lewis Wharf, Boston, her last home, thanking us for the invitation to come to Brown for the conference on poetry and poetics but with her regrets that she was unable to attend. This exchange of letters was the closest I came to meeting Bishop. Intimate it was not, but then, I remind myself, actual first meetings of poet and reader do not always go well. So, never having had the privilege of seeing Elizabeth Bishop face to face or even at a distance, I have tried to compensate for the loss of those opportunities by writing a book about her and her poetry. I do have one regret, however. Once, as Honig was leaving the John Carter Brown Library after some lecture, I mentioned to him in passing that someday I would tell him something about Elizabeth Bishop that involved him. But time went by and there was never an occasion to tell him how Bishop had curtailed McCarthy’s effort to get Willemsen’s attack on Honig published in the United States.

CHAPTER

17

Translating Nathaniel Hawthorne It is a curious and little-known fact that shortly after the publication in 1850 of his masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne considered the possibility of pursuing a diplomatic post in Portugal, To his publisher, James T. Fields of Boston, Massachusetts, the American novelist wrote on 11 December 1852: “Do make some inquiries about Portugal—as, for instance, in what part of the world it lies, and whether it is an empire, a kingdom, or a republic. Also, and more particularly, the expenses of living there, and whether the minister would be likely to be much pestered with his own countrymen.” But soon he was having second thoughts about the post in Lisbon. “I hope Pierce [Franklin Pierce, the President of the United States, had been Hawthorne’s friend in college] will not offer it, for I cannot answer for myself that I shall do what really seems to me the wisest thing—that is, refuse it.” Had Hawthorne gone to Portugal as charge-d’affaires in the 1850s, instead of taking the consulship in Liverpool, England, where he did end up, it is likely that The Scarlet Letter would have been translated into Portuguese long before Fernando Pessoa got the chance to do it. Had there been even one such translation in existence, it is safe to say, it is unlikely that Pessoa would have taken on the task of doing a second one.

Pessoa’s Translation Typewritten on 220 half-sheets, Fernando Pessoa’s translation of The Scarlet Letter has remained among the poet’s papers since the 1920s at the latest. In the espólio at the Biblioteca Nacional in Lisbon this unpublished manuscript bears the call numbers 83-1-113, 84-1-106 and 74-B-27. The odd page, as it turns out, is the very last page of the

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novel, having been separated at some point from the rest of the translation and only now, through the medium of publication, joined to the body of the work it brings to closure. Why this manuscript has not attracted the attention of Pessoanos hitherto, I shall not try to fathom. When the late João Gaspar Simões, for instance, was asked about its existence, he told me honestly and simply that he did not know anything about it. And there are still other questions—better ones—-regarding this manuscript that not only have not been considered hitherto but cannot be answered by me at this time and perhaps by no one else either. Still, I shall ask them for the record. For starters, when did Pessoa do this translation? Why did he translate it? Did he choose the book himself or was it suggested to him by a friend? Did he do it on assignment for some publisher? Or did he do it on speculation, hoping to find an outlet for it? Was he paid for it? Why wasn’t it published when he finished it or at any later time? Why is there no record of his having dealt with a publisher or, if his original agreement fell through for some reason, with other publishers? And why, on two occasions, did he start to write an introduction to the author and the author’s book, only to break off after a few sentences? I cannot, as I have said, answer these questions. But two points can be made. The first is that given the fact that the translation survives complete, in a fair copy with only occasional minor holograph revision, it seems safe to say that Pessoa had high hopes for publication not only until he had completed his translating but after he had typed the text for the printer. (I am assuming that there was an earlier version of the translation, probably, though not assuredly, in holograph.) The second point is that given the fact that the introduction survives in two fragmentary texts—both of them seem to be beginnings—it is likely that the translation was never set up in type. Whether Pessoa’s translation of The Scarlet Letter started out as a labor strictly for hire or whether it was also a labor of love (one assumes that Pessoa could not have afforded to take on the demanding task of translating an entire novel as a labor of love alone), it is possible to speculate on what attractions the novel would have had for the poet. It would seem at first that a novel about Puritans in New England in the seventeenth century, one in which a curious ménage a trois emerges as the result of a sexual indiscretion on the part of an older man’s young wife and her minister resulting in the birth of a child, would seem alien to Pessoa’s characteristic interests. After all, one can hardly say that Pessoa’s writings show much interest in matters such as heterosexual love, marriage, children (though his own child-

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hood was ever fascinating to him), let alone wronged husbands, feckless lovers, and the whole matter of adultery. The curious nature of his two-staged love affair with Ofélia, abortive twice and probably unconsummated, is a sort of exception that proves the rule. Yet where, for instance, is the body of love poetry to Ofélia that another, more conventionally romantic poet would undoubtedly have written? Still, there was, in my opinion, one riveting interest for Pessoa in Hawthorne’s great romance. It is the character of Arthur Dimmesdale, the young minister who fathers Hester Prynne’s child but is unable to acknowledge the fact publicly. It is Arthur Dimmesdale who keeps within him this secret, one that nurtures and fosters his consuming guilt. At the heart of his dilemma is the ironic development that even his attempts to confess are so stated, indirectly and high-mindedly, that they are taken as signs of his grace by a trusting and ingenuous congregation. It is revealing, on this matter, to turn to a passage from Chapter XI, “The Interior of a Heart,” a chapter particularly meaningfult to the author of “Autopsicografia.” One notices particularly the terms in which Hawthorne has couched his characterization of this guilt-ridden clergyman: It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration tortured him! It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and to reckon all things shadow-like, and utterly devoid of weight or value, that had not its divine essence as the life within their life. Then, what was he?—a substance?—or the dimmest of all shadows? He longed to speak out, from his own pulpit, at the full height of his voice, and tell the people what he was. “I, whom you behold in these black garments of the priesthood,—I, who ascend the sacred desk, and turn my pale face heavenward, taking upon myself to hold communion, in your behalf, with the Most High Omniscience,—I, in whose daily life you discern the sanctity of Enoch,—I, whose footsteps, as you suppose, leave a gleam along my earthly track, whereby the pilgrims that shall come after me may be guided to the regions of the blest,— I, who have laid the hand of baptism upon your children,—I, who have breathed the parting prayer over your dying friends, to whom the Amen sounded faintly from a world which they had quitted,—I, your pastor, whom you so reverence and trust, am utterly a pollution and a lie!” More than once, Mr. Dimmesdale had gone into the pulpit, with a purpose never to come down its steps, until he should have spoken words like the above. More than once, he had cleared his throat, and drawn in the long, deep, and tremulous breath, which, when sent

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forth again, would come burdened with the black secret of his soul. More than once—nay, more than a hundred times—he had actually spoken! Spoken! But how? He had told his hearers that he was altogether vile, a viler companion of the vilest, the worst of sinners, an abomination, a thing of unimaginable iniquity; and that the only wonder was, that they did not see his wretched body shriveled up before their eyes, by the burning wrath of the Almighty! Could there be plainer speech than this? Would not the people start up in their seats, by a simultaneous impulse, and tear him down out of the pulpit which he defiled? Not so, indeed! They heard it all, and did but reverence him the more. They little guessed what deadly purport lurked in those self-condemning words. “The godly youth!” said they among themselves. “The saint on earth! Alas, if he discern such sinfulness in his own white soul, what horrid spectacle would he behold in think or mine!” The minister well knew—subtle, but remorseful hypocrite that he was!—the light in which his vague confession would be viewed. He had striven to put a cheat upon himself by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had gained only one other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame, without the momentary relief of being self-deceived. He had spoken the very truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood. And yet, by the constitution of his nature, he loved the truth, and loathed the lie, as few men ever did. Therefore, above all things else, he loathed his miserable self!147

Here one finds not only a voice that is similar to that of the lyric poet in “Autopsicografia” but even more remarkably, one that has affinities with the voice and tenor of Álvaro de Campos, while employing some of the very words that would appear in his marvelously spirited confessional “Poema em linha recta” (Poem— Straight to the Point). I quote in my translation the opening lines of this feisty poem: I have never known anyone who has taken a beating, Everyone of my acquaintance has been a champion in everything. And I, who have so often been shabby, filthy, contemptible, So often unaccountably parasitic, Inexcusably dirty, I, who so often have not had the patience to take a bath, I, who so often have been ridiculous, absurd, Who have in public stumbled over the rugs of etiquette, Who have been grotesque, niggardly, submissive and arrogant, Who have silently suffered insults,

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Who when I have broken my silence have behaved even more ridiculously; I, who have been viewed comically by the hotel maid, I, who have known the knowing winks of porters; I, who have been shameless in money matters, borrowing and not repaying, I, who, when it was the moment to take the blow, have cowered out of reach; I, who have suffered anguish at small, ridiculous things, I testify that in these matters I have in this world no peer.148

Of course Álvaro de Campos is not Hawthorne’s Arthur Dimmesdale, nor was he intended to be. Álvaro de Campos is impulsive, energetic and wonderfully public in his pronouncements. Dimmesdale, on the other hand, is reticent, private, insular. It will be said, perhaps, that in the case of “Poema em linha recta,” the way it differs from the passage from The Scarlet Letter quoted above, especially in the belligerence of Álvaro de Campos’ confession, is more important than the similarities that are obvious both in the language used and in the dramatic confessional thrust of the poem. But I would counter with conviction that Pessoa’s poem would not have been possible had Pessoa not found the characterization of Dimmesdale painfully congenial to “êle-mesmo” and sharply antithetical to the salient aspects of the public Álvaro de Campos, and had he not come upon, happily, the very language that would enable his own poem. The relationship of Pessoa’s poem to Hawthorne’s chapter “The Interior of a Heart” is tricky—parody, in part, and in part an equivalent for a diminished age—but it is a relationship that, in my opinion, is undeniable.

The Scarlet Letter Just exactly when in the summer of 1849 Hawthorne began to write The Scarlet Letter is not known. His summer had been one of disappointment, frustration, and, with the death of his mother, great personal anguish. By late September he was writing nine hours a day; and by early winter he had completed a substantial portion of his story. How that portion of the uncompleted manuscript of was wheedled out of Hawthorne by his publisher is itself an interesting story told by James T. Fields, the junior partner of the famous Boston firm, then called Ticknor, Rccd and Fields. Some twenty years after the event, Fields recreated the experience in his Yesterdays with Authors (1871). The account tells us almost

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as much about Fields as it does about Hawthorne, but it merits quoting at length: In the winter of 1849, after he [Hawthorne] had been ejected from the custom-house, I went down to Salem to see him and inquire after his health, for we heard he had been suffering from illness . . . . I found him alone in a chamber over the sitting-room of the dwelling; and as the day was cold, he was hovering near a stove. We fell into talk about his future prospects, and he was, as I feared I should find him, in a very desponding mood. “Now,” said I, ‘is the time for you to publish, for I know during these years in Salem you must have got something ready for the press.” “Nonsense,” said he; “what heart had I to write anything, when my publishers . . . have been so many years trying to sell a small edition of the Twice-Told Tales?” I still pressed upon him the good chances he would have now with something new. “Who would risk publishing a book for me, the most unpopular writer in America?” “! would,” said I, “and would start with an edition of two thousand copies of anything you write.” “What madness!” he exclaimed; “your friendship for me gets the better of your judgment. No, no,” he continued; “I have no money to indemnify a publisher’s losses on my account.” I looked at my watch and found that the train would soon be starting for Boston, and I knew there was not much time to lose in trying to discover what had been his literary work during these last few years in Salem. I remember that I pressed him to reveal to me what he had been writing. He shook his head and gave me to understand he had produced nothing. At that moment I caught sight of a bureau or set of drawers near where we were sitting; and immediately it occurred to me that hidden away somewhere in that article of furniture was a story or stories by the author of the Twice-Told Tales, and I became so positive of it that I charged him vehemently with the fact. He seemed surprised, I thought, but shook his head again; and I rose to take my leave, begging him not to come into the cold entry, saying I would come back and see him again in a few days. I was hurrying down the stairs when he called after me from the chamber, asking me to stop a moment. Then quickly stepping into the entry with a roll of manuscript in his hands, he said: “How in Heaven’s name did you know this thing was there? As you have found me out, take what I have written, and tell me, after you get home and have time to read it, if it is good for anything. It is either very good or very bad,— I don’t know which.” On my way up to Boston I read the germ of The Scarlet Letter; before I slept that night I wrote him a note all aglow with admiration of the marvellous story he had put into my hands,

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and told him that I would come again to Salem the next day and arrange for its publication.

No doubt we must allow for Fields’ neatly rounded account of the prescient publisher’s encounter with the shy, reluctant author, but the account has, in spite of this, the feel of fundamental, if not detailed, truth. Armed with an unfinished manuscript (“the germ”), Fields encouraged the author to follow the work through to rapid completion, and immediately began to prepare for book publication. He began to publicize the book even before he knew whether it would turn out to be a novel or a collection of tales in the manner of Twice-Told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse. Advance publicity was begun as early as December 29, 1849, when The Literary World announced that Ticknor, Reed and Fields had “just added to their recent announcements of Books in Press—A new volume by Nathaniel Hawthorne,” the nature of the volume unspecified; and for three consecutive issues, beginning January 5, 1850, the publisher listed among his “Forthcoming Works” “Nathaniel Hawthorne: A New Volume of Tales.” Actually it was not until February 2, 1850 (two weeks after the author had sent Fields the final portion of the novel, along with his introductory essay, “The Custom-House”) that the publisher’s advertising caught up with the fact that Hawthorne had abandoned his original plan for a collection of tales (provisionally entitled “Old Time Legends: Together with Sketches, Experimental and Ideal”) which would include as its principal and initial offering a long tale entitled The Scarlet Letter, in favor of publishing the novel as a single title. From this point on the book was advertised faithfully each week in The Literary World until it was published on March 16, 1850, the title on the title-page printed in red, as Hawthorne had suggested, even though, as he had cautioned further, he was “not quite sure about the good taste of so doing.” The immediate demand for The Scarlet Letter exhausted the first edition of 2,500 copies in ten days, and this edition was followed by the printing of another 2,500 copies the next month. Anticipating a “large sale” abroad, Fields rushed sheets to the London publisher Richard Bentley. Despite Fields’ hope, however, the novel was destined to sell far better in two unauthorized English editions than in the authorized edition. In America a total of 7,300 copies were in print by September 1851. In 1852 it was reprinted by the German publisher Tauchnitz. The novel was to sell consistently, if not spectacularly, through the decades. Just how well it did sell is indicated in a report from Houghton Mifflin Company (successor to Ticknor,

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Reed and Fields). By 1922 that firm had sold a total of 340,000 copies, many of them long after copyright had expired.149 In 1850, however, Hawthorne had serious reservations about the causes for his book’s immediate popularity. The contemporary vogue of The Scarlet Letter was due, he felt, more to the public’s topical interest in the quasi-autobiographical nature of his “preliminary chapter,” “The Custom-House,” than to the tale proper. And there is no doubt that the autobiographical nature of his brilliant, if acerbic, account of his recent experience in the Salem Customhouse had its large effect on immediate sales. But a look at the contemporary reviews suggests that Hawthorne was not responding to all the facts. Many of the reviews the book received were preponderantly, if not totally, favorable to the qualities of Hawthorne’s style and to his craftsmanship, while a few of them balked, in various ways and to differing degrees, at his characters and daring theme. For example, Henry Chorley, writing for the London periodical The Athenaeum (June 15, 1850), and granting that The Scarlet Letter was “a most powerful but painful story,” concluded: “We are by no means satisfied that passions and tragedies like these are the legitimate subjects for fiction . . . But if Sin and Sorrow in their most fearful forms are to be presented in any work of art, they have rarely been treated with a loftier severity, purity, and sympathy than in Mr. Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.” Anne Abbott, in the North American Review (July, 1850), claimed that she found only puzzlement. “One cannot but wonder,” she wrote, “that the master of such a wizard power over language as Mr. Hawthorne manifests should not choose a less revolting subject than this of The Scarlet Letter, to which fine writing seems as inappropriate as fine embroidery. The ugliness of pollution and vice is no more relieved by it than the gloom of the prison is by the rose tree at its door.” But George Loring, in The Massachusetts Quarterly Review (September, 1850), found The Scarlet Letter “extraordinary, as a work of art, and as a vehicle of religion and ethics,” concluding his review with what remains a critical question. “But is it not most sad and most instructive,” he asked, “that Love, the great parent of all power and virtue and wisdom and faith, the guardian of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the effulgence of all that is rich and generous and luxuriant in nature, should rise up in society to be typified by the strange features of The Scarlet Letter?” A young Episcopal cleric, Arthur C. Coxe, destined in time to become the Bishop of western New York, wrote a lengthy, fervid review. After paying lip service to Hawthorne’s tales and sketches, he confessed that he found nothing praiseworthy in Hawthorne’s novel, save that it was merely an experiment on the author’s part, and one

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which thankfully need not be repeated. Writing for The Church Review (January, 1851 ), Coxe began by expressing wonder that Hawthorne should have chosen “as the proper material for romance, the nauseous amour of a Puritan pastor, with a frail creature of his charge, whose mind is represented as far more debauched than her body.” In his opinion the novel had “already done not a little to degrade our literature, and to encourage social licentiousness”; indeed, he announced in self-conscious triumph: “The Vicar of Wakefield is sometimes coarsely virtuous, but The Scarlet Letter is delicately immoral.” There were several contemporary reviews that may be used to counter those of Miss Abbott and Father Coxe, but for our purposes we may settle on a single one, Edwin Percy Whipple’s in Graham’s Magazine (May, 1850). Responding to The Scarlet Letter as “a novel of so much tragic interest and tragic power, so deep in thought and so condensed in style,” Whipple was moved to observe: [I]n truth, Hawthorne, in The Scarlet Letter, has utterly undermined the whole philosophy on which the French novels rest, by seeing farther and deeper into the essence both of conventional and moral laws; and he has given the results of his insight, not in disquisitions and criticisms, but in representations more powerful even than those of Sue, Dumas, or George Sand. He has made his guilty parties end, not as his own fancy or his own benevolent sympathies might dictate, but as the spiritual laws, lying back of all persons, dictated to him. In this respect there is hardly a novel in English literature more purely objective.

It was Whipple’s sympathetic view, of course, not Coxe’s condemnation, which prevailed even in Hawthorne’s day, and it is an assessment which has continued, fundamentally unrevised, for well over a century. The Scarlet Letter made Hawthorne’s reputation as a writer and as a personality. Eighteen months after its publication, Fields, writing to an English friend, observed happily: “A few days ago the author of The Scarlet Letter came to Boston after an absence of many months. Every eye glistened as it welcomed an author whose genius seems to have filled his native land quite suddenly with his fame.” When Hawthorne went to England in 1853 to assume his new duties as American Consul in Liverpool, he was pleased to find The Scarlet Letter on sale everywhere—still at a shilling—even if the pleasure came largely at his own expense since all the copies he saw were pirated.

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Pessoa’s Introduction: Two Fragments For the sake of putting these documents on public record, both of those abortive attempts at what is undoubtedly an introduction to his translation of The Scarlet Letter are given here. I have made no attempt either to date these fragments or to speculate on their order of composition. The one given first, one typewritten sheet in purple ink, carries the Biblioteca Nacional number: Envelope 14 C-23. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was born in 1804 and died in 1864, is considered to be the greatest American novelist, and one of the greatest writers in the English language. The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, is his major work. One critic has called it “the Puritan Faust,” and added that it was “the only real masterpiece” that American prose has produced. It is, says another critic, “a sinister tragedy, in which the consequences of error are delineated with a simplicity, a sure development, and an implacability worthy of the tragedies of Euripides.” Henry James, who has at least the authority of his enormous fame as a novelists, classified it as “the prose novel of the most superior type that has emerged from American soil.” And these opinions, far from being peculiar to these critics, are representative of the general opinion of English criticism.

The second of the Pessoa fragments is also typewritten but this time Pessoa used a red ribbon, a color totally appropriate to the novel for which the introduction was being prepared. Hawthorne himself, it will be recalled, had insisted that on the title-page the title to his novel be printed in red, a wish with which his publisher complied. This fragment carries the Biblioteca Nacional number: 144–41. The Scarlet Letter is the most celebrated, and, in the opinion of the great majority of critics, the greatest of North American novels. Henry James called it “the most distinctive work of prose fiction that has been produced on American soil.” “It is a tragedy (grim,” says Dr. Northup, “in which the consequences of sin are painted with a simplicity, a firm movement, and an impiety worthy of the tragedies of Euripides.” And another American critic, Mr. W. C. Brownell, calls it “the Puritan Faust,” and “our only prose masterpiece.”

Postscript [The following is an interview with me that was begun but never completed. It dates from 1988.]

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Q: The Lisbon publisher Dom Quixote has just brought out Fernando Pessoa’s translation of The Scarlet Letter, the novel by the nineteenth-century American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. This translation by Pessoa was not only unpublished but unknown to Pessoa studies. How did you come to discover it? A: It was a case, as in so much scholarship, of informed serendipity. In the fall of 1985 I was able to spend a couple of days working in the espólio at the Biblioteca Nacional in Lisbon. I was looking for further evidence of Pessoa’s very important links to Edgar Allan Poe, a writer he admired and one whose poems and stories (at least some of them) he translated. In the course of my work on this subject I ran across a single page of typescript which was not identified further. That is to say, it was not assigned to any known work by Pessoa or to anyone else. I knew what it was immediately. It was a translation of the last page of The Scarlet Letter. There was no mistaking it. If there was a last page, I reasoned rather quickly, there must be more. Or at least there must have been more. I checked through the catalogue for the Pessoa papers and turned up the name “Nathaniel Hawthorne.” I asked for the folder. And there it was—all typed up neatly. The entire novel, including the preliminary essay, “The Custom House,” without, of course, the final page (which I had already discovered, catalogued misleadingly, in a different set of folders). Because this discovery came at the very end of my time in Lisbon, I did nothing about it at the time. I expected to come back to Lisbon and did so later. Q: How did it come about that the book was finally published? A: When I returned to Lisbon in the summer of 1986, I ordered a photocopy of the manuscript, including the misplaced last page, and copied out two short attempts at what I take to be the beginning of a preface by Pessoa for his own edition of the book. I telephoned João Gaspar Simões, whom I had known since 1977 when he was a keynote speaker at the first international symposium on Fernando Pessoa, which was held at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island (U.S.A.) under the auspices of the Center for Portuguese and Brazilian Studies. I had visited with him in 1980 in Lisbon and we had seen each other in the States on a couple of other occasions. In the course of our chat over the phone, I asked him about Pessoa’s translation of The Scarlet Letter. He expressed surprise. He knew nothing about it, but that my discovery of the manuscript was an important matter. It should be published. He offered to speak to his new publisher, Dom Quixote, which was about to bring out the fifth edition of his bio-critical study of Pessoa. He made the call and got back to me within the half-hour with the news that his publisher

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would be receptive to a call from me. I called, arranged for an appointment, and a couple of days later met with Sr. Alvím. Shortly thereafter we signed a contract. That was in July 1986. Just about a year later I turned in my copy of the translation, along with a preface. Q: How as it that no one before you had discovered this important work? A: I cannot say for certain that no one before me “discovered” it, so to speak. What I can say is that either the scholars who came before me did not think the work of importance or they did not recognize it for what it is: a translation of a major novel by an equally major poet. It continues to puzzle me, however, that even if it were not immediately clear that this typescript was a translation, someone should have investigated the possibility that it constituted an effort by Pessoa at some original work. Maybe the answer is simply that no one with sufficient knowledge of American literature came across the translation, and those whose knowledge of literature is mainly Portuguese and / or European bypassed it for more immediately interesting items in the espólio. Q. Are there any other finds of a similar nature just waiting for the informed and interested scholar? A: There may well be. Certainly there are unfinished translations of Poe’s poems, for example, as well as some unpublished materials in English on Pessoa’s notions about the English and American detective story. Indeed, there can be no doubt that any future edition of all of Pessoa’s work, especially the unpublished materials, would greatly benefit from the advice and counsel of a scholar or two well-versed in Anglo-American literature and culture. It was not for nothing that Pessoa spent so many of his early years in South Africa.

CHAPTER

18

Pessoa’s Enduring Presence In The Presence of Pessoa I considered, along with other matters, the famous Beat writer Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s anarchist banker, my colleague Edwin Honig’s confidence-man Pessoa, Thomas Merton’s anti-poet of the dark night of the soul, Charles Eglington’s Pessoa as Southern African poet, and Roy Campbell’s Homeric Pessoa, a Melvillean poet of the sea.150 Here I take note of a half dozen other instances of writers who, in one way or another and in more recent years, have paid homage to the Portuguese poet. Of course this constitutes no more than a drop in the bucket, given his ever widening appeal to readers and writers alike. But they do represent the different ways in which his audience has chosen to regard Pessoa’s work. Taking his hint from Pessoa’s fictive world surrounding Ricardo Reis, the Horatian heteronym, José Saramago took full imaginative possession—if only for a spell—of that world. He devoted himself to what turned out to be his most widely admired novel, O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis, published in 1984, and, in 1992, in an English translation by Giovanni Pontiero, as The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. But as things go in such matters, Saramago’s own presumptive rule (in this, admittedly, his own favorite among his many novels) over the life of Ricardo Reis engendered, twenty some years later, a notable sequel. In March 2005, Robert Boyers, the editor of the American journal Salmagundi, published “A Friend of Dr. Reis,” a long short story employing characters from Saramago’s novel. Published in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Boyer’s story is told from the viewpoint of a Henry James-like observer who, after the death of Ricardo Reis in Lisbon in 1937, becomes intimately involved with the hotel maid created by Saramago. She is called Lidia, and is Ricardo Reis’s companion, perhaps lover, but certainly, at least, the patient listener to his, at times, dismal complaints. Another poet has found inspiration in Alberto Caeiro. The Keeper of Sheep (O Guardador de Rebanhos) has come in for a radical re-doing, a re-personalizing, if

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you will, by a Canadian poet, Eirin Moure. She calls her book-length poetic parody, Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (2001), describing it as a “transelation” of Caeiro’s famous sequence of poems. More modestly and on a lesser scale, the art historian and literary critic David Shapiro, inspired by the presence of Pessoa’s three major heteronyms—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos— on the three visible sides of the square that constitutes the marker for Fernando Pessoa’s bones, disinterred from the cemetery called Prazeres in 1988 and reinterred below the stones of a passageway bordering the courtyard at the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos—wrote a short poem in which he gives voice, briefly, to the three heteronyms. At the Grave of Ferdinand Pessoa or the Triple Tomb 1. Caeiro Do not shelter me like any day’s all day Or push me toward the fields of a river. Don’t say it is enough the theme of shelter As if work and happiness were carnivores and a flower. 2. Reis Is it enough for the interior to seem vast. Nothing Exaggerated but multiplicity itself? Does everything fall into one thing? Like the weak poet counting Quantities or fatally subdivided like a minute? Is it enough to fall like everything late Shining, and shining with the light at the bottom of a heteronym? 3. De Campos No, and again you wanted nothing green or marvelous Like writing a great agreement in the middle of the street. Nothing, but the most youthful night of no conclusions, but for him, Then, the unique conclusion of dying (as if one existed, ever) to the everyday.151

Then there’s Bob Holman, a poet and teacher of writing at Columbia University, who brings in Pessoa when he advocates teaching poetry through performance. “Teach [Charles] Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’ and [Frank] O’Hara’s ‘Personism: A Manifesto’ back to back,” he suggests. “Toss in some Surrealist and Futurist Manifestos. Then have the class invent schools of poetry, characters who write in that style, and write ‘their’ poems.” Then comes, rather strikingly, a plug for the Portuguese poet. “Pessoa is great here,” he

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interjects. “Physicalizing Pessoa’s heteronyms is a great performance. I had a student, Amanda Graham, who wrote a ‘Dating Game’ play where she was the contestant and Pessoa’s heteronyms were her uitors. Pessoa personifies the performance of writing.”152 Now that’s a script I’d like to see. But not everybody is a fan of Pessoa’s poetry. Let me tell you, briefly, about the American poet James Dickey (1923–1997) and what he called Pessoa’s “terrific idea.” Although Dickey is perhaps bestknown now as the author of Deliverance (1972), a novel made into a popular movie starring Burt Reynolds (with Dickey himself playing a sheriff), in his day Dickey was considered to be a poet of stature and a critic of major influence. In the 1960s, it has been observed, “Dickey’s best work as a poet and critic” was done, “and while it may be difficult for us to remember now, he looked hard to beat in the American poetry sweepstakes.”153 It was in his guise as poet that in 1963 he tried out his new idea on the editor of Poetry Magazine. He offered to send Henry Rago poems (not yet written) to be published under pseudonyms: I want to write some poems under another name—a couple of other names, in fact—to see if I can take on different ‘writing personalities’ in case I get tired of the one I have. I’d like to send some of these to you and see what you think of them, but, in case of publication, I wouldn’t want my real identity known. Is this a legitimate kind of pursuit, in letters? A Portuguese poet named Pessoa did this some time ago—he had four alter egos!—and I wanted to try it, just to see what would happen.154

Curiously, in mentioning Fernando Pessoa’s name to Henry Rago, Dickey was carrying coals to Newcastle, for Poetry Magazine had already published, under Rago’s direction, several of Pessoa’s poems, some of them in Edouard Roditi’s translation, eight years earlier, the poems accompanying Roditi’s essay entitled “The Several Names of Pessoa.”155 I do not know what sort of answer Dickey received from Rago regarding his offer to imitate Pessoa’s creation of multiple “alter egos.” What is known is that Pessoa’s great project in heteronomy continued to interest Dickey—but with a caveat. In an interview he granted to the New York Times in 1970, he stated: “I think it’s important, as you get older, to discover and energize different parts of yourself. I like to think about a Portuguese poet named Fernando Pessoa, who spread himself out into four personalities, and tried to create a completely separate body of work for each of the four.

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Unfortunately, I believe none of the four turned out to be very good, but what a terrific idea!”156 At the last, though, Dickey’s notion of adapting Pessoa’s “terrific idea” to his own work came to nothing, for he published no poems under the names of “Jesse Shields” and “Boyd Thornton,” two of his stillborn pseudonyms. Decidedly more ambiguous in its reference to Pessoa than Dickey’s fox-and-grapes write-off, is April Bernard’s “Lisbon, 1989,” a poem published in the New York Review of Books on November 6, 2014, The author, formerly the senior editor of the splashy journal Vanity Fair, is now identified as a member of the faculty of the Master of Fine Arts Program at Bennington College. The question for me is how does the reference to Pessoa that closes out the poem, one replete, as it is, with unfavorable descriptions of “how it was” in Portugal’s capital city a quarter of a century ago, actually work. Lisbon, 1989 The new year lurched on a clamor of horns trash cans and firecrackers rising up from the harbor over the window sills into a hotel room where civility had just died. Next day we went for lunch to a pricey restaurant filled with leftover Nazis and I was sick in the ladies’ room where the wails were zebra skins and the vanity stools mothed-up leopard. So I left alone for a walk, drank a cold espresso in a cold café and reckoned my losses in the face of lowering rain. At a bookstore I opened a book of poems: a few tender lines about the emerald sea, memory bringing a smell of salt and roses— Portuguese, indecipherable. Querido Pessoa, your voice was clear as music for those

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few moments I could read all the poems ever written.

Poetry manifests itself on the page, though the words themselves, in Portuguese, are indecipherable, even those of the “dear” Pessoa. The question that I am left with is “has the bookstore moment” had the effect of saving for the poet a day that she has rued. Is this, thus, an experience remindful of Robert Frost’s poem “Dust of Snow,” in which the day is saved by the way a crow shakes snow on him from above? Or in the focus on the loss of “those few moments” when the poet could read “all the poems ever written”? Caveat emptor.

Notes 1

2 3 4

5

6 7

8 9 10 11

12 13

14

On Feb. 8, 1996, under the title “Fernando Pessoa and Company: Imaginary Poets in a Real World,” an earlier version of this paper was read at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, R.I. in conjunction with the exhibition “Azulejo: Five Centuries of Portuguese Ceramic Tile” (Dec. 8, 1995—Feb. 25, 1966). Orpheu 3 (Provas de Pagina), ed. José Augusto Seabra (Porto: Edições Nova Renascença, 1983), p. 222. Joyce Carol Oates, The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese (New York: Vanguard, 1975), p. v. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and the School of Ages (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1994), pp. 463–92; and George Steiner, “Foursome: The Art of Fernando Pessoa,” New Yorker (Jan. 8, 1996), pp. 76–80. Benoit van Innis’s drawings referencing Pessoa appear in the New Yorker (June 21, 1993), p. 62; (Apr. 3, 1995), p. 44; (June 26 & July 3, 1995), p. 66; (Sept. 11, 1995), p. 89; and (Sept. 25, 1995), p. 61. In instances 1–3 Pessoa’s name actually appears. Steiner, “Foursome,” 76. Adolfo Casais Monteiro, A Poesia de Fernando Pessoa, 2nd ed., organized by José Blanco (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1985), pp. 232–33. This translation from the Portuguese is mine as are the others throughout the paper, unless otherwise noted. “Tábua Bibliográfica,” presença, no. 17 (Dec. 1928), p. 10. Quoted in A Centenary Pessoa, ed. Eugenio Lisboa with L. C. Taylor (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995), pp. 133–34. II: Pessoa por Conhecer: Textos para um Novo Mapa, compiled by Teresa Rita Lopes (Lisboa: Estampa, 1990), p. 379. John Wain, “Thinking About Mr Person,” New Lugano Review, 2 (Oct./Dec. 1979), 73–77; reprinted in Poems 1940–1979 (New York: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 29–35. Quotation is taken from Poems, 29. Wain, Poems, 31. Roy Campbell, “Olive Schreiner, Crusading Without a Cross,” manuscript, Roy Campbell Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Quoted with the permission of Francisco Campbell Custodio and of Ad. Donker (Pty) Ltd. and the consent of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. “List of New Books . . . Poetry,” The Athenaeum, no. 4637 (Jan. 1919), 36.

Notes 15

16

17 18

19

20 21 22

23

24 25

26

27

187

See Ana Paula Quintela Ferreira Sottomayor, “Ecos da Poesia Grega nos Epitafios de Fernando Pessoa,” in Actas do I Congresso Internacional de Estudos Pessoanos (Porto: Brasilia, 1979), 83–95. Yara Frateschi Vieira, on the other hand, reads the inscriptions in the context of English-language literature, particularly Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, published in 1915 (“Pessoa, Leitor da Antologia Grega,” Remate de Males, 8 [1988], 53–65). The first ten epitaphs in the Athenaeum are credited to P. H. C. Allen (Aug. 1, 1919, 680; Aug. 8, 1919, 713; Aug. 22, 1919, 776; Oct. 3, 1919, 970; and Oct. 17, 1919, 1028), and the last three (Feb. 27, 1920, 272) to R. A. Furness. See R. W. Howes, “Fernando Pessoa, Poet, Publisher, and Translator,” British Library Journal, 9 (Autumn 1983), 164,168–69, n. 14. Pessoa’s copy of W. R. Paton’s The Greek Anthology, including his markings and preliminary translations, is described in Maria da Encarnação Monteiro, Incidências Inglesas na Poesia de Fernando Pessoa (Coimbra: [Universidade de Coimbra] 1956), pp. 95, 108–10. Jorge de Sena, “O Heterónimo Fernando Pessoa e os Poemas Ingleses que Publicou,” in Poemas Ingleses de Fernando Pessoa, ed. Jorge de Sena (Lisboa: Ática, 1974), p. 230. Sena, “O Heterónimo Fernando Pessoa,” II, 147. Jorge de Sena, “Anglicismo,” in Amor e Outros Verbetes (Lisboa: edições 70, 1992), pp. 86–87. Jorge de Sena, “Fernando Pessoa e a literatura inglesa,” O Comercio do Porto (Aug. 11, 1953); reprinted in Sena, Fernando Pessoa & Ca. Heterónima (Lisboa: edições 70, 1982), I, 92. Jorge de Sena, “Resposta a tres perguntas de Luciana Stegagno Picchio sobre Fernando Pessoa,” Quaderni Portoghesi, no. 1 (Spring 1977); reprinted in Fernando Pessoa & Ca. Heterónima, II, 168–69. Lisboa, Preface to Centenary Pessoa, xiv Georg Rudolf Lind, “Fernando Pessoa perante a Primeira Guerra Mundial,” in Estudos Sobre Fernando Pessoa (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1981), pp. 425–58, an essay first published in Ocidente (1972), 82: 11–30. On October 18, 1916, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported: “A Madrid dispatch to the Cologne Gazette says no Portuguese troops will be sent to France until two new divisions have been made ready to preserve order in Portugal. Travelers reaching Vigo from Portugal, the dispatch says, declare that the larger part of the Portuguese people is opposed to war, and that many arrests are being made. At Oporto a crowd attacked the barracks, and 130 persons, including a number of soldiers, were arrested” (p. 4). The poem was reprinted two years later, on November 11, 1928, the tenth Anniversary of the armistice that led to the end of the long war, in O Noticias Illustrado.

188 28

29 30

31 32 33 34

35

36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43

Notes

João Gaspar Simões, Vida e Obra de Fernando Pessoa (História de um Geração), 2 vols. (Lisboa: Bertrand, 1950). The particulars are in the first volume, entitled Infância e Adolescência. Fernando Pessoa, “His Mother’s Child,” in Self-Awareness and Thirty Other Poems, trans. George Monteiro (Lisboa: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1988), p. 25. Brooke’s patriotic poem resonated in the United States as well. For example, five years after the war it was evoked to lend support to incurring the expense of replacing the white wooden crosses identifying the graves of American soldiers killed and buried in France with stone markers. (“Enduring Marble Memorials,” Watertown Daily Times [New York], October 4, 1923, p. 4.) Geoffrey Keynes, Preface to The Poetical Works of Rupert Brooke, ed. Keynes (London: Faber and Faber, 1946), p. 5. “Death of Mr. Rupert Brooke: Sunstroke at Lemnos,” London Times, April 26, 1915, p. 5. Henry James, Preface, Letters from America by Rupert Brooke (New York: Scribner’s, 1916), pp. xl–xlii. Quoted in John Lehmann, The Strange Destiny of Rupert Brooke (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), pp. 137–38. Lehmann’s title for the fifteenth chapter of his book is “Aftermath and Canonization” (150). Rupert Brooke (London: Ernest Benn [1925]). See A Biblioteca Particular de Fernando Pessoa / Fernando Pessoa’s Private Library, ed. Jerónimo Pizarro, Patricio Ferrari and Antonio Cardiello (Lisboa: Acervo Casa Fernando Pessoa / House of Fernando Pessoa’s Collection, Volume I, [Dom Quixote, 2010]), item 8–69. Quoted in Alexandrino E. Severino, “Was Pessoa Ever in South Africa?” Hispania, 74 (September, 1981), 529. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 281–82. “Como é que o poeta, morando na pacífica Lisboa, se teria inspirado em motives bélicos, não conhecendo mais sobre a guerra do que aquilo que os jornais relatavam?” (Lind, “Fernando Pessoa,” 425). Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “Hello to All That!” New York Review of Books, 58 (June 23, 2011), p. 31. George Monteiro, Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century AngloAmerican Literature (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), Chapter 12, “Webs of Empire: Caroline Norton, Rimbaud, and Others,” pp. 129–44. Arthur Rimbaud, “The Sleeper in the Valley,” Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans., intr. and notes by Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 57. Sophia de Melo Bryner, “O Soldado Morto,” in Mar Novo (Lisboa: Guimarães, 1958), p. 36. Sophia de Melo Breyner, “The Dead Soldier,” in Marine Rose: Selected

Notes

44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60

189

Poems, trans. Ruth Fainlight (Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan Books, 1988), p. 77. See Roy Campbell, “The Poetry of Luiz de Camões,” London Magazine, 4 (August 1957), 23–33. Roy Campbell, Collected Works, ed. Peter Alexander, Michael Chapman, and Marcia Leveson (Craighall: Ad. Donker, 1985–88), 4: 435. Poetry of the 1930s, ed. Allen Rodway (London: Longmans, 1967). “ Homenagem a Roy Campbell na Radiotelevisão Portuguesa,” Diário Ilustrado, May 28, 1957, p. 24. My translation. Peter Alexander, Roy Campbell, A Critical Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 74. Roy Campbell, Collected Poems (London: Bodley Head, 1957), 2: 30. Leonard Bacon Papers, Bienecke Library of Manuscripts and Rare Books,” Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Quotations from Campbell manuscripts appear with permission of Ad. Donker, and with the Library’s consent. Alexander, Campbell, 200. Alexander, Campbell, 198. D.S.J. Parsons, Roy Campbell: A Descriptive and Annotated Bibliography with notes on unpublished sources (New York and London: Garland, 1981), pp. 103–17. Roy Campbell, “Luís de Camões,” Talking Bronco (London: Faber & Faber, 1946), p. 11. “ Luís de Camões,” trans. Jorge de Sena, Diário de Lisboa, June 9, 1952, p. 3. Jorge de Sena, “Sobre Roy Campbell,” O Comércio do Porto, May 21, 1957, p. 6. Poesia do Século XX (De Thomas Hardy a C. V. Cattaneo), ed. and trans. Jorge de Sena (Porto: Inova, 1978), pp. 402–4. Jorge de Sena, A Literatura Inglêsa: Ensaio de Interpretação e de História (São Paulo: Cultrix, 1963), pp. 370–71. Roy Campbell Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Texas. The note venturing this characterization continues: “I may seem ungrateful [to T. E. Lawrence]. He got my first book published. I have got his mail. He was going to hoist me into fame. When I told him that I was a man, that I was married at the age of 19—he hated me: he wrote frenzied insults and fell in love with my wife’s Lesbian Sister who is about 6 feet high.” Campbell continued his attack on Lawrence in a bit of undated doggerel intended for his friend, Rob Lyle: “In these mad times when ink is poured in torrents / About such tinpot fakes as ‘T. E. Lawrence’ / The whining belly-acher of ‘The Mint’ / (Surely the title should have been The Bint) / When skulking Catamites that shunned all fights.” David Wright, Roy Campbell (London: Longmans, Green, 1961), pp. 32–33.

190 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

72 73 74 75

76 77 78 79 80 81 82

83

Notes

Wright, Campbell, 33. Campbell, Works, 4: 435. Alexander, Campbell, 227. H[arold] V. L[ivermore], “Book Reviews: Cousin Bazilio,” Atlante, 2 (No.1, 1954), 48. Campbell, Works, 4: 405. Campbell, Works, 4: 414. Mary Campbell, Preface, The Collected Poems of Roy Campbell, Volume 3 [Translations] (London: Bodley Head, 1960), p. 13. Notebooks, Roy Campbell Papers. Manuel Bandeira, “Renúncia,” Estrêla da Vida Inteira (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1966), p. 46. Campbell, Works, 4: 405. Campbell, Works, 4: 488. Elsewhere Campbell writes: “Translations are like wives or mistresses: the most attractive are generally the least faithful” (Works, 4: 376). Campbell, Works, 4: 488. Campbell, Works, 4: 405. V. S. Pritchett, “Salazar Land,” New Statesman, 54 (November 30, 1957), 736. G[erald] M M[oser], “Eça de Queiroz in English—Cousin Bazilio,” Hispania, 37 (March 1954), 102. Moser refers to Dragon’s Teeth (1889), Mary J. Serrano’s translation of O Primo Basílio, published by Ticknor in Boston. The Atlantic Monthly’s notice is dismissive. Although the translator puts her name only on the title-page, she is not wholly unjust to her author, for she gives due credit to Eça de Queiros in a brief introductory note. “One enters a Portuguese novel with some hopefulness, but when he comes out of this one he is bound to confess that the Portuguese variety of human nature offers no great surprise or specially new pleasure. There is the same cousin who interferes between man and wife. The flavor of the book is foreign, but that is all” (“Books of the Month: Dragon’s Teeth,” Atlantic Monthly, 63 [June 1889], 859). Livermore, “Book Reviews,” 48–49. Alexander, Campbell, 227. Campbell, Works, 2: 483. Fernando Pessoa, Mensagem (Lisboa: A. M. Pereira, 1934). “Olive Schreiner: Crusading without a Cross,” Roy Campbell Papers. Roy Campbell Papers. Roy Campbell, Portugal (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1958), pp. 157– 58. Campbell’s unfinished manuscript is discussed in George Monteiro, The Presence of Pessoa: English, American, and Southern African Literary Responses (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998). Monteiro, Presence, 110, 115.

Notes

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84 Roy Campbell, Lorca: An Appreciation of His Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952). 85 Fernando Pessoa, Obra Poética, ed. Maria Aliete Galhoz (Rio de Janeiro: Aguilar, 1960), p. 82. 86 Pessoa, Obra, 385. 87 Pessoa, Obra, 301–2. 88 Leonard Bacon Papers. 89 J. Monteiro-Grillo, “Roy Campbell,” Diário Ilustrado, May 7, 1957, p. 24. 90 An early version of this piece was prepared in 2002 for a collection of essays on Roy Campbell to be published in South Africa, a volume that did not materialize. For earlier work on Campbell and the Portuguese, see Monteiro, Presence, 19–27, 137–40, and Miguel Alarcão, “Roy Campbell (19901–1957): O Hispanista Escocês da Africa Austral,” Revista de Estudos Anglo-Portugueses, 16 (2007), 135–57. 91 Pessoa, “Ulysses,” in Self-Analysis, 19. 92 Edward Glaser, “The Odyssean Adventures in Gabriel Pereira de Castro’s VLYSSEA,” Bulletin des Etudes Portugaises, n.s. 24 (1963), 28. 93 João Medina, Ulisses, o Europeu (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 2000). 94 Glaser, “Odyssean,” 30. 95 Ronald W. Sousa, The Rediscoverers: Major Writers in the Portuguese Literature of National Regeneration (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981), p. 159. 96 Manuel Luciano da Silva (1926–2012), who practiced medicine in Bristol, R. I., was an amateur historian. He supported the notion that the Azorean bothers Corte-Reais had survived their final voyages to the edge of the New World, the evidence for thinking so being the “discovery” of markings on a much-scarred and mysteriously marked rock in the Dighton River in Taunton, Massachusetts. He also promoted the notion that Christopher Columbus was of Portuguese ascendance. 97 Maria Leonor Machado de Sousa, Fernando Pessoa e a Literatura de Ficção (Lisboa: Novaera, 1978), p. 11. 98 Fernando Pessoa, Páginas de Estética e de Teoria e Crítica Literárias, ed. Georg Rudolf Lind and Jacinto do Prado Coelho (Lisboa: Ática, 1966), p. 193. 99 Pessoa, Páginas de Estética, 207. 100 Fernando Pessoa Papers, Instituto da Biblioteca Nacional e do Livro, Lisbon. All quotations from Pessoa, unless otherwise indicated, are to the Papers. 101 Pessoa, Páginas de Estética, 221. 102 Machado de Sousa, Literatura de Ficção, 9–22. See also Maria Leonor Machado de Sousa, “Postface” to Fernando Pessoa, “Um Jantar Muito Original” seguido de “A Porta”, trans. Maria Leonor Machado de Sousa (Lisboa: Relógio de Água, 1985), pp. 59–60. 103 Machado de Sousa, Literatura de Ficção, 15–16.

192

Notes

104 “O Corvo,” Athena, 1 (October 1924), 27–29. 105 “Os Poemas Finais de Edgar Poe,” Athena, 1 (January 1925), 161–64. 106 José Blanco, quoted in Fotobibliografia de Fernando Pessoa, compiled by João Rui de Sousa, pref. Eduardo Lourenço (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda / Biblioteca Nacional, 1988), p. 104. 107 Monteiro, Incidências Inglesas, 96. 108 The Choice Works of E. A. Poe, Poems, Stories, Essays, intr. Charles Baudelaire (London: Chatto and Windus, 1902), p. 10. 109 Pessoa, Páginas de Estética, 211. 110 Poe, Choice Works, 18–19. 111 José Blanco, Fernando Pessoa: Esboço de Uma Bibliografia (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional–Casa da Moeda / Centro de Estudos Pessoanos, 1983), cover. 112 Fernando Pessoa Papers. 113 Pessoa, Páginas de Estética, p. 194. 114 Pessoa, Obra Poética, 505. My translation here and throughout this chapter. 115 Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Edward H. Davidson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), p. 93. 116 Cartas de amor de Fernando Pessoa, pref., notes by David MouraoFerreira (Lisboa: Ática, 1978), p. 157. 117 Pessoa, Cartas de amor, 66 and 78. 118 Pessoa, Cartas de amor, 157. 119 Pessoa, Cartas de amor, 162–163. 120 Pessoa, Cartas de amor, 161. 121 Pessoa, Cartas de amor, 155–156. It is Y. K. Centeno’s argument that Pessoa’s “horror of sex” made it impossible for him to see Ofélia as anything more than as a child, who as such would be no threat to him sexually (“Ophélia—bébézinho ou o horror do sexo,” in Fernando Pessoa: o amor, a morte, a iniciação [Lisboa: A Regra do Jogo, 1985], pp. 11–21). 122 Pessoa, Obra Poética, 534. 123 Pessoa, Cartas de amor, 77–78. 124 That the entire courtship from beginning to end was an elaborate act of characteristic feigning is argued by José Augusto Seabra, “Amor e fingimento,” in O Heterotexto pessoano (Lisboa: Dinalivro, 1985), pp. 61–76. See also Antonio Tabucchi, who asserts that in this courtship Pessoa, as always, is living out his “life in literature” (“Um Fausto mangas-de-alpaca: As ‘Cartas de amor’ de Pessoa,” in Pessoana minima [Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1984], pp. 51–59). 125 Charles Baudelaire, “Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Works,” Choice Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 18. 126 Pessoa, Cartas de amor, 129. 127 Pessoa, Obra poética, 399–400. 128 “Ligeia,” Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 94.

Notes

193

129 Maria da Graça Queiroz, “Ofélia Queiroz: O mistério duma pessoa,” Jornal de letras (November 12/18, 1985), p. 4. 130 Pessoa, Cartas de Amor, 137. 131 My understanding of Fernando Pessoa’s courtship of Ofélia Queiroz and its melancholy aftermath has been appreciably enhanced by two earlier studies: Alexandrino Severino’s and Hubert D. Jennings’ unpublished essay, “In Praise of Ofélia: An Interpretation of Pessoa’s Only Love” (delivered by Severino at the International Symposium on Fernando Pessoa, held at Brown University, Providence, R.I., on October 7–8, 1977), and David Mourão-Ferreira’s essay, “Estas ‘Cartas de Amor’ de Fernando Pessoa,” postface to Pessoa, Cartas de amor. It goes almost without saying, moreover, that no one writing on the subject of Pessoa and Ofélia can safely ignore the work of João Gaspar Simões. Rereading recently his Vida e Obra de Fernando Pessoa, I was once again struck by Simões’s vigorously argued account of the Freudian nature of this affair. See, especially, his chapter “Único amor” (4th ed., 1980), pp. 485–508. 132 See Fernando Pessoa’s letter to João de Castro of June 23, 1924, first published by Teresa Rita Lopes in Pessoa Inêdito (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 1992), pp. 222–23. 133 The various aspects of Pessoa’s decades-long interest in Poe’s work are taken up in my “Poe/Pessoa,” Comparative Literature, 40 (Spring 1988), 134–49; “Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935),” in Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities, ed. Lois Davis Vines (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), pp. 210–14, and “The Wing of Madness: Poe,” (chapter 9), in Fernando Pessoa and NineteenthCentury Anglo-American Literature, pp. 111–27. 134 Fernando Pessoa, Principais Poemas de Edgar Allan Poe, intr. Fernando Pessoa and Margarida Vale de Gato, ed. and trans. Margarida Vale de Gato (Lisboa: Guimarães, 2011). 135 For Fernando Pessoa’s translation “O Corvo” (“The Raven”) see Athena: Revista de Arte, 1 (October 1924), 27–29; for “Annabel Lee” and “Ulalume” see Athena 1(January 1925), 161–64. 136 Claudio Weber Abramo, O Corvo; Gênese, Referências e Traduções do Poema de Edgar Allan Poe (São Paulo, Brazil: Hedra, 2011). 137 Abramo, O Corvo. 138 Vale de Gato, Principais Poemas, 78–81. 139 Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence, ed. Joelle Biele (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), p. 261. 140 The texts of Browning’s original and Pessoa’s translation are available, on facing pages, in Arnaldo Saraiva, Fernando Pessoa: Poeta–Tradutor de Poetas (Porto: Lello, 1996), pp. 112–16. Saraiva notes that Pessoa’s translation was first published, circa 1911, in Biblioteca Internacional de Obras Célebres, 20, pp. 10096–10100. 141 In completing Pessoa’s fragmentary translation of Poe’s “For Annie,” Vale de Gato follows Pessoa’s lead, as can be seen from the surviving

194

142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149

150 151 152

153 154 155

156

Notes

text of Pessoa’s incomplete translation, by dropping the heroine’s name from the poem while retaining it in the title. (Principais Poemas, 116– 25, 177–81). See Vale de Gato, Principais Poemas, 166. Vale de Gato, Principais Poemas, 166. See also her “Poetics and Ideology in Fernando Pessoa’s Translations of Edgar Allan Poe,” Edgar Allan Poe Review, 11 (Spring 2010), 123. Vale de Gato, Principais Poemas, 166. Pessoa, Obra Poética, p. 108. Luís de Camões, Obras Completas, ed. Hernani Cidade, 3rd ed. (Lisboa: Sá da Costa, 1971), 1: 213–14. The Scarlet Letter (facsimile of the first edition, in 1850), ed. Hyatt H. Waggoner and George Monteiro (San Francisco: Chandler, 1968), pp. 172–73. “Poema em linha recta” and “Poem—Straight to the Point,” SelfAnalysis, 42–43. This information, penciled on an unpublished letter to Houghton Mifflin Company from William W. Ellsworth, September 4, 1922 (Houghton Mifflin Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University), would appear to correct a considerably larger figure reported publicly in 1896—480,000 copies (The Critic, 26 [July 25, 1896], 62). To put the Houghton Mifflin figure clearly in perspective, it should be pointed out that the same letter contains additional pencil notations: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 997,000 copies; Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, 2,183,000, and his Evangeline, 3,600,000. Monteiro, Presence of Pessoa. David Shapiro, “At the Grave of Ferdinand Pessoa or the Triple Tomb,” American Poetry Review, 28 (May/June 1999), p. 69. Bob Holman, “Notes toward ‘Exploding Test: Poetry Performance,’” in Poetry & Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary, ed. Joan Retallack and Juliana Spahr (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 294–95. David Mason, “The Inner Drama of James Wright,” Hudson Review, 58 (Winter 2006), 669. Crux: The Letters of James Dickey, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman (New York: Knopf, 1999), pp. 195, 527 note. Poetry Magazine, 87 (October1955), 26–29, 40–44. Roditi’s piece was accompanied by examples, in translation, of Pessoa’s poetry: Pessoa’s “Autopsycography,” Alberto Caeiro’s “Discontinuous Poems” and “The Herdsman,” and two of Ricardo Reis’s odes. Walter Clemons, “James Dickey, Novelist,” New York Times (March 22, 1970), p. 298.

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Index A Brasileira (café) 78, 90 Abramo, Claudio Weber 153 O Corvo: Gênese Referências e Traduções do Poema de Edgar Allan Poe 153 Acção (journal) 7 Actas do I Congresso Internacional de Estudos Pessoanos (Oporto) 120 Adams, Henry 99–102 (quoted), 115 A Águia (journal) 3–5, 87, 111, 155 Agência Geral das Colónias (Lisbon) 54 Aguilar (publisher) 83, 97 Aiken, Conrad 19 Alexandre, António Franco 133 Alighieri, Dante 39, 103 Il Paradiso 39 Alliance (Portugal and England) 24 Almeida, Mário de 6, 85 Os Sonetos From the Portuguese e Elisabeth Barrett Browing [sic] 6 Almeida, Onésimo Teotónio 54–57, 75 Mensagem: uma tentativa de reinterpretação 54–55, 57, 75 Pessoa, Portugal e o Futuro 55–57 American Renaissance 100 Andrade, Carlos Drummond de 61 “Sonetilho do Falso Fernando Pessoa” 61 Anon, Charles Robert (C. R. Anon) (heteronym) viii, 2–3, 81, 85, 111 “Antero de Quental Prize” 12, 53–54, 74, 76, 78, 96 Antigone 30 Antinous 65, 81 Antologia de Poetas Português Modernos 10 Antunes, Antonio Lobo 133, 136–37 Arabia Felix 35 Aristotle (Aristolian, non-Aristolian) 8, 158 Arp, Hans 76

Ashbee, Henry Spencer (see “Pisanus Fraxi”) Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas 127 Assírio & Alvim (publisher) 98 Assis, Machado de 153 Athena: Revista de Arte (journal) 8, 20, 109, 112, 139–40, 143, 152 Athenaeum (London) (journal) 7, 19–20, 69, 81 (quoted), 86 Ática (publisher) 83, 106, 110 Auden, W. H. 34 Aztec Shops (San Diego State University, California) 50 Azulejos 14 Bacon, Leonard 35 Badajor (Africa) 100 Baixa (Lisbon) 53, 78, 84, 90, 111 Bandeira, Manuel 37–39 “Renúncia” (“Counsel”—rejected titles: “Renunciation,” “Resignation,” “Warning,” “Life Insurance”) 37–39 (quoted) Barão de Teive (Álvaro Coelho de Athayde) (heteronym) 98–99, 115 Bardi, Anna 137 Barker, George 34 Barrow-in-Furness (England) 158–59 Baudelaire, Charles 3, 42, 102–3, 139, 142 (quoted), 147 (quoted) Choice Works of Edgar Allan Poe 109, 139–40, 152 Bell, Aubrey 19 Belo, Ruy 133, 135 “Muriel” 135 Toda a Terra 135 Bentley, Richard 175 Bentley, William A. 56 (quoted) Portugal 56 Berardinelli, Cleonice 80, 82–83 Poesias de Álvaro de Campos (Obras

Index Competas de Fernando Pessoa, vol. 2) 83 Besant, Annie 5 Os Ideaes da Theosophia 5 Bessa-Luis, Agustina 135 Betjeman, John 61 Biberfeld, Simone 62 A Biblioteca Internacional de Obras Célebres 3, 6, 85, 154 Bishop, Elizabeth (“The Bishop”; “Saint Elizabeth of Petrópolis”; “Lis Bish”; “Ms Bishop”) 154 (quoted), 161–68 (quoted) Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring 162 Blackmore, Josiah 104–6 The Songs of António Botto 104–6 Blake, William 68, 76 Marriage of Heaven and Hell 68 Blanco, José 60–66, 73, 124, 131 Fernando Pessoa: Esboço de uma bibliografia 60–61 Œuvres complètes. I; Proses (publiées de vivant de L’auteur 64–65 Œuvres completes, 3:Poésies et proses de Álvaro de Campos (publiés du vivant de Fernando Pessoa) 66 Œuvres completes, 4. Poèmes de Alberto Caeiro (publiés du vivant de Fernando Pessoa) 66 Pessoa en personne: Lettres et documents 62–63 Bloom, Harold 14–15, 100 Boca do Inferno (Cascais) 10, 104 Bocage, Manuel Maria Barbosa du 35, 41 Boer War (South Africa) 28–29 Borges, Jorge Luis 15, 90, 110 “Partial Magic in the Quixote” 110–11 (quoted) Botto, Antonio 7, 10–12, 78, 84, 104–6, 112, 133 António 11, 105 Canções 7, 104, 112 Cartas que me foram devolvidas 11 Ciume 12 Bourbon e Meneses 84 Bréchon, Robert 88–89 Étrange Étranger: Une Biographie de Fernando Pessoa 88–89

201

Breyner, Sophia de Melo 32–33, 138 “O Soldado” (“The Dead Soldier”) 32–33 (quoted) Brooke, Rupert 23, 25–30 Collected Poems 28 “The Dead” 25–26 (quoted) Letters from America 27 “1914” (“War Sonnets”) 25, 28, 30 1914 & Other Sonnets 28 “The Soldier” 25 (quoted) Brooks, Cleanth 75 Understanding Poetry 75 Brown, Susan M. 63, 95 The Keeper of Sheep 63 Poems of Fernando Pessoa 63, 95 Brown University (Rhode Island) 120–31. 161–63, 166–68, 179 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 6, 84–85, 154 “Catarina to Camoens” 6, 85, 154 “Natércia” (“Catarine,” “Catarina”) (character) 154 Browning, Robert 15, 81, 84–85 Byron, George Gordon (Lord Byron) 2 Cabral, Sacadura 8, 79 Caeiro, Alberto (heteronym) 4, 6, 8, 11–12, 15–18, 23, 42, 58–59, 63, 66–69, 74, 84–85, 91, 94–95, 99, 101, 104, 111–13, 115, 119 (quoted), 133, 135, 158–60 “O Guardador de Rebanhos” (“The Keeper of Sheep”) 8, 11, 16, 59 (quoted), 63, 74, 104, 113 “Poemas inconjunctos” 6, 8 Caesar 94, 113 Caetano, Marcelo 54 Café Montanha (Lisbon) 92 Calçada da Estrêla 100–3 Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation 124, 126–27, 129, 131, 166 Cambridge (university) 113 Camões (Camoens), Luiz Vaz de viii, 6, 8, 15, 34–35, 41–42, 51–52, 56, 75, 85, 96, 100, 114, 118, 154–57 “Alma minha gentil, que partiste” (Oh gentle spirit mine that didst part”) 154–56 (quoted) Os Lusíadas (Lusiads) viii, 34–36 (quoted), 51, 75, 87, 96 Adamastor (Spirt of the Cape of Good Hope) (character) 35, 42

202

Index

Campbell, Mary 37 Campbell, Roy ix, 18–19 (quoted), 34–47, 61, 91–92, 121 Adamastor 34–35 Collected Poems of Roy Campbell 37–38 Collected Works II Poetry Translations 37 Fernando Pessoa 42–47 The Flaming Terrapin 34 Flowering Rifle 34, 46 The Georgiad 34 “Imitation (and Endorsement) of the famous Sonnet of Bocage which he Wrote on Active Service Out East” 35 Lorca: An Appreciation of the Poetry 43 “Luís de Camões” 35–36 (quoted) “The Making of a Poet” 36 Mithraic Emblems 34 “On the Martyrdom of Garcia Lorca” 36 Portugal 42 “Rounding the Cape” 36 Talking Bronco 35 Taurine Provence 34 The Wayzgoose 34 Campos, Álvaro de (heteronym) 4–12, 15–19, 23, 42–44 (quoted), 46, 58, 61–62, 64 (quoted), 66–69 (quoted), 71, 80, 82–85, 91–92, 94–95, 99–101, 103–4, 110–15, 123, 129,133, 138, 146–50, 158–60, 172–73, 182 “Addiamento” 10 “Ah, um soneto” 11, 43–45 (quoted) “All love letters are ridiculous” 148–49 (quoted) “Ambiente” 9 “Anniversario” 10 “Apontamento” 10 “Apostilha” 9 “Até casado! (à portuguesa ou à inglesa)” 67–68 (quoted) “Aviso por causa da moral” 7 “Barrow-on-Furness” (“Barrow-inFurness”) 158–59 “Clearly non-Campos” 158 “Escripto num livro abandonado em viagem” 9 “A Fernando Pessoa depois de ler o

seu drama statico O Marinheiro em Orpheu I” 10 “Gazetilha” 10 “Letter to Fernando Pessoa” 133 “Lisbon Revisited (1923)” 7, 9, 158 “Nota ao Caso” 112 “Ode Marcial” 23 “Ode marítima” (“Maritime Ode”) 5, 19, 42, 112, 123, 158 “Ode triunfal” 4–5, 16, 112 “Opiário” 4–5, 43, 45–46 (quoted), 112 A Passagem das Horas 82, 138 “Quasi” 9 “Quero acabar entre rosas” 11 “Saudação a Walt Whitman” 5, 82, 103, 158 “Soneto já antigo” 7, 71, 112 “Tabacaria” (“The Tobacco Shop”) 11, 59–60 (quoted), 62, 103, 112, 158 “Trapo” 11 “Ultimatum” 6, 112 Camus, Albert 60 “Cantigas” 41 Cape Guardafui (Somalia) 35 Cape of Good Hope (Africa) 35 Cape of Storms (Africa) 19 Carcanet (publisher) 72–73 Cardoso, Amadeo de Souza 121–22 Carlyle, Thomas 2, 101 On Heroes and Hero-worship 101 (quoted) Casa Fernando Pessoa (Lisbon) 139 Castro, Américo 110 El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha 110 Castro, Gabriel Pereira de 52 Vlyssea, ov Lysboa edificada 52 Ulysses (Odysses) (character) 52 Cascais (Portugal) 10–11 Cassian, Nina 134 Castro, Ivo de 82 Cavaco, Gilbert 122 “Pessoa and Portuguese Politics” 122 Cavafy, Constantine P. 62 Celan, Paul 61 Centauro (journal) 6 Centeno, Y. K. 75, 86–87 (quoted) Center for Portuguese and Brazilian Studies (Brown University, Rhode Island) 120, 123–27, 129–30, 179

Index Centro de Estudos Pessoanos (Oporto) 120 Cervantes (Saavedra), Miguel de 110–11 Quixote (novel) 110–11 Quixote (character) 110–11 Cesariny, Mário 133–34 Cervejaria Jansen (Lisbon) 5 Chiado (Lisbon) 78 C.I.A. (Central Intelligence Agency) ix, 49–50 Cinatti, Ruy 133 Cirurgião, Antonio 74–76 O “Olhar Esfingico” da Mensagem de Pessoa 74–76 Citibank (New York) 50 Coelho, Adolfo 4 Coelho, Jacinto do Prado 72–73, 98, 124 Coelho, Joaquim-Francisco 61–62, 125 Microleituras de Álvaro de Campos 61–62 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 11, 84–85, 101 “Man from Porlock” 11, 101 Columbia University (New York) 66, 132 Colóquio-Letras (journal) 124 Commercial School (Durban) 2 O Comércio do Porto (journal) 36 Constable and Company, Limited (publisher) 6, 19, 68, 81, 85, 87 Contemporanea (journal) 7–9, 20, 23, 43, 81, 86, 112 Contemporary Portuguese Poetry 138 Correa, Manuel Tângier 155 Correia, Natalia 133 Corbière 42, 103 Corte-Reais 131 Côrtes-Rodrigues, Armando 63 Costa, Augusto da 12 Portugal Vasto Império 9, 12 Costa, Maria Velho da 133 Courteau, Joanna 123 Coutinho, Gago 79 Crane, Hart 76, 100–1 The Bridge 76 Crespo, Angel 88 Crowley, Aleister 10–11, 84, 104, 165 “Hymn to Pan” 11 Cullen, Countee 87 Cunha, Augusto 5 Cunha, Teresa Sobral 72–73, 98

203

Curso Superior de Letras (University of Lisbon) 3 Daunt, Ricardo 102–4 T. S. Eliot e Fernando Pessoa: Dialogos de New Haven 102–4 Davidson, John 105 Descimento da Cruz” (“Descent of the Cross”) 79 Descobrimento (journal) 11, 72 Diário Ilustrado (journal) 35 Diário de Lisboa (journal) 12, 36, 77 Diário de Noticias (journal) 1, 8, 12 Dias, Bartolomeu 20 Dias, Cunha 12 Amor de outono 12 Dias, Francisco Caetano 8–9 Dickens, Charles 109, 151 Dionísio, João 80–82 Poemas Ingleses, 1; Antinous, Inscriptions, Epitalamism, 35 Sonnets 80–82 Dr. Pancrácio (pseudonym) 2 Dom Quixote (publisher) 61, 135, 179–80 Dowson, Ernest 88, 105 Dryden, John 37 Dupin (firm) (Lisbon) 144 Durban (South Africa) 1–3, 15, 18–19, 28, 69, 78, 113 Durban High School 1–2 Durban High School Magazine (journal) 2 Ecclesiastes 74, 110 (quoted) Editorial Delta (publisher) 140 Eh Real! (journal) 5 Elbe (river) 101 Eliot, T. S. 15, 19–20, 76, 81–82, 102–6, 120 “Gerontion” 103 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” 103 (quoted) “Portrait of a Lady” 103 The Waste Land 76 J. Alfred Prufrock (character) 98 Elizabethan English 81, 86–87 Estado Novo (Portugal) 12, 53–54 Exílio (journal) 5 Faculdade de Letras (Lisbon) 159 Fagundes, Franciso Cota 123 Fall River (Massachusetts) 131

204

Index

Fama (journal) 11 Fanshawe, Sir Richard 87 Faria, Almeida 128–29 Faro (Portugal) 6 Feldman, Catarina 122 “The Sun vs. Ice Cream and Chocolate: The Works of Wallace Stevens and Fernando Pessoa” 122 Ferdinand, Archduke Franz 24 Ferrari, Patricio (and Claudia J. Fisher) 106–8, 114, 116 Argumentos para Films 106–8 Ferreira, José Gomes 138 Ferreira, Vergilio 134–35 Aparição 134 Conta-corrente 134 “The Hen” 134–35 Manhã Submersa 134 Para Sempre 134 Ferro, António 5, 12, 53–54, 76, 96 Fielding, Henry Tom Jones 140 First International Symposium on Fernando Pessoa (Brown University, Rhode Island) ix, 48, 120–31, 179 Flaubert, Gustave 114 Madame Bovary 40 Folha de Arte (journal) 8 Fonseca, Abel Pereira da 149 Fonseca, Branquinho da 93 Forster, E. M. 19, 105 Maurice 105 Fowlie, Wallace 32 “The Sleeper in the Valley” (quoted) 32 Fradique (journal) 11 Franco, João 3 Freire, Luísa 85–88 Poesia Inglesa 85–88 Freitas, Ana Luisa Nogueira de (Aunt Anica) 4–6 French Academy (Paris) 135 Frisch, Max 134 Frost, Robert 132, 185 “Dust of Snow” 185 “The Wood-Pile” 132 Fussell, Paul 29 The Great War and Modern Memory 29 (quoted) Futurism 53, 114

G. K. Hall (publisher) 121 A Galera (journal) 5 Galhoz, Maria Aliete 72, 83, 97 Obra Poetica (Pessoa) 83, 97 Gallipoli (Turkey) 26–27 Garcia, José Martins 123, 133 Garcilaso de la Vega 124 Gascoyne, David 34 Gávea-Brown (publisher) 50, 120 Germany 24 Gibbons, Reginald 121 The Poet’s Work: 29 Masters of 20th Century Poetry on the Origins and Practice of their Art 121 Gil, José 66 Caeiro 66 Girassol (journal) 10 Glasgow (Scotland) 67, 159 Glasgow Herald (journal) 6, 81 (quoted) Godinho, Lisa 122 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 114 Gomes, Augusto Ferreira 12 Quinto Império 12 Gonçalves, Olga 133 The Great War (see World War I) Greek Anthology 7–8, 20, 84, 86, 96 Green, Anna Katherine 9 The House on Fifth Avenue 9 Greene, Graham 134 Grierson, H. J. C. 20, 81 Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the Seventeenth Century 20 Griffin, Jonathan 61, 73, 95–98, 121 Message 95–98 Guedes, Vicente (heteronym) 73, 98–99 Guerreiro, Fernando 106–7 Guibert, Armand 61 Guillen, Claudio 76 Entre lo uno y lo diverso: Introduccion a la literatura comparada 76 Hadrian (Emperor) 81, 86 Harper, Michael 163 Harvard University (Massachusetts) 99, 122 Havel, Václav 134, 137 Hawthorne, Nathaniel ix, 8, 62, 112, 135, 169–80 The Scarlet Letter (A Letra

Index Encarnada) ix, 8, 112, 135, 169– 80 Hazard, Shirley 48 The Transit of Venus 48 Helder, Herberto 136 “Dogs, Seaman” 136 “Style” 136 Hemingway, Ernest 62 Henry, O. (William Sydney Porter) 8, 109, 151 O Heraldo (journal) 6 Herzog (ship) 3 Heteronomy viii–ix, 1–2, 4, 6–7, 12, 14–15, 17–18, 23, 28, 42, 48, 58–63, 65–67, 69, 72, 76, 78, 80–82, 84–85, 91–96, 99–101, 104, 107, 111–12, 114–15, 117– 18, 121, 133, 139–40, 146–47, 158, 160, 181–83 Hispania (journal) 40 Hispanic Society of America 121, 124 Homer 42, 52, 114, 181 Honig, Edwin 58–61, 63–64, 95, 121–23, 161–68, 181 Always Astonished: Selected Prose 63–64 The Keeper of Sheep 63 Poems of Fernando Pessoa 63, 95 “Poetry Chronicle” 162 Selected Poems by Fernando Pessoa 58–60, 63, 163 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) 30, 181 “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” 30 Hospital de S. Luís (Lisbon) 12, 18, 61 Hotel de Nice (Paris) 5 Housman, A. E. 23, 29–30, 105–6 “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries” 29 A Shropshire Lad 29–30 (quoted), 105 “To an Athlete Dying Young” 106 (quoted) Hugo, Victor 114 Huxley, Aldous 19 Ibis 3, 144 Ilustração (journal) 8 O Imparcial (journal) 2, 9 “Imprensa Ibis” (publisher) 3 A Informação (journal) 9 Innis, Benoit van 15

205

Instituto da Biblioteca Nacional e do Livro (Lisbon) 140 Intermediate Examination (Durban) 2 J.G.H.C. (heteronym) 2 James, Henry 27–28 (quoted), 48, 178, 181 Preface, Letters from America 27–28 (quoted) Jennings, Hubert D. 122 Jerónimos Monastery (Mosteiro dos Jerónimos) 78 Jesus 117–18 Joan of Arc 83 John the Baptist 111 Johnson, Lionel 88, 105 Jorge, João Miguel Fernandes 133, 135 Jorge, Lidia 133 O Jornal (journal) 5 Jornal de Letras (journal) 86, 149 O Jornal do Comercio e das Colonias (journal) 9, 12 “Portugal Vasto Imperio” 9, 12 Joyce, James 66–67 Ulysses 66 Leopold Bloom (character) 66–67 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Stephen Daedalus (character) 95 Junqueiro, Guerra 118 Kamenezky, Eliezer 11 Alma errante 11 Keats, John 2, 18 Keene, Donald 133 Kierkegaard, Søren 15 Kim, Tomás (see J. Monteiro-Grillo) Kinsella, John 102 Kipling, Rudyard 84–85 Lacerda, Alberto de 134 Laforgue, Jules 102–3 Lamu (Kenya) 35 Lancastre, Maria José de 73, 89–90 Fernando Pessoa 89–90 Fernando Pessoa: Uma Fotobiografia 73, 89 Largo de São Carlos (Lisbon) 1 Lawrence, T. E. (“Lawrence of Arabia”) 36 Seven Pillars of Wisdom 36 Leibowitz, Herbert 163, 166

206

Index

Leadbeater, C. W. 5 Auxiliares Invisíveis 5 A Clarividência 5 Compendio de Theosophia 5 Leal, Raul 7–8 Sodoma Divinizada 7 Lewis, C. Day 34 Liga de Ação dos Estudantes de Lisboa 7 Lind, Georg Rudolf 23, 29 (quoted), 124 Livermore, Harold V. 40–41 (quoted) Livraria Clássica Editora (publisher) 5 Locke, Richard 133 “The World of Fernando Pessoa” 133 London Graphic (journal) 80–81 (quoted) London Times (journal) 6, 19, 26–27 (quoted) London Times Literary Supplement (journal) 25, 80 Longland, Jean 61, 121–24 Lopes, Teresa Rita 66–68 (quoted), 77–80, 82–85 Álvaro de Campos: Livro de Versos 82–84 Campos 66 Fernando Pessoa et le drame symboliste: Héritage et création 66 Lisboa: O Que o Turista Deve Ver / What the Tourist Should See 77–80 Vida e obras do engenheiro 66–68, 83 Lorca, Garcia 36–37 Lourenço, Eduardo 125, 135, 137 Nós e a Europa ou as duas razões 137 Lowell, James Russell 3, 84 Lowell, Robert (Cal) 162 Luso-Brazilian Review (journal) 121 Luz Sobre o Caminho e O Karma 5 MacAdam, Alfred 73 MacShane, Frank 132 McCarthy, Mary 137, 163–68 (quoted) Cannibals and Missionaries 163 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 3, 78 Macedo, Helder 95–96 (quoted) Macfadden, Bernard 11 Macneice, Louis 34

Magalhães, Joaquim 133, 135 Maia, Álvaro 7 “Literatura de Sodoma” 7 Maldonado, Fátima 133 Mallarmé, Stephane 114 Mansfield, Katherine 19 Martines, Enrico 92–93 Cartas entre Fernando Pessoa e os directores da presença 92–93 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 53 O Martinho da Arcada (café) 90 Medina, João 51 Ulisses, o Europeu 51 Melo, João de 133 Méluret, Jean Seul de (heteronym) 117–18 Melville, Herman 42, 86, 181 Merton, Thomas 61, 181 Metaphysics 8, 59, 100, 113 Michaux, Henri 76 Michelangelo 76 Mickle, William Julius 35 Miguéis, José Rodrigues 134 Military Bookstore (Leavenworth, Kansas) 50 Millay, Edna St. Vincent 87 Fatal Interview 87 Milosz, Czeslaw 121 “Ars Poetica?” 121 Milton, John 2, 85, 114 Ministry of Justice (Portugal) 1 “Miradoiro” (RTP—Rádio e Televisão de Portugal) 46–47 (quoted) Missal de Trovas (journal) 5 Mittel-Europa (Middle Europe) 126 M.L.A. (Modern Language Association) 123 Modernism ix, 9, 20, 44, 53, 61, 63, 67, 72, 76–77, 81–82, 84, 88, 91–92, 100–2, 107, 109, 113, 120, 151, 160 Moisés, Carlos Felipe 61 Momento (journal) 11–13 Montagu, Ewen 48–50 The Man Who Never Was 7, 49–50 Montaigne, Michel de 114 Montale, Eugenio 134, 137 Montalvor, Luís de 9, 83 Monteiro & Company (publisher) 80 Monteiro, Adolfo Casais 9, 11–12, 15, 92–93, 102, 114, 134, 158–59 Poesias de Álvaro de Campos 83, 158

Index Monteiro, George 55 (quoted), 123–31 The Man Who Never Was: Essays on Fernando Pessoa ix, 48–50, 64, 120, 123 “Pessoa’s Critics” 58–119 Monteiro-Grillo, J. (Tomás Kim) 35 (quoted), 46–47 (quoted), 133 Moore, Thomas 3, 84 Mora, Antonio (heteronym) 115 Moser, Gerald M. 40 (quoted) Moura, Vasco Graça 134 Mourão-Ferreira, David 46–47, 111, 134 O Mundo Português (journal) 11–12 Murry, John Middleton 19 Museu-Biblioteca do Conde de Castro Guimarães (Portugal) 11 Musset, Alfred de 114 Natal Mercury (journal) 2–3, 28–29, 111 Nation, Carry 67 National Proverbs 107 Negreiros, José de Almada 4, 6, 9, 12, 76–77, 112, 159 “Artigos no Diario de Lisboa” 77 “O Cágado” 76–77 A Engomadeira 76–77 “O homen que não sabe escrever” 77 “K4 O Quadrado Azul” 77 Nome de Guerra 76–77 Obras Completas 77 Nemésio, Vitorino 133–34 Nietzsche 114 New Criticism 82 New Haven (Connecticut) 102–3 New Numbers (journal) 25 New Yorker (journal) 15–16 Newcastle-on-Tyne (England) 112, 183 Nobel Prize 134 Nobre, Antonio 5, 105 Só 5 Nogueira, Madalena Xavier Pinheiro 1, 90 O Noticias Ilustrado (journal) 9–10, 12 Oates, Joyce Carol 14 The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese 14 Fernandes de Briao (character) 14 Ogi, Mori 133

207

“Mademoiselle Hanako” 133 Old Testament 74 Olisipo (Lisbon) 51–52, 77–80 Olisipo (publisher) 7, 80 Oliveira, Carlos de 133 Orpheu 5, 9, 10, 12, 45, 53, 77, 92–93, 111, 139 Orpheu 2 112 Orthonomy 15, 17, 43, 69, 74, 88, 94, 108, 118, 123 Oxford (university) 113 Pacheco, C. 6, 14 “Para Além de Outro Oceano” (Beyond a Further Sea) 14 Paço d’Arcos, Joaquim 41–42 Poemas imperfeitos (Nostalgia) 41–42 Palmer, Cecil 107 Palmer, Frank 107–8 (quoted) Pantaleão (heteronym) 117–18 Pantheon (publisher) 73 Paris 4–5, 62, 64, 66, 88–89, 164, 166 “Paris” 7 Parnassas (journal) 163–64, 166 Partisan Review (PR) (journal) 162–63 Pascal, Blaise 57 Pas, Chevalier de (“Le Chevalier de Pas”) (heteronym) 1, 15, 114 Pascoaes, Teixeira de 111, 155 Pater, Walter 8, 62 Studies in the Renaissance 8 Paton, W. R. 20, 84 Greek Anthology 20, 84 Paz, Octavio 58, 61, 128–29, 165 Pedro, Luíz 11 Acrónios 11 Perrone-Moisés, Leyla 73, 98 Pessoa, Fernando (orthonym) “À memória do Presidente Sidónio Paes” 7 “Afonso de Albuquerque” 12 “Além-Deus” 5 “O andaime” 11 “Anti-gazetilha” 9 Antinous 5–7, 19, 56, 65–66, 68, 80–81, 86, 103–4, 120 “António Botto e o ideal estético creador” 11 “António Botto e o ideal esthético em Portugal” 105 “Autopsicografia” 11, 42, 171–72

208

Index

Pessoa, Fernando (orthonym) (continued) “O banqueiro anarquista” 7, 64, 112 “Carry Nation” 83 Cartas de Amor 149 “A casa branca nau preta” 6 “A ceifeira” 6 “Chuva oblíqua” (“Oblique Rain”) 5, 112 “Conselho” 12 “O Corvo” (quoted) 142, 151 (quoted) “Cronicas decorativas” 4 “D. João o Segundo” 12, 19 (quoted) “D. Sebastião” 9 “D. T.” 142 “Depois da feira” 9 “Ela canta, pobre ceifeira” 8 English Poems I 68 English Poems I–II 7, 19–20, 80–81, 86 English Poems II 68 English Poems III 7, 19, 80–81, 86 “Epithalamium” (poem) 4, 7, 65–66, 68, 80–81, 86–87 “Eros e Psique” 11 Faust 3 Ficções do Interlúdio 6, 98 “Fresta” 11 “Gato que brincas na rua” (“Cat, you tumble down the street”) 60 (quoted) Gládio 4 “Gladio” 5, 8 “Gomes Leal” 10 “Guia me a so razão” 11 A Hora do Diabo 98 “Impressões do crespúsculo” 4, 111 “O Infante D. Henrique” 12 “Iniciação” 11 Inscriptions 7, 19–20, 68, 80, 86–87, 121 “Intervalo” 12 O Interregno—Defeza e justificação da Dictadura Militar em Portugal 10, 97, 98 “Isto” 11 “Let there be a tomb” 146 (quoted) “Ligeia” 140, 143–44 (quoted) A Língua Portuguesa 98 Livro do Desassossego (Book of

Disquiet) viii–ix, 4, 10–11, 72–74, 91, 98, 101, 111, 133, 138 A Maçonaria Vista por Fernando Pessoa 12 The Mad Fiddler (O Louco Rabequista) 6, 19, 68–72, 81, 85–88 “Mar portuguez” 7, 10–11, 43–44 (quoted), 101 “Marinha” 9 O marinheiro (The Mariner) (play) 4–5, 10, 84, 133, 136, 138 “Meantime” 7, 19, 69, 81, 86 “O menino da sua mãe” 9–10, 23–33 (quoted) Mensagem (Portugal), (Message) 12, 19–20, 41, 43, 51–52, 54–56, 74–76, 95–98, 101, 139, 152 “A morte chega cedo” (“Death comes before its time”) 42 “O mostrengo” 12, 19, 42 “A múmia” 6 “Na floresta do Alheamento” 4, 111 “Natal” 7, 10, 12 A Palavra (journal) 2 O Palrador (journal) 2, 3 “Passos da cruz” 6, 10 “Pauis” 4 Poésias 66 Poesias Inéditas 143 “Prece” 10, 12 Principais Poemas de Edgar Allan Poe (The Major Poems of Edgar Allan Poe) 108–10, 152–53 “Qualquer música” 9 “Quando a dôr me amargurar” 2 “Quando ela passa” 2 “Quatro / As Ilhas Afortunadas” 97 “O que me doi não é” (“The Thing that hurts and wrings is not”) 42 “Quinto / Nevoreiro” 97 “Regie, monópolio, liberdade” 9 “Reincindindo” 3 “Rubaiyat” 9 “Sacadura Cabral” 8 “Salute to the Sun’s entry into Aries” 23 “Segundo / Antonio Vieira” 96–97 “Ó sino da minha aldeia” 4, 8, 78 “Sister Cecily” 70–72 (quoted) “Spell” 7, 20, 81, 86 “Stolen Document” 152 “Tábua Bibliográfica” 115

Index “Terceiro” (”Third”) 97–98 (quoted) 35 Sonnets 6, 19–20, 56, 68, 78, 80, 86, 103, 120 “Thomas Babington Macaulay” 3, 78 “Tomámos a villa depois de um intenso bombardeamento” 10, 23 “Toward Explaining Heteronmy” 121 “Tríptico” 11 “Trois chansons mortes” 7 “O último sortilégio” 10 “Ulysses” 51–52 (quoted) “Um grande português” 10 “A Very Original Dinner” 140 “White House—Claypit A (Trough poem)” 145–46 (quoted) Pessoa, Dionísia 3 Pessoa, Joaquim Seabra 1, 90 Pessoa, Jorge 1 Pessoa (Rosa), Maria Madalena Pinheiro Nogueira 1, 2, 8, 90 Petrarch 124 O Pimpão 2 Pires, José Cardoso 134, 136 Pisanus Fraxi (Henry Spencer Ashbee) 65 Pizarro, Jerónimo (and Patricio Ferrari; Antonio Cardiello: Jorge Uribe) 106–8, 110–16 Eu sou uma antologia; 136 autores fictícios 114–16 Prosa de Álvaro de Campos 110–14 Provérbios Portugueses 106–8, 112 Pleasance, Simon 89 Poe, Edgar Allan ix, 2, 8, 10, 84, 108–10, 112–14, 139–57 (quoted) “Annabel Lee” 8, 109, 140, 143, 152–53 “The Bells” 140 “The Black Cat” 142 “The City in the Sea” 140 “The Fall of the house of Usher” 141; Roderick Usher (character) 141 “For Annie” 140 “The Gold Bug” 139–40, 143 “The Haunted Palace” 140 “Ligeia” 140–41, 143–44, 149 (quoted); Lady Rowena (character) 144, 149; Ligeia (character) 144, 146, 149

209

“The Man of the Crowd” 114 (quoted), 140, 142, 152 “The Masque of the Red Death,” 8, 140, 143 “MS. Found in a Bottle” 140 “Mystery of Marie Roget” 140 “The Philosophy of Composition” 143, 152 “The Purloined Letter” 152 “The Raven” 8, 109, 139–43 (quoted), 151–57 (quoted); Lenore (character) 151, 153–57 “The Tell-Tale Heart” 141 “Thou Art the Man” 140 “Ulalume” 8, 109, 140, 143, 152 “William Wilson” 8, 140, 142–43 Pope, Alexander 2 Portalegre (Portugal) 3 Portugal (journal) 5 Portugal, José Blanc de 69 Portugal Futurista (journal) 6, 77, 112 “Portuguese Anthology” 20 Post-modernism ix, 72, 90 Pound, Ezra 36–37 (quoted), 39, 42, 47, 76, 120, 158, 161 Cantos 76 “Seafarer” (“Sea-Rover”) 39, 42 Pre-Raphaelite 88 Prémio Femina 134 Prentice-Hall Twentieth-Century Views 121 presença (journal) 9–12, 16–17, 44, 72, 91–94, 107, 112–13, 115, 121, 159 “Presença” Editora (publisher) 11 Pretória (South Africa) 3, 5–6 I Salão dos Independentes 10 Proverbs (quoted) (Scripture) 18 Pritchett, V. S. 40 (quoted), 134, 136–37 Pseudonymy 2, 7, 65, 94, 158, 183–84 Quadros, Antonio 73 Quaderni Portoghesi (journal) 89, 128 Queen Victoria 18 Queen Victoria Memorial Prize (Durban) 2, 109, 139, 152 Queirós, Carlos 41, 149 Queiroz, Eça de 35, 37, 40–41, 47, 62 O Primo Basilio (Cousin Bazilio) 37, 40; Conselheiro (character) 40; Dona Felicidade (character)

210

Index

Queiroz, Eça de (continued) 40; Julião Zugarti (character) 40; Luisa (character) 40 A Cidade e as Serras (The City and the Mountains) 37, 40 Queiroz, Maria da Graça 149 (quoted) Queiroz, Ofélia (Ophelia) 7, 10, 17, 63, 122–23, 143–50 (quoted), 159–60 (quoted) Quental, Anthero de 41, 118 “Complete Sonnets” 118 Quinta dos Bochechos (Galamares) 40 Quintanilha, F. E. G. 121 Quinto Império 12 Quinto Império (Fifth Empire) 75, 96–97 Rabassa, Gregory 135, 163, 166 Rahv, Philip 162 (quoted) O Raio (journal) 4 Ramsey, T. W. 39 The Real Thing (play) 48 Reckert, Stephen 75 Régio, José 9, 41, 92–93, 115, 134 “Da geração modernista” 9 Reinhardt (publisher) 40 Reis, Ricardo (heteronym) 4, 8–9, 11–12, 15–18, 23, 42, 58–59 (quoted), 66–67, 69, 85, 91, 94–95, 99, 101, 111–12, 115, 133, 158–60, 181–82 Odes de Ricardo Reis 66 Reis, Vasco 12, 76, 96 A Romaria 12, 76, 96 A Renascença (journal) 4, 111 República (journal) 4 A Revista (journal) 11 A Revista da Solução Editora (journal) 10 Revista de Comércio e Contabilidade (journal) 9, 64 Revista Portuguesa (journal) 8 Revolução (journal) 11, 43 Revuelta (journal) 165 Rhode Island School of Design 14 Ribeiro, Nuno (with Cláudia Souza) 116–19 (quoted) The Transformation Book or Book of Tasks 116–19 (quoted) Richards, I, A. 75 Rickard, Peter 121 Rilke, Rainer Maria 15, 120

Rimbaud, Arthur 32–33 “Le dormeur du val” (“The Sleeper in the Valley”) 32 Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) 79, 83 Rocha, Adolfo (see Miguel Torga) Rocky Mountains (United States) 101 Roditi, Edouard 61 “The Several Names of Pessoa” 183 Rodway, Allen 34 Poetry of the 1930s 34 Rollinat, Maurice 141 Rosa, Henrique 1, 8 Rosa, Henriqueta Madalena 1, 167 Rosa, João Miguel 1–2, 6 Rosa, Luis Miguel 2 Rosa, Madalena Henriqueta 1, 2 Rosa, Maria Clara 2, 3 Rosicrucianism 74 Rossio (Lisbon) 78 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 114 Rua de Bela Vista, 17 (Lisbon) 3 Rua Bernardim Ribeiro, 11 (Lisbon) 6 Rua Coelho da Rocha, 26 (Lisbon) 7 Rua do Carmo, 18 (Lisbon) 4 Rua da Conceição da Glória, 38 (Lisbon) 3 Rua da Glória, 4 (Lisbon) 4 Rua Pascoal de Melo, 119 (Lisbon) 4 Rua de Passos Manuel, 24 (Lisbon) 4 Rua de S. Marçal, 104 (Lisbon) 1 Rua Vitor Cordon (Lisbon) 5 Sá-Carneiro, Mário de 4–9, 11–12, 14, 133–34 “Apice” 9 “5 horas” 8 “Crise lamentável” 11 Dispersão 4 Indícios de ouro 11 “O Lord” 7 “Serradura” 12 Sáchá (novella-film) 7 Sadlier, Darlene 90–92 An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa: Modernism and the Paradoxes of Authorship 90–92 St. Elizabeth’s Hospital (Washington, D.C.) 161 Saint John of the Cross 37 Salazar, Antonio Oliveira 12, 53–54, 97, 136 Santareno, Bernardo 134 Santayana, George 19

Index Santa Thereza 83 Santo Antonio 1 Santos, Irene Ramalho 100–2 Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa’s Turn in Anglo-American Modernism 100–2 Sapega, Ellen W. 76–77 (quoted) Ficções Modernistas: Um estudo da obra em prosa de José de Almada Negreiros 76–77 Saraiva, Arnaldo 84–85, 166 Fernando Pessoa: Poeta—Tradutor de Poetas 84–85 Sarajevo (Bosnia) 24 Saramago, José 133–34, 136–37, 181 The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis 133, 136, 181 Saudades viii, 41–42, 45, 131 Schreiner, Olive 42 Seabra, José Augusto 125 Search, Alexander (heteronym) viii, 2, 28–29 (quoted), 81, 85, 88, 115, 117–19, 140 “Day of Sun” 119 (quoted) Search, Charles James (heteronym) 117–18 Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional (Portugal) (see S.P.N.) Sena, Jorge de 20–22 (quoted), 36, 48– 49, 61, 64 (quoted), 72, 87, 91, 93–94, 120, 122–31, 133–34, 136 “Fernando Pessoa: The Man Who Never Was” 48, 64, 122, 129 A Literatura Inglêsa 36 (quoted) “As Memorias do ex-criminoso de Guerra” 136 “O Papagaio Verde” 136 Poesia do Século XX 36 Sinais de Fogo 136 Sena, Mécia de 123, 127, 131 Serpent’s Tail (publisher) 73 Serrano, Mary 40 Severino, Alexandrino (with Hubert D. Jennings) 122–23 “In Praise of Ophelia: An Interpretation of Pessoa’s Only Love” 122 Shakespeare, William 4, 81, 86–87, 99–100, 100–11, 114, 151, 159 Hamlet (play) 110 Hamlet (character) 17, 110–11, 159 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 2, 84–85, 141

211

Silva, Manuel Luciano da 131 Silveira, Pedro da 133 Simões, João Gaspar 23, 33, 63, 65, 70, 83, 88–89, 91–93, 121–22, 124, 128, 131, 159, 170, 179 “As relações de Fernandio Pessoa com a revista presença” 121 Vida e Obra de Fernando Pessoa 89 Smith, William Jay 132, 135 S.N.I. (Secretariado Nacional de Informação) (Portugal) 12, 53. 76. 53, 56, 76, 96 Soares, Bernardo (semi-heteronym) ix, 72–73, 91, 98–99, 133, 135 Sol: bi-semanário republicano (journal) 9–10 Solução Editôra (publisher) 10 Sorel, Georges 55, 57, 75 Sorley, Charles 28 (quoted) Sousa, João Rui de 111 Fotobibliografia de Fernando Pessoa 111 Sousa, John Philip 48 The Transit of Venus 48 Sousa, Ronald W. 52 (quoted), 122 “Ascendant Romanticism in Fernando Pessoa” 122 The Rediscoverers 52 Spender, Stephen 34 Spenser, Edmund 86–87 Epithalamium 86 S.P.N. (Secretariado da Propaganda Nacional) 12, 96 Stanford University (California) 125, 128 Stegagno-Picchio, Luciana 61 Steiner, George 14–16, 94 Stevens, Wallace 100, 122 Sudoeste (journal) 12, 112 Swenson, May 163 Swinburne, Algernon 65, 88, 185 “Dolores” 65 Symonds, J. A. 65 Tabucchi, Antonio 89–90 (quoted) Tagus (river) 2, 51, 100 Tamen, Pedro 133 Teatro (journal) 4 Teatro Repúblico (Portugal) 6 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 2–3, 84 Terceira (Azores) 1–2 Terlinden, Anne 68–72 (quoted), 124 Fernando Pessoa: The Bilingual

212

Index

Terlinden, Anne (continued) Portuguese Poet: A Critical Study of “The Mad Fiddler” 68–72 Terra Nossa (journal) 6 Themido, João Hall 122 Thomas, Dylan 34 Tindall, William York 66–67 Torga, Miguel 92, 133 Translation viii–ix, 4–6, 8–9, 11, 20, 23, 32, 34–40, 42–44, 46–47, 58–66, 69, 72–73, 79, 84–85, 87, 89, 95–97, l40–6, 108–10, 112–13, 118, 121–22, 132–35, 140, 143, 151–57, 163–70, 172, l78–81, 183 Translation (journal) 132–38 Trás-os-montes (Portugal) 137 Twayne World Authors 121 Ulysses (Odysseus) 51–52 United States viii, 49, 58, 63, 120–22, 124, 163, 168–69 United States Army 50 United States History for Teachers 50 United States Naval War College 50 University of California, Santa Barbara 69, 122–31 University of the Cape of Good Hope 2, 109, 152 University of Pisa (Italy) 128 University of Rome (Italy) 128 University Matriculation Examination (Durban) 2 Vale de Gato, Margarida 108–10, 152–53 (quoted), 155 Principais Poemas de Edgar Allan Poe 108–10 Valéry, Paul 42 (quoted), 120 Vassar College (Poughkeepsie, New York) 163 Vaz, Ruy 8, 143, 152 Verde, Cesário 3 Vicente, Gil 41 Vieira, Nelson H. 121 Vieira, Yara Frateschi 65–66 Sob o ramo da bétula: Fernando Pessoa e o erotismo vitoriano 65–66

Vigny, Alfred de 114 Vilela, José Stichini 122 Virgin Mary (Holy Virgin, Mother and Queen, Our Lady) 71–72 Vital, Joaquim 65 Voltaire 114 A Voz do Silencio 5 Wain, John 18 “Thinking About Mr Person” (poem; quoted) 18 Warren, Robert Penn 75 Understanding Poetry 75 Weichberger, Laurent 50 West Street (convent) (South Africa) 1 Whittier, John Greenleaf 3, 84 Whitman, Walt 5, 67, 82, 95, 100–1, 103, 114, 158 “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” 100 Wilde, Oscar 65, 68, 73, 88, 105 “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” 65 Willemsen, August 163–68 Williams, William Carlos 76 Paterson 76 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 104 Wohl, Hellmut 121–22 “The Short Happy Life of Amadeo de Souza Cardoso” 121 Wolfe, Thomas 62 Woolf, Virginia 19 Wordsworth, William 3, 6, 84, 88 “Solitary Reaper” 6 World Literature Today (journal) 55 World War I ix, 23–32, 53, 107 World War II 50 Wright, David 36–37 (quoted) Yeats, William Butler 88 Ypres (Belgium) 29 Zenith, Richard 72–74 (quoted), 93–95, 98–99, 132, 134–35 (quoted) The Book of Disquietude 72–74 A Educação do Estóico 98–99 Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems 93–95

About the Author George Monteiro, Professor Emeritus of English and of Portuguese Studies, has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American, English, and Portuguese literatures. Besides contributing to the scholarship on Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Bob Dylan, he has published books on Fernando Pessoa, José Rodrigues Miguéis, Luiz Vaz de Camões, Pedro da Silveira, Jorge de Sena, and Miguel Torga. Among his latest books are Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and After: A Poetic Career Transformed (McFarland, 2012), As Paixões de Pessoa (Ática, 2013), The Gávea-Brown Book of Portuguese-American Poetry, co-edited with Alice R. Clemente (Gávea-Brown, 2013), Caldo Verde is Not Stone Soup (Peter Lang, 2017), There’s No Word for SAUDADE (Peter Lang, 2017), and Love and Fame in Fernando Pessoa (University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, 2017). His four books of poetry are entitled The Coffee Exchange (Gávea-Brown, 1982), Double Weaver’s Knot (1989), The Pessoa Chronicles: Poems, 1980-2016 (Bricktop Books, 2016), and As the Crow Flies, Poems: 1996-2017 (Bricktop Books, 2017). In 2016 he published 38 School Street, a Memoir (Bricktop Books), and in 2018 he edited John Hay’s Complete Short Stories (Bricktop Books). He and his wife, Brenda Murphy, make their home in Connecticut.

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