The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa Read online

  Praise for The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa:

  “Imagine if, some day back in the 1950s, an American poet named John Ashbery had not only written a few of his own highly original poems, but in an ecstasy of creative surfeit, had invented three other poets—Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schyler—and then, over the years, proceeded to write poems as them, even entire books. It sounds fantastic, but that is what Pessoa actually did. Nor was it just a whimsical creative exercise. In The Western Canon, that ultimate literary proving ground, Harold Bloom named Caeiro and de Campos as ‘great poets’ in their own right.... Fascinating.”

  —Brendan Bernhard, LA Weekly

  Praise for Fernando Pessoa:

  “Portugal’s greatest poet since Camoëns... [with a] wide range of talent, craft, intellect, and poetic achievement.”

  —Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, The Boston Book Review

  “The saddest of our century’s great literary modernists and perhaps its most inventive ... the finest poet Portugal has ever produced.”

  —The Boston Phoenix Literary Section

  “Pessoa’s writing, the whole of his extraordinary opus, [is] a major presence in what has come to be known as ‘modernism’ in the European languages.... Almost any commentary of any length on Pessoa’s writings, sensibility, and imagination is bound to convey a glimpse, at least, of its intensity and elusiveness, its apparently endlessly unfolding hall of mirrors.”

  —The New York Review of Books

  “If [Pessoa] never achieved such renown during his life, the years since he died have elevated him to a numinous status among European poets, and writers as idiomatically disparate as Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, and Antonio Tabucchi ... have acknowledged his potent sway.”

  —The Times Literary Supplement

  “Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) is one of the great originals of modern European poetry and Portugal’s premier modernist. He is also a strange and original writer. Other modernists—Yeats, Pound, Eliot—invented masks through which to speak occasionally, from Michael Robartes, to Hugh Selwyn Mauberly to J. Alfred Prufrock. Pessoa invented whole poets.”

  —Robert Hass, “Poet’s Choice.”

  The Washington Post and San Francisco Examiner

  “Pessoa would be Shakespeare if all that we had of Shakespeare were the soliloquies of Hamlet, Falstaff, Othello and Lear and the sonnets. His legacy is a set of explorations, in poetic form, of what it means to inhabit a human consciousness.... What makes Pessoa’s thought and poetry compelling is not that he picks up and develops the forms and themes of Whitman and Emerson and retransmits our patrimony back to us—though this would be marvelous—but because in the poems and prose he has passed a judgment upon the twentieth-century rejection of individualism.”

  —Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “The amazing Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa ... as a fantastic invention surpasses any creation by Borges.... Pessoa was neither mad nor a mere ironist; he is Whitman reborn, but a Whitman who gives separate names to ‘my self,’ ‘the real me’ or ‘me myself,’ and ‘my soul,’ and writes wonderful books of poetry for all of them.”

  —Harold Bloom, The Western Canon

  “[Pessoa’s] work is never more profound than when it is most ludicrous, never more heartfelt than when it is most deeply ironic.... Like Beckett, Pessoa is extremely funny.... His work is loaded with delights.”

  —The Guardian (UK)

  “There are in Pessoa echoes of Beckett’s exquisite boredom; the dark imaginings of Baudelaire (whom he loved); Melville’s evasive confidence man; the dreamscapes of Borges.”

  —The Village Voice Literary Supplement

  The Selected Prose of FERNANDO PESSOA

  ALSO BY FERNANDO PESSOA FROM GROVE PRESS:

  Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems

  The Selected Prose of FERNANDO PESSOA

  Edited and translated by

  RICHARD ZENITH

  Translation copyright © 2001 by Richard Zenith

  Introduction copyright © 2001 by Richard Zenith

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by

  any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and

  retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by

  a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of

  educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for

  classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include

  the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc.,

  841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pessoa, Fernando, 1888–1935.

  [Prose works. English. Selections]

  The selected prose of Fernando Pessoa / edited and translated by Richard Zenith.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9850-1

  1. Pessoa, Fernando, 1888–1935—Translations into English. I. Zenith, Richard.

  II. Title.

  PQ9261.P417 A288 2001

  869.8′4108—dc 21 2001018997

  Design by Laura Hammond Hough

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  CONTENTS

  E = original of Pessoa in English

  F = original of Pessoa in French

  GENERAL INTRODUCTION

  Fernando Pessoa the Man and Poet

  Fernando Pessoa, Prose Writer

  Fernando Pessoa, English Writer

  About This Edition

  Thanks

  ASPECTS

  THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN AND HETERONYM

  Introduction

  “I was a poet animated by philosophy ...” E

  “The artist must be born beautiful ...” E

  “I have always had in consideration ...” E

  Three Prose Fragments (Charles Robert Anon)

  “Ten thousand times my heart broke ...” E

  “I saw the little children ...” E

  “I, Charles Robert Anon ...” E

  “I am tired of confiding in myself ...” E

  [An Unsent Letter to Clifford Geerdts] (Faustino Antunes) E

  Two Prose Fragments (Alexander Search)

  “Bond entered into by Alexander Search ...” E

  “No soul more loving or tender ...” E

  Rule of Life E

  THE MARINER

  Introduction

  The Mariner—A Static Drama in One Act

  To Fernando Pessoa (Álvaro de Campos)

  THE MASTER AND HIS DISCIPLES

  Introduction

  Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro (Álvaro de Campos)

  from Translator’s Preface to the Poems of Alberto Caeiro (Thomas Crosse) E

  [On Álvaro de Campos] (I. I. Crosse) E

  [On the Work of Ricardo Reis] (Frederico Reis)

  SENSATIONISM AND OTHER ISMS

  Introduction

  Preface to an Anthology of the Portuguese Sensationists (Thomas Crosse) E

  “All sensations are good ...”

  [Intersectionist] Manifesto

  Sensationism

  ULTIMATUM (ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS)

  Translator’s Preface to Ultimatum (Thomas Crosse?) E

  Ultimatum

  from “What Is Metaphysics?” (Álvaro de Campos)

  LETTER TO MÁRIO DE SÁ-CARN
EIRO

  RIDDLE OF THE STARS

  Introduction

  [Letter to His Aunt Anica]

  [30 Astral Communications] (Henry More, Wardour, Voodooist, etc.) E

  from Essay on Initiation E

  Treatise on Negation (Raphael Baldaya)

  LETTER TO TWO FRENCH MAGNETISTS F

  SELECTED LETTERS TO OPHELIA QUEIROZ

  [Phase 1: Pessoa in Love?] (March–November 1920)

  [Phase 2: Pessoa Insane?] (September–October 1929)

  NEOPAGANISM

  from The Return of the Gods (António Mora)

  “Without yet going into the metaphysical foundations ...”

  “Humanitarianism is the last bulwark ...”

  “Only now can we fully understand ...”

  “We are not really neopagans ...”

  from Preface to the Complete Poems of Alberto Caeiro (Ricardo Reis)

  “The work of Caeiro represents the total reconstruction ...”

  “When I once had occasion ...”

  “Alberto Caeiro is more pagan than paganism ...”

  “For modern pagans, as exiles ...”

  PORTUGAL AND THE FIFTH EMPIRE

  Introduction

  1. “Any Empire not founded on the Spiritual Empire ...”

  2. “The Fifth Empire. The future of Portugal ...”

  3. “The promise of the Fifth Empire ...”

  4. “Only one kind of propaganda can raise the morale ...”

  5. “What, basically, is Sebastianism?”

  6. “To justify its present-day ambition ...”

  7. “An imperialism of grammarians?”

  8. “A foggy morning.”

  THE ANARCHIST BANKER

  PESSOA ON MILLIONAIRES

  from An Essay on Millionaires and Their Ways E

  from American Millionaires E

  ENVIRONMENT (ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS)

  [SELF-DEFINITION]

  EROSTRATUS: THE SEARCH FOR IMMORTALITY

  Introduction

  from Erostratus E

  ON THE LITERARY ART AND ITS ARTISTS

  [The Task of Modern Poetry] E

  Shakespeare E

  [On Blank Verse and Paradise Lost] E

  from Charles Dickens —Pickwick Papers E

  from Concerning Oscar Wilde E

  [The Art of James Joyce]

  [The Art of Translation] E

  FROM ESSAY ON POETRY (PROFESSOR JONES) E

  FROM FRANCE IN 1950 (JEAN SEUL DE MÉLURET) F

  RANDOM NOTES AND EPIGRAMS

  TWO LETTERS TO JOÃO GASPAR SIMÕES

  [Letter of 11 December 1931]

  [Letter of 28 July 1932]

  THREE LETTERS TO ADOLFO CASAIS MONTEIRO

  [Letter of 11 January 1930]

  [Letter of 13 January 1935]

  [Another Version of the Genesis of the Heteronyms]

  [Letter of 20 January 1935]

  THE BOOK OF DISQUIET (BERNARDO SOARES)

  Introduction

  from The Book of Disquiet

  FROM THE EDUCATION OF THE STOIC (BARON OF TEIVE)

  FROM THE PREFACE TO FICTIONS OF THE INTERLUDE

  LETTER FROM A HUNCHBACK GIRL TO A METALWORKER (MARIA JOSÉ)

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  GENERAL INTRODUCTION

  Fernando Pessoa has the advantage of living more in ideas than in himself.

  Álvaro de Campos

  Fernando Pessoa the Man and Poet

  When he died on November 30, 1935, the Lisbon newspapers paid tribute, without fanfare, to the “great Portuguese poet” Fernando Pessoa, who was born in Lisbon in 1888. He was remembered for Mensagem (Message), a book of forty-four poems published in 1934, and for some 160 additional poems published in magazines and journals, several of which he helped to found and run. The author, a single man survived by a half sister and two half brothers, had the peculiarity of publishing his poetry under three different names besides his own—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Alvaro de Campos—which he claimed were not mere pseudonyms, since it wasn’t just their names that were false. They were false personalities, with biographies, points of view, and literary styles that differed from Pessoa’s. They were names that belonged to invented others, whom their inventor called “heteronyms.” Pessoa also published over a hundred pieces of criticism, social commentary, and creative prose, including passages from The Book of Disquiet, whose authorship he credited to “Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon.” Another peculiarity about this author—mentioned by the literary compeer who delivered the brief funeral address—was that he wrote poems in English, some of which he published in chapbooks, for the benefit (according to the compeer) of “the literary cercles of serene Albion.” In fact, scarcely anyone in Portugal had read them. French was the second language of those who had one.

  Still another peculiarity—this one a complete secret—was that Pessoa’s death marked the birth of a far larger writer than anyone had imagined. It was a slow birth that began only in the 1940s, when Pessoa’s posthumous editors opened up the now legendary trunk in which the author had deposited his legacy to the world: twenty-nine notebooks and thousands upon thousands of manuscript sheets containing unpublished poems, unfinished plays and short stories, translations, linguistic analyses, horoscopes, and nonfiction on a dizzying array of topics—from alchemy and the Kabbala to American millionaires, from “Five Dialogues on Tyranny” to “A Defense of Indiscipline,” from Julian the Apostate to Mahatma Gandhi. The pages were written in English and French as well as in Portuguese, and very often in an almost illegible script. The most surprising discovery was that Pessoa wrote not under four or five names but under forty or fifty. The editors timidly stuck to poetry by the names they knew—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and Pessoa himself—and further limited their selection to manuscripts that were easy to transcribe. It wasn’t until the 1980s that reliable, relatively complete editions of poetry by the main heteronyms began to appear, and no such edition has yet appeared for the poetry signed by Pessoa himself, much of which still needs to be “lifted” from the manuscripts. Pessoa’s English heteronyms and his one French heteronym remained virtually unpublished until the 1990s, when many of the minor Portuguese heteronyms also began to make their way into print.

  It’s impossible to know how much psychological and emotional space the heteronyms occupied, or opened up, in their creator. In the real world Pessoa was a loner, by choice and by natural inclination. He was in love once, if at all, and his intimacy with friends was restricted to literary matters. As a young man he moved from one neighborhood to another, staying sometimes with relatives, sometimes in rented rooms, but from 1920 on he lived at the same address—with his mother until her death in 1925, and then with his half sister, her husband, and their two children. Family members have reported that the mature Pessoa was affectionate and good-humored but resolutely private.

  Pessoa the child was the same way, according to people who knew him at school in Durban, South Africa, where he lived from age seven to seventeen. His father had died when he was five, and his mother remarried Portugal’s newly appointed consul to Durban, a boom town in what was then the British colony of Natal. Shy foreigner though he was, Fernando Pessoa quickly stood out among his classmates, none of whom could surpass him in English composition. English writers—including Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Carlyle—were the formative influence on his literary sensibility, and English was the language in which he began to write poetry. Pessoa returned to Lisbon to attend university but soon dropped out, and it was his knowledge of English that enabled him to make a living as a freelance, doing occasional translations and drafting letters in English (he also wrote some in French) for Portuguese firms that did business abroad.