A Centenary Pessoa E-Book

Fernando Pessoa

• Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 595

Beschreibung

Author of paradoxes as clear as water and, as water, dizzying: '... mysterious man who does not cultivate mystery, mysterious as the mid-day moon, taciturn phantom of the Portuguese mid-day - who is Pessoa?' asks Octavio Paz. This collection of the work of Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) answers that question. It is an essential introduction to the work of one of the most original European poets of the twentieth century. It includes translations of a broad selection of his poems and his extraordinary prose, and some of his original English writings. A major introductory essay by Octavio Paz, a critical anthology, two posthumous 'interviews' and illustrations from the Pessoa archive are also included, to reveal the world of Pessoa in all its richness.

Leseprobe

FyfieldBooks aim to make available some of the great classics of British and European literature in clear, affordable formats, and to restore often neglected writers to their place in literary tradition.

FyfieldBooks take their name from the Fyfield elm in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’. The tree stood not far from the village where the series was originally devised in 1971.

Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.

Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,

Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side

FERNANDO PESSOA

A Centenary Pessoa

Edited by EUGÉNIO LISBOA and L.C. TAYLOR with an introduction by OCTAVIO PAZ

To the memory of JONATHAN GRIFFIN pioneer translator of Pessoa into English

The Trunk and the Fable. From a painting by Emilia Nadal

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

PREFACE

by Eugénio Lisboa

INTRODUCTION

Unknown to Himself by Octavio PazTranslated by Michael Schmidt

POETRY

Selected and translated by Keith Bosley

LIFE AND TIMES

by L.C. Taylor

THE BOOK OF DISQUIETUDE

Introduction by Richard Zenith a sampler selected by P.J. Kavanagh Translated by Richard Zenith

TWO POSTHUMOUS INTERVIEWS

A Conversation in the Autumn of 1935by Antonio Tabucchi

Translated by John Byrne

Fernando Pessoa, Europe and the Portuguese Discoveriesby José Blanco

Translated by Janet Louth

PROSE

Selected by Eugénio Lisboa, Helder Macedo and L.C. Taylor

Translated by Bernard McGuirk and Maria Manuel Lisboa

COMMENT AND RESPONSE

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Select bibliography, English and Portuguese, by José Blanco

About the Author

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THE EDITORS WOULD LIKE TO THANK:

Donors of financial support essential to this publication:

The Trustees of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation; The Instituto Camões, Lisbon; The Instituto da Biblioteca Nacional e do Livro, Lisbon.

Authors and publishers who allowed previously published works to be included in this anthology:

Octavio Paz: ‘Introduction’ to Fernando Pessoa: Antologia, Mexico 1962; its translation by Michael Schmidt first appeared in Numbers, 4, Cambridge 1988; Antonio Tabucchi: Uma Conversa no Outono de 1935 Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, Lisbon 1935; Richard Zenith: The Book of Disquietude Carcanet, Manchester 1991. Some of Keith Bostley’s translations of Pessoa’s poetry, done for this book, were given advance journal publication in Cultura, The Time Literary Supplement, Stand, and Translation.

Artists, and/or owners and publishers, who generously allowed their art-work to be included:

Júlio Pomar (and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) who gave permission for his sketches – originally done for decoration of the ‘Alto dos Moinhos’ station on the Lisbon Underground – to be used extensively; they appear on the seven half-titles; Emilia Nadal (and Margarida and José Blanco) whose painting ‘The Trunk and the Fable’ – here in black-and-white – has been used as half-title for the Contents page; Alfredo Margarido whose painting ‘A Biblioteca’, in black-and-white, accompanies the Biblio graphy; a new painting, kindly sent by him, (sadly here reproduced only in black-and-white) concludes that section. Other drawings in the text by Martins Correia and David Levine.

Owners of photographs, or other items, reproduced in this book:

Many photographs of Fernando Pessoa, and other personal effects, are part of the collection of the poet’s family, and are here used with permission, gratefully acknowledged, from Manuela Nogueira.

Thanks for particular items are also due to: Espólio de Fernando Pessoa at the Biblioteca Nacional in Lisbon; Colecção da Casa Fernando Pessoa – Câmara Municipal de Lisboa; Arquivo de Maria da Graça Queiroz Seruya; Arquivo do José de Almada Negreiros; Arquivo de Manuel Vilhena de Carvalho; Arquivos fotográficos do Diário de Notícias, A Ilustração Portuguesa and O Notícias Ilustrado.

The photograph of Pessoa’s tomb was taken especially for this book by Manuel J. Palma, courtesy of the Monastery of Jerónimos/IPPAR, Lisbon.

Authors and publishers of books central to the compilation of this anthology:

A. Editions of Pessoa’s own works: ed. José Aguilar: Fernando Pessoa: Obra poética Rio de Janeiro 1960; ed. Jorge de Sena: Fernando Pessoa: Páginas de Doutrina Estética Editorial Inquérito, Lisbon 1946; ed. Georg Rudolf Lind e Jacinto do Prado Coelho: Fernando Pessoa: Páginas Íntimas e de Auto-interpretação Edições Ática, Lisbon 1966; ed. Georg Rudolf Lind e Jacinto do Prado Coelho: Fernando Pessoa: Páginas de Estética e de Teoria e Crítica Literárias Edições Ática, Lisbon 1967.

B. Other key books: Maria José de Lancastre: Fernando Pessoa: Uma fotobiografia Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda/Centro de Estudos Pessoanos, Lisbon 1980; and the revised and extended version of the above, Pessoa: une photobibliographie Christian Bourgois Editeur, Paris 1990. The above books are ‘classic’ in their field. Of similar status is: ed. João Rui de Sousa: Fernando Pessoa: Fotobibliografia 1902-1935 Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda/Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon 1988. Other books or works that have proved of value in this compilation have included: Margarida Barahona and Pierre Léglise – Costa: ‘Chronologie Synoptique’ in L’Univers Pessoa Metropolitano de Lisboa/Europalia 1991; Peter Rickard: ‘Introduction’ to his translations of Selected Poems by Fernando Pessoa, Edinburgh 1971; ed. José Blanco: Fernando Pessoa:A Galaxy of Poets accompanying an exhibition by the London Borough of Camden/Portuguese Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Culture, Lisbon; ed. Fernando Pernes: Fernando Pessoa e a Europa do Século XX Fundação de Serralves/Commissariat Portugais de Europalia 1991; ed. Philippe Arbaizar: Fernando Pessoa: Poète Pluriel BPI/Centre Georges Pompidou/Éditions de la Différence, Paris 1985.

Others who have helped in various ways:

Kim Taylor, designer of this book, whose detailed care and helpful suggestions have extended far beyond normal ‘design’ expectations.

Janet Allan, who has co-ordinated the passage of this complex book through type-setter and printer, and Grant Shipcott, who type-set each edition.

Mike Eltenton, who has acted as invaluable intermediary and organizer in numerous transactions and arrangements in Lisbon.

Brian Scragg, who wrestled with some dense pieces of French literary criticism for the ‘Comment and Response’ section, and Adam Taylor who contributed translations from the Italian.

The Trustee, Director and Staff of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s office in London for indispensable administrative and general support. Frequent, cheerful and willing ‘hands-on’ help, which has lightened the labours of editing, has been received from: Brian Neville, Jayne Eustace, Joy Eaton, Andrée Mas, and Lynne Cope, who made sense on a word-processor of a particularly awkward text.

As befits a work of this sort, contributions have been received from many persons and sources; the editors may inadvertently have omitted or wrongly made some due acknowledgement. If so, they sincerely apologize.

PREFACE

Eugénio Lisboa

HAROLD BLOOM, PROFESSOR OF HUMANITIES AT Yale and dean of American literary critics, has recently written about twenty-six authors – from Dante and Shakespeare to Joyce and Proust – who comprise, he considers, The Western Canon of literature.1 Among that select twenty-six he has placed Fernando Pessoa. In France, say, or Italy, Spain, Latin America… that would cause no blank amaze: but in the English-speaking world, alas, news of Pessoa has scarcely leaked beyond the walls of Academia. Time magazine, in its review of The Western Canon, wondered who on earth Pessoa was, and reckoned his inclusion in such select canonical company had to be put down to Bloom’s addiction to ‘academic obscurities’. This curious parochialism explains why – despite books of Pessoa’s translations in the last twenty-five years by Griffin, Rickard, Honig and others, and paraphrases of his poems by writers as various as John Betjeman and Thomas Merton – a comprehensive introductory volume of Pessoa is still needed in English. Pessoa’s poetry and prose (in a more copious selection than ever before) we have therefore had newly translated and, to help appreciation, we have added contributory pieces about him and artworks inspired by him.

Both Pessoa’s strange personality and his singular literary achievement make him and his works quintessentially modern, indeed contemporary. Many people experience, intermittently, that sense of incredulous detachment, of strangeness, of disquietude… that alienation, which Pessoa constantly felt and acutely expressed. He is, indeed, the archetype of the alien, the ‘foreigner’. He spent his first six years in Lisbon and was then ‘exiled’ to Durban; the return to Lisbon, alone, aged seventeen, was a second exile. He had discovered a new language – English – so that Portuguese had to be the object of re-discovery, mainly through the poetry of Cesário Verde and the prose of António Vieira. As with so much else – friendship, love – language had to be seen from the perspective of the outsider. In a way, in a deep and painful way, Fernando Pessoa acted systematically as the amazed discoverer of realities to which he did not belong. The very distance between himself and the environment, his non-involvement, allowed him a new and creative perspective; he saw the ‘obvious’ in a new and different light. Taking nothing for granted, because he was never a natural part of it, he was free to question reality afresh. He even ‘reinvented’ Portuguese – because he knew English.

Eternal traveller, always passing by and never entering, brilliant virtuoso, unashamed grabber of conquests achieved but not fully exploited by other writers, dazzling literary manipulator of human ecstasies and nauseas that others felt more deeply or simply more genuinely than he did – Fernando Pessoa soon became aware of his acute foreignness, of his being the incurable outsider at the very centre of life, of an excruciating inability really to feel ‘the pains of happy people or the pains of people who live and complain’.

Wounded by lucidity, by frigidity, by a sense of distance from living, this same distance, this omnipresent perspective, made his inquisitive mind see things in a clearer or, at the least, in a different way. People like Pessoa learn early in life that the country most of us inhabit, made comfortable by familiar presumptions, is forbidden to them. But this awkward exclusion, an embarrassment in everyday living, this disability that amounts at times to a disease, can prove a fertile dis-ease. Unable to integrate with the habitual, forbidden from happy absorption, unable to see evidence as evident and the obvious as obvious, gazing in always from outside, wondering about ‘facts’ and ‘things’ that others accept at once without question – such an affliction can lead to a productive amazement. It is this which permeates Pessoa’s work: nor do we need to find texts to prove it implicitly, for Pessoa himself draws our attention to his odd disease explicitly: for him, ‘poetry is astonishment, admiration, as of a thing fallen from the skies taking full consciousness of his fall, astonished by things’.

Graham Greene once remarked, in a foreword to a novel by a dissident Czech writer, that ‘exile is like some herb which gives its distinct bitter flavour to many different forms of writing: the comic, the ironic, the tragic. You can taste it in the irony of Conrad – it is completely absent from home-based tragedies of Hardy – it is there in The Cherry Orchard. For to experience exile a man doesn’t necessarily have to leave his country. The sense of banishment can be felt on one’s own hearth-stone. Exile is deprivation…’. Fernando Pessoa felt that ‘sense of banishment’ all the time, and in every kind of human experience. But if exile is deprivation, it may also be a bizarre form of wealth, to the extent that it makes a mind powerfully inquisitive and subversively creative. Such was the case with Pessoa, as the poetry and prose in this collection will show.

1The Western Canon by Harold Bloom. Harcourt Bruce, New York 1994; Macmillan, London 1995. Bloom describes his ‘canonical’ authors as ‘authoritative in our culture’ and ‘selected both for their sublimity and their representative nature’.

INTRODUCTION

OCTAVIO PAZ

Translated by Michael Schmidt

OCTAVIO PAZ: Unknown to Himself

POETS DON’T HAVE BIOGRAPHIES. THEIR WORK IS their biography. Pessoa, who always doubted the reality of this world, would readily approve if I were to go straight to his poems, forgetting the incidents and accidents of his earthly life. Nothing in his life is surprising – nothing, except his poems. I do not think his ‘case history’ – one must resign oneself to using that unpleasant term – explains them; I think that, in the light of his poems, his ‘case history’ ceases to be one. Pessoa means person in Portuguese and derives from persona, mask of Roman actors. Mask, character out of fiction, no one: Pessoa. His history could be reduced to the passage between the unreality of his daily life and the reality of his fictions. These fictions are the poets Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and, above all, Fernando Pessoa himself. Thus it is not pointless to recall the salient features of his life, so long as we know that it is the footprints of a shadow we are following. The real Pessoa is someone else.

Born in Lisbon in 1888. Father dies, mother re-marries. In 1896 she and her children move to Durban, South Africa, where her second husband is sent as Portuguese Consul. English education. Bilingual poet, the Anglo-Saxon influence will be constant on his thought and in his work. In 1905, on the verge of matriculating at the University of Capetown, he must return to Portugal. In 1907 he drops out of the Faculty of Letters at Lisbon and sets up a printing works. Failure, a word that will be repeated often in his life. Then he works as ‘foreign correspondent’, that is, as a freelance translator of commercial correspondence in English and French, a modest employment which will keep him fed most of his life. True, from time to time, with discretion, the doors to a university career open to him; with the pride of timid men, he refuses the offer. I wrote discretion and pride; I should probably have said reluctance and realism: in 1932 he aspires to the post of archivist in a library and they reject him. But there is no rebellion in his life: just a touch of modesty that looks like disdain.

After his return from Africa, he never again leaves Lisbon. First he lives in an old house with a spinster aunt and a mad grandmother; then with another aunt; for a time with his mother, again widowed; the rest of the time, in temporary accommodation. He meets his friends in the street or at the café. Lone drinker in taverns and inns in the old quarter. Other details? In 1916 he plans to set up as an astrologer. Occultism has its perils and on one occasion Pessoa finds himself involved in a row, set up by the police against the magician and ‘satanist’ E.A. Aleister Crowley, passing through Lisbon in search of neophytes for his mystical-erotic order. In 1920 he falls in love, or thinks he does, with an office girl; the relationship is short-lived: ‘my destiny,’ he says in the letter that breaks it off, ‘belongs to a different law, whose existence you do not even suspect…’ No other loves are known of. In the ‘Maritime Ode’ and the ‘Salutation to Whitman’ there is a strain of anguished homosexuality; these are great compositions which make one think of those that García Lorca was to write fifteen years later in Poet in New York. But Álvaro de Campos, expert at provocation, is not the whole Pessoa. There are other poets in him. Chaste, all his passions are imaginary; or rather, his great vice is imagination. That is why he never gets up out of his chair. And there is another Pessoa who belongs neither to everyday life nor to literature: the disciple, the initiate. Nothing can or should be said about this Pessoa. Revelation, deception, self-deception? All three together, perhaps. Like the master in one of his hermetic sonnets, Pessoa ‘knows and is silent’.

Anglomaniac, myopic, courteous, evasive, dressed darkly, reticent and agreeable, cosmopolitan who preaches nationalism, solemn investigator of futile things, humorist who never smiles but chills our blood, inventor of other poets and destroyer of himself, author of paradoxes clear as water and, as water, dizzying; to pretend is to know yourself, mysterious man who does not cultivate mystery, mysterious as the mid-day moon, taciturn phantom of the Portuguese mid-day, who is Pessoa? Pierre Hourcade, who knew him at the end of his life, writes: ‘Never, when I bade him goodbye, did I dare to turn back and look at him; I was afraid I would see him vanish, dissolved in air.’ Did he forget something? He died in 1935, in Lisbon, of a hepatic colic. He left two plaquettes of poems in English, a slim volume of Portuguese poems and a trunk full of manuscripts. His complete works have yet to be published.

His public life (one has to call it by some name) passes in shadow. Literature from the suburbs, ill-lighted zone in which move – conspirators or lunatics? – the irresolute shadows of Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and Fernando Pessoa. For a brief moment, the harsh reflectors of scandal and polemic illuminated them. Afterwards, darkness once more. Near-anonymity and near-celebrity. Everyone knows the name of Fernando Pessoa but few know who he is or what he does. Portuguese, Spanish and Latin American reputation: ‘Your name rings a bell, are you a newspaper reporter or a film director?’ I imagine Pessoa would not have minded the confusion. On the contrary, he cultivated it. Periods of literary agitation followed by stretches of lethargy. If his appearances are isolated and spasmodic, like hand-claps to scare off the fat cats of official literature, his lonely work is constant. Like all the great lazy geniuses, he spends his life making catalogues of the works he will never write; and as also happens with lethargic people, when they are impassioned and imaginative, in order not to burst, not to go crazy, almost on the sly, in the margins of their great projects, each day he writes a poem, an article, a reflection. Dispersion and tension. Everything marked with the same sign: those texts were written of necessity. And this, fatedness, is what distinguishes an authentic writer from a merely talented one.

His first poems he writes in English, between 1905 and 1908. At the time he was reading Milton, Shelley, Keats, Poe. Later he discovers Baudelaire and haunts various ‘Portuguese sub-poets’. Imperceptibly he returns to his mother tongue, though he will never stop writing in English. Until 1912 the influence of Symbolist poetry and of saudosismo is dominant. That year he published his earliest things in the magazine A Águia, the organ of the ‘Portuguese renaissance’. His contribution consisted in a series of articles on Portuguese poetry. It is very characteristic of Pessoa to launch his writing career as a literary critic. No less significant is the title of one of his texts: ‘In the Forest of Estrangement’. The theme of estrangement and the search for self, in the enchanted forest or in the abstract city, is rather more than just a theme: it is the substance of his work. In those years he sought himself; he will soon be inventing himself.

In 1913 he meets two young people who will be his fastest friends in the brief Futurist adventure: the painter Almada Negreiros and the poet Mário de Sá-Carneiro. Other friendships: Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues, Luis de Montalvor, José Pacheco. Imprisoned still in the enchantment of ‘decadent’ poetry, those young men try in vain to revive the Symbolist current. Pessoa invents ‘Paulism’. And suddenly, by means of Sá-Carneiro, who lives in Paris and with whom he keeps up a feverish correspondence, the revelation of the great modern insurrection: Marinetti. The fecundity of Futurism is undeniable, though its brilliance has faded since as a result of its founder’s renunciations. The repercussion of the movement was instantaneous perhaps because, more than a revolution, it was a mutiny. It was the first spark, the spark that ignites the powder-keg. The fire ran from one corner of Europe to the other, from Moscow to Lisbon. Three great poets: Apollinaire, Mayakovsky and Pessoa. The next year, 1914, would be the year of discovery or, rather, of birth for the Portuguese poet: Alberto Caeiro and his disciples, the futurist Álvaro de Campos and the neoclassicist Ricardo Reis, appear.

The irruption of the heteronyms, an inner event, prepares the public action: the explosion of Orpheu. In April 1915 the first issue of the magazine appears; in July, the second and last. Little? Rather, too much. The group was not homogeneous. The very name Orpheu shows the Symbolist mark. Even in Sá-Carneiro, despite his violence, Portuguese critics perceive the survival of ‘decadentism’. In Pessoa the break is clean: Álvaro de Campos is a complete Futurist but Fernando Pessoa continues as a ‘Paulist’ poet. The public received the magazine with indignation. The texts by Sá-Carneiro and Campos provoked the usual outrage from journalists. Insults were followed by jeers, jeers by silence. The cycle was complete. Did anything remain? In the first issue the ‘Triumphal Ode’ appeared; in the second, the ‘Maritime Ode’. The first is a poem which, despite its tics and affectations, already has the direct tone of ‘Tobacconist’s Shop’, the vision of how little a man weighs when set against the brute weight of social life. The second poem is something more than the fireworks of Futurist poetry: a great spirit raves aloud and its cry is never bestial nor superhuman. The poet is not a ‘little god’ but a fallen being. The two poems remind us more of Whitman than of Marinetti, a Whitman abstracted and denying. This is not all. Contradiction is the system, the form of Pessoa’s vital coherence: in the same period when the two odes are composed, he writes The Keeper of Flocks, the posthumous book of Alberto Caeiro, the Latinizing poems of Reis and ‘Epithalamium’ and ‘Antinous’, ‘two English poems of mine, very indecent, and therefore unpublishable in England’.

The adventure of Orpheu is brusquely interrupted. Some, faced with the journalists’ attacks and perhaps frightened by the intemperateness of Álvaro de Campos, take French leave. Sá-Carneiro, always unstable, returns to Paris. A year later he kills himself. A new attempt in 1917: the only issue of Portugal Futurista, edited by Almada Negreiros, in which ‘Ultimatum’ by Álvaro do Campos appears. Today it is difficult to read that stream of diatribes with interest, though some retain a salutary virulence: ‘D’Annunzio, Don Juan on Patmos; Shaw, cold tumour of Ibsenism; Kipling, scrap-iron imperialist.’ The Orpheu episode ends in the dispersion of the group and the death of one of its guiding lights. One must wait for fifteen years and a new generation. None of this is unusual. The astonishing thing is the appearance of the group, well ahead of its time and its society. What was being written in Spain and Latin America in those years?

The following period is one of relative obscurity. Pessoa publishes two booklets of English poetry, 35 Sonnets and Antinous, which The Times and the Glasgow Herald review very courteously but without enthusiasm. In 1922 appears Pessoa’s first contribution to Contemporanea, a new literary magazine: ‘The Anarchist Banker’. From those years also date his political whims: eulogies of nationalism and of the authoritarian regime. The reality disabuses him and obliges him to recant: on two occasions he stands up to public power, the church and social morality. The first time to defend António Botto, author of Canções, poems of homosexual love. The second time against the ‘Student Action League’, which attacked free thinking with the pretext of doing away with the so-called ‘literature of Sodom’. Caesar is always a moralist. Álvaro de Campos distributes a handout: ‘Warning on a moral count’; Pessoa publishes a manifesto; and the aggrieved party, Raúl Leal, writes a pamphlet: ‘A moral lesson to the students of Lisbon and the impudence of the Catholic Church’. The centre of gravity has shifted from free art to artistic freedom. The cast of our society is such that the creator is condemned to heterodoxy and opposition. The lucid artist does not evade that moral risk.

In 1924, a new magazine, Athena. It runs for only five issues. The supporting talents were never very good. In fact, Athena is a bridge between Orpheu and the young writers of Presença (1927). Each generation when it emerges selects its tradition. The new group discovers Pessoa: at last he has found people to talk with. Too late, as usual. A little later, a year before his death, the grotesque incident of the poetry competition of the Secretariat for National Propaganda occurs. The theme, of course, was a hymn to the glories of the nation and the empire. Pessoa sends in Mensagem, poems which are an ‘occultist’ and symbolic interpretation of Portuguese history. The book must have puzzled the officials in charge of the contest. They gave it a ‘second category’ prize. It was his final literary experience.

It all begins on 8 March 1914. But it’s better to transcribe an extract from a letter Pessoa wrote to one of the young poets of Presença, Adolfo Casais Monteiro:

Around 1912 I got the idea of writing some poems of a pagan nature. I drafted some things in irregular verse (not in the style of Álvaro de Campos) and then gave up the attempt. All the same, in the confused half-light, I glimpsed a vague picture of the person who was doing it (without my knowing it, Ricardo Reis had been born). A year and a half or two years later, it occurred to me to play a trick on Sá-Carneiro – to invent a bucolic poet, a little complex, and present him, I don’t recall in what form, as if he were a real entity. I spent a few days at this without getting anywhere. One day, when I had at last given up – it was 8 March 1914 – I drew near a high chest of drawers and, taking a handful of paper, began to write standing up, as I always do when I can. I wrote 30-odd poems, one after another, in a sort of ecstasy whose nature I could not define. It was the triumphal day of my life and I will never have another like it. I began with a title, ‘The Keeper of Flocks’. And what followed was the appearance of someone in me whom I immediately called Alberto Caeiro. Excuse me for the absurdity of the expression: my master appeared in me. That was the immediate sensation I had. And it was such that, as soon as the 30 poems were written, on another paper I wrote, also without stopping, ‘Oblique Rain’, by Fernando Pessoa. Immediately and complete…

It was the return of Fernando Pessoa-Alberto Caeiro to Fernando Pessoa himself. Or better said: Fernando Pessoa’s reaction against his inexistence as Alberto Caeiro… When Caeiro had appeared, I tried unconsciously and instinctively to find him some disciple. I wrenched the latent Ricardo Reis away from his false paganism, I found him a name and adjusted him to himself, because at that peak of excitement I could already see him. And suddenly, from an opposite source to Reis, another individual surged up impetuously. At a stroke, without interruption or revision, the ‘Triumphal Ode’ of Álvaro de Campos sprang forth. The ode with that title and the man with the name he has.

I do not know what could be added to this confession. Psychology offers us various explanations. Pessoa himself, who was interested in his case, proposes two or three. One crudely pathological: ‘I am probably an hysteric – neurasthenic… and this explains, well or ill, the organic origin of the heteronyms.’ I wouldn’t say ‘well or ill’ but inadequately. The fault of these hypotheses is not that they are false: they are incomplete. A neurotic is a man possessed: if he controls his disorder, is he then sick? The neurotic suffers his obsessions; the creator is their master and transforms them. Pessoa recounts that from childhood he lived among imaginary characters. (‘I don’t know, of course, if it is they or I who don’t exist: in these cases we ought not to be dogmatic.’) The heteronyms are surrounded by a fluid mass of half-beings: the Baron of Teive; Jean Seul, satirical French journalist; Bernardo Soares, a phantom of the phantasmal Vicente Guedes; Pacheco, a poor copy of Campos… not all of them are writers: there is a Mr Cross, tireless participant in the charade and crossword competitions in the English magazines (an infallible means, Pessoa believed, of ending up broke), Alexander Search and others. All this – like his solitude, his discreet alcoholism and so many other things – casts light on his character but does not explain his poems for us, and that is all that really matters to us.

The same thing happens with the ‘occultist’ hypothesis, to which Pessoa, far too analytical, does not openly resort but which he does not fail to evoke. It is known that the spirits which guide the pens of mediums, even the spirits of Euripides or Victor Hugo, reveal a disconcerting literary dullness. Others hazard a guess that it is a case of ‘mystification’. The error here is doubly coarse: Pessoa is not a liar nor is his work a fraud. There is something extremely vile in the modern mind; people, who tolerate every kind of unworthy lie in real life, and all kinds of unworthy realities, will not tolerate the existence of the fable. And that is what Pessoa’s oeuvre is: a fable, a fiction. To forget that Caeiro, Reis and Campos are poetic creations is to forget too much. Like all creation, those poets were born of play. Art is play – and other things. But without play there is no art.

The authenticity of the heteronyms depends on their poetic coherence, their verisimilitude. They were necessary creations, otherwise Pessoa would not have devoted his life to living and making them; what matters now is not that they were necessary to their author but that they should also be so to us. Pessoa, their first reader, did not doubt their reality. Reis and Campos said what perhaps he himself would never had said. In contradicting him, they expressed him; in expressing him, they forced him to invent himself. We write to be what we are or else to be what we are not. In either case, we seek ourselves. And if we have the luck to find ourselves – sign of creation – we will discover that we are an unknown. Always the other, always he, inseparable, alien, with your face and mine, you always with me and always alone.

The heteronyms are not literary masks: ‘What Fernando Pessoa writes belongs to categories of work which we could call orthonyms and heteronyms. It cannot be said that they are anonymous or pseudonymous because they really aren’t. The pseudonymous work is by the author in his own person, except he signs it with another name; the heteronymic work is by the author outside his own person…’ Gérard de Nerval is the pseudonym of Gérard Labrunie: the same person and the same work; Caeiro is a heteronym of Pessoa: impossible to confuse them. Closer is the case of Antonio Machado, which is also distinct. Abel Martín and Juan de Mairena are not entirely the poet Antonio Machado. They are masks, but transparent masks: a Machado text is not different from a Mairena text. What is more, Machado is not possessed by his fictions, they are not creatures who inhabit him, contradict him or deny him. By contrast, Caeiro, Reis and Campos are the protagonists of a novel which Pessoa never wrote. ‘I am a dramatic poet,’ he confides in a letter to João Gaspar Simões. Nonetheless, the relationship between Pessoa and his heteronyms is not the same as that between a playwright or novelist and his characters. He is not an inventor of character-poets but a creator of poets’-works. The difference is crucial. As Casais Monteiro says: ‘He invented the biographies to accompany the works, and not the works to go with the biographies.’ Those works – and Pessoa’s own poems written in the light of, for and against them – are his poetic oeuvre. He himself turns into an oeuvre of his oeuvre. And he doesn’t even have the privilege of being the critic of that coterie: Reis and Campos treat him with a certain condescension; the Baron of Teive does not always greet him; Vicente Guedes, the archivist, is so like him that when he finds him, in a neighbourhood tavern, he feels a little pity for himself. He is the bewitched enchanter, so wholly possessed by his phantoms that he feels himself to be watched by them, perhaps despised, perhaps pitied. Our creations judge us.

Alberto Caeiro is my master. This declaration is the touchstone of all his work. It could be added that the work of Caeiro is the only affirmation Pessoa ever made. Caeiro is the sun and around him Reis, Campos and Pessoa himself keep their courses. In all of them there are particles of negation and unreality: Reis believes in form, Campos in sensation, Pessoa in symbols. Caeiro doesn’t believe in anything: he exists. The sun is life stuffed full of itself; the sun does not look because all his rays’ glances are transformed into heat and light; the sun is not self-conscious because in him thinking and being are one and the same. Caeiro is all that Pessoa is not and, moreover, all that no modern poet can be: man reconciled with nature. Before Christianity, yes, but also before work and before history. Before consciousness. Caeiro denies, by the mere fact of existing, not only Pessoa’s Symbolist aesthetic but all aesthetics, all values, all ideas. Is nothing left? Everything is left, scoured of the phantoms and cobwebs of culture. The world exists because my senses tell me so; and in telling me so, they also tell me I exist. Yes, I will die and the world will die, but to die is to live. Caeiro’s affirmation annuls death; when he suppresses conscience, he suppresses nothingness. He does not affirm that everything is, because that would be to affirm an idea; he says that everything exists. Moreover, he says that it is all that exists. The rest are illusions. Campos sets himself the task of dotting the ‘i’: ‘My master Caeiro was not pagan; he was paganism.’ I would say: an idea of paganism.

Caeiro hardly went to school.1 When he learned that he was being called a ‘materialist poet’ he wanted to know what that doctrine consisted of. When he heard Campos’ explanation, he did not conceal his surprise: ‘It’s an idea of priests without religion! You say that they say space is infinite? In what space have they seen that?’ In the face of his disciple’s stupefaction, Caeiro maintained that space is finite: ‘What is limitless doesn’t exist…’ Campos replied: ‘And numbers? After 34 comes 35, then 36 and so on…’ Caeiro stayed gazing at him with pity: ‘But those are onlynumbers!’ and he went on ‘like a formidable child’: ‘Is there by any chance a number 34 in reality?’ Another anecdote: they asked him: ‘Are you content with yourself?’ He replied: ‘No, I am content.’ Caeiro is not a philosopher: he is a sage. Thinkers have ideas; for the sage, living and thinking are not separate acts. That is why it is impossible to expound the ideas of Socrates or Laotse. They did not leave doctrines, but a fistful of anecdotes, riddles and poems. Chuangtse, more faithful than Plato, does not pretend to communicate a philosophy to us but to tell us some little stories: the philosophy is inseparable from the story, is the story. The doctrine of the philosopher encourages refutation; the life of the sage is irrefutable. No sage has proclaimed that the truth can be learned; what all of them, or almost all, have said, is that all that is worthwhile is to live the experience of truth. The weakness of Caeiro rests not in his ideas (that is, rather, his strength); it consists in the unreality of the experience he says he embodies.

Adam in a villa in provincial Portugal, without woman, children or creator: without conscience, work or religion. A sensation among sensations, an existing among existences. Rock is rock and Caeiro is Caeiro, at this moment. Later on, each will be something different. Or the same. It’s the same or it’s different: everything’s the same by being different. To name is to be. The word with which he names the rock is not the rock but has the same reality as the rock. Caeiro doesn’t set himself to name the beings and that is why he never tells us if the rock is an agate or a cobble-stone, if the tree is a pine or a holm-oak. Nor does he pretend to establish relations between things: the word like does not figure in his vocabulary; each thing is sunk in its own reality. If Caeiro speaks it is because man is a creature of words, as the bird is a winged creature. Man talks as the river runs and the rain falls. The innocent poet does not need to name things; his words are trees, clouds, spiders, lizards. Not these spiders I see, but these I say. Caeiro is astonished at the idea that reality is ungraspable: why, there it is, in front of us, it’s enough to touch it. It’s enough to speak.

It would not be hard to show Caeiro that reality is never at hand and that we must conquer it (even at the risk that in the act of conquest it might evaporate before us or turn into something else: idea, utensil). The innocent poetry is a myth, but a myth which institutes poetry. The real poet knows that words and things are not the same, and for that reason, to re-establish a precarious unity between man and the world, he names things with images, rhythms, symbols and comparisons. Words are not the things they name: they are the bridges we extend between the things and ourselves. The poet is the conscience of the words, that is, the nostalgia for the actual reality of things. True, words were also things before they were the names of things. They were things in the myth of the innocent poet, that is, before language. The opaque words of the real poet evoke the speech of the time before language, the glimpsed paradisal accord. Innocent speech: silence in which nothing is said because everything is said, everything is saying itself. The poet’s language feeds upon that silence which is innocent speech. Pessoa, real poet and sceptic, needed to reinvent an innocent poet to justify his own poetry. Reis, Campos and Pessoa speak mortal, dated words, words of perdition and dispersion: they are the presentiment of a nostalgia for unity. We hear them against the silent background of that unity. It isn’t by chance that Caeiro dies young, before his disciples begin their work. It is his raison d’être, the silence that sustains them.

The most natural and simple of the heteronyms is the least real. He is least real because of excess reality. Man, above all modern man, is not entirely real. He is not a compact entity like nature or things; self-consciousness is his insubstantial reality. Caeiro is an absolute affirmation of existence and hence his words strike us as truths from another age, that age in which everything was one and the same. Sensible and untouchable present: we hardly name it and it evaporates! The mask of innocence which Caeiro turns to us is not that of wisdom: to be wise is to resign oneself to the knowledge that we are not innocent. Pessoa, who did know it, was nearer to wisdom.

The opposite extreme is Álvaro de Campos.2 Caeiro lives in the timeless present of children and animals; the Futurist Campos in the now. For the first, his hilltop retreat is the centre of the world; the other, cosmopolitan, has no centre, exiled in that nowhere which is everywhere. Nonetheless, they do resemble one another; they both practice free verse; both trample on the Portuguese language; neither avoids the prosaic. They believe only in what they touch, they are pessimists, they love concrete reality, they do not love their peers, they despise ideas and live outside history, one in fulness of being, the other in its most extreme privation. Caeiro, the innocent poet, is the one Pessoa could not be; Campos, the dandy vagabond, is the one he could have been but wasn’t. They are the impossible vital possibilities of Pessoa.

The first poem by Campos has a deceptive originality. The ‘Triumphal Ode’ appears to be a brilliant echo of Whitman and of the Futurists. But as soon as this poem is compared with those which were being written in France, Russia and elsewhere in those years, the difference is apparent. Whitman really believed in man and in machines; or rather, he believed that natural man was not incompatible with machines. His pantheism extended also to industry. Most of his descendants do not share these illusions. Some see machines as marvellous toys. I think of Valéry Larbaud and of Barnabooth, who resembles Álvaro de Campos in more ways than one. Larbaud’s attitude to the machine is epicurean; the attitude of the Futurists was visionary. They see it as the destroyer of false humanism and, of course, of natural man. They do not set out to humanize the machine but to construct a new human species similar to it. Mayakovsky would be one exception and even he… The ‘Triumphal Ode’ is not epicurean, romantic or triumphal: it is a song of rage and defeat. Its originality resides in this.

A factory is ‘a tropical landscape’ inhabited by huge, lascivious beasts. Infinite fornication of wheels, pistons and tackle-blocks. As the mechanical rhythm grows louder, the paradise of steel and electricity becomes a torture chamber. The machines are sexual organs of destruction: Campos would like to be chewed up by those furious propellers. This strange vision is less fantastic than it appears and it is not just an obsession of Campos’s. The machines reproduce, simplify and multiply vital processes. They seduce and terrify us because they give us at one and the same time the sensation of intelligence and unconsciousness: all that they do, they do well, but they don’t know what they are doing. Isn’t this an image of modern man? But the machines are one fact of contemporary civilization. The other is social promiscuity. The ‘Triumphal Ode’ ends in a howl; transformed into a package, box, parcel, wheel, Álvaro de Campos loses the use of the word: he whistles, chimes, hammers, cracks, explodes. Caeiro’s word evokes the unity between man, rock and insect; Campos’s evokes the incoherent noise of history. Pantheism and universal mechanism, two ways of abolishing conscience.

‘Tobacconist’s Shop’ is the poem of recovered consciousness. Caeiro asks himself: what am I? Campos: who am I? From his room he watches the street: cars, passers-by, dogs, all real and all hollow, all close at hand and all remote. Opposite, sure of himself like a god, enigmatic and grinning like a god, rubbing his hands like God the Father after his horrible creation, the proprietor of the Tobacconist’s appears and disappears. He arrives at this cave-temple-shop, Steve the chap with nothing on his mind, metaphysical being, who talks and eats, has feelings and political opinions and keeps the feast-days of obligation. From his window, from his consciousness, he watches the two puppets and seeing them, sees himself. Where is reality, in me or in Steve? The proprietor of the Tobacconist’s smiles and does not answer. As a Futurist poet, Campos begins by affirming that the only reality is sensation; a few years later he asks himself if he himself is real at all.

When he abolishes self-consciousness, Caeiro suppresses history; now it is history that suppresses Campos. Marginal life: his siblings, if he has them, are the whores, the vagrants, the dandy, the half-wit, the rabble from upstairs and down. His rebellion has nothing to do with ideas of redemption or justice: No: anything but being right! Anything but caring about mankind! Anything rather than give in to humanitarianism! Campos also rebels against the idea of rebellion. It is not a moral virtue, a state of consciousness – it is the consciousness of sensation: ‘Ricardo Reis is a pagan by conviction: Antonio Mora by intelligence; I by rebellion, that is, by temperament.’ His sympathy for the underdog is tinged with disgust, but he feels that disgust above all for himself:

I feel sympathy for all those people,

Especially when they do not merit it.

Yes, I too am vagrant and I crave…

To be vagrant and a beggar is not to be those things

But to be outside the social hierarchy…

Not to be Supreme Court Judge, of fixed employment, whore,

Solemnly poor, exploited worker,

Sick with an incurable disease,

Longing for justice, or cavalry captain,

Not, finally, those social persons, novelists,

Who gorge themselves with letters because they have reason to shed tears

And who rebel against social life because they have more than enough reasons to…

His vagrancy and penury have no circumstantial source; they are irremediable and unredeemable. To be a vagrant thus is to be isolated in the soul. And later on, with that brutality that scandalized Pessoa: I don’t even have the excuse of being able to have social opinions… I’m lucid. None of your heart-felt aesthetics… I’m lucid. Bloody hell! I’m lucid.

Consciousness of exile has been a constant note in modern poetry, for the last century and a half. Gérard de Nerval pretends he is the Prince of Aquitaine; Álvaro de Campos chooses the mask of vagrant. The transition is revealing. Wandering minstrel or beggar, what does that mask conceal? Nothing, perhaps. The poet is the consciousness of his historic unreality. But if that consciousness draws back from history, society subsides into its own darkness, becomes Steve or the Proprietor of the Tobacconist’s. There will those who say that Campos’s attitude is not ‘positive’. Casais Monteiro answered such critics in these terms: ‘The work of Pessoa really is a negative work. It does not serve as a model, it teaches neither to govern nor to be governed. It serves exactly the opposite purpose: to undiscipline spirits.’

Campos does not set out, like Caeiro, to be everything but to be everyone and to be in all places. The fall into plurality is paid for by the loss of identity. Ricardo Reis chooses the other possibility latent in his master’s work3. Reis is a recluse as Campos is a vagabond. His hermitage is a philosophy and a form. The philosophy is a mixture of stoicism and epicureanism. The form, the epigram, the ode and the elegy of the neo-classical poets. but the neo-classicism is a nostalgia, that is, a romanticism that does not recognize itself or masks itself. While Campos writes his long monologues, each time coming closer to introspection than to hymn, his friend Reis polishes little odes on pleasure, ephemerality, Lydia’s roses, the illusory freedom of man, the vanity of the gods. Educated at a Jesuit College, a physician by profession, a monarchist, exiled to Brazil since 1919, pagan and sceptic by conviction, Latinist by education, Reis lives outside time. He seems, but is not, a man of the past: he has chosen to live in a timeless sagesse. Cioran recently pointed out that our century, which has invented so many things, has not created the one thing we most lack. It is not surprising therefore that some seek it in the Eastern tradition: Taoism, Zen Buddhism; in fact those doctrines fulfil the same function as the moral philosophies of the end of the ancient world. Reis’s stoicism is one way of not being in the world – without ceasing to be in it. His political ideas have a similar meaning: they are not a programme but a negation of the contemporary state of affairs. He does not hate Christ or love him; he abhors Christianity though, aesthete to the end, when he thinks of Jesus he admits that ‘his sober, dolorous form brought us something that was lacking’. Reis’s real god is Fate and we all –men and myths – are subject to its rule.

Reis’s form is admirable and monotonous, like everything that achieves artificial perfection. In those little poems one perceives, more than the poet’s familiarity with Latin and Greek originals, a wise and distilled mixture of Lusitanian neo-classicism and of the Greek Anthology translated into English. The correctness of his language troubled Pessoa: ‘Caeiro writes Portuguese badly; Campos does it well enough, though he perpetrates expressions like “I proper” for “I myself”; Reis writes better than I but with a purism I consider exaggerated.’ The sleepwalking exaggeration of Campos, by a very natural movement of contradiction, turns into the exaggerated precision of Reis.

Neither form nor philosophy protect Reis: they protect a phantom. The fact is that Reis does not exist either, and he knows it. Lucid, and with a more penetrating lucidity than Campos’ exasperated kind, he contemplates himself:

I do not know from whom I recall my past,

I was another, nor do I know myself

When with my soul I feel

That alien I remember as I feel.

From one day to the next we forsake ourselves.

Nothing that’s certain binds us to ourselves,

We are who we are and it is

Something inwardly perceived, the thing we were.

The labyrinth in which Reis is lost is the labyrinth of himself. The poet’s inturned look, something quite distinct from introspection, makes him resemble Pessoa. Though both used fixed metres and forms, it is not traditionalism that unites them because they belong to different traditions. They have in common a feeling about time – not as something which passes before us but something which becomes us. Imprisoned in the instant, Caeiro and Campos affirm in a single stroke being or lack of being. Reis and Pessoa get lost in the fastnesses of their thought, catch up with themselves at some bend or turning and, at the point of joining up with themselves, embrace a shadow. The poem is not the expression of being but the commemoration of that moment of fusion. Hollow monument: Pessoa raises a temple to the unknown; Reis, more soberly, writes an epigram that is also an epitaph:

Let Fate deny me everything, except to see it,

For I, a Stoic without obduracy,

In the sentence engraved by Destiny

Wish to enjoy the characters.

Álvaro de Campos used to quote a sentence of Ricardo Reis: ‘I hate a lie because it is an inexactness.’ These words could also be applied to Pessoa, so long as lie is not confused with imagination or exactness with rigidity. The poetry of Reis is precise and simple as a line-drawing; Pessoa’s exact and complex like music. Complex and various, it moves in different directions: the prose, the Portuguese poetry and the English poetry (the French poems have to be set aside as insignificant). The prose writings, which have still to be published in full, can be divided in two main categories: those signed with his own name and those of his pseudonyms, principally the Baron of Tieve, an aristocrat fallen on hard times, and Bernardo Soares, ‘impregnated with commerce’. In various passages Pessoa stresses that they are not heteronyms: ‘both write in a style which is, for better or for worse, my own’. It is not necessary to linger over the English poems; their interest is literary and psychological but they do not add much, it seems to me, to English poetry. The poetic oeuvre in Portuguese, from 1902 to 1935, includes Mensagem, the lyric poetry and the dramatic poems. These last, in my view, are marginal in value. Even if they are left aside, an extensive poetic oeuvre remains.

First difference: the heteronyms write only in one direction and in a single current of time; Pessoa branches out like a delta and each of its branches offers us the image, the images, of a moment. Lyric poetry ramifies in Mensagem, the Cancioneiro (with the unpublished and scattered pieces) and the hermetic poems. As is always the case, the classification does not correspond to the reality. Cancioneiro is a Symbolist book full of hermetic elements, though the poet does not have specific recourse to the images of the occult tradition. Mensagem is, above all, a book of heraldry – and heraldry is a part of alchemy. Finally, the hermetic poems are, in form and spirit, Symbolist; it is not necessary to be an initiate to get into them and to understand them as poems does not require special knowledge. These poems, like the rest of his work, require a spiritual understanding, the highest and most difficult form of understanding. The knowledge that Rimbaud was interested in the cabbala and identified poetry and alchemy is useful and helps us approach Rimbaud’s work; really to get into it, however, we need something more and something less. Pessoa defined that something in this way: sympathy; intuition; intelligence; comprehension; and the most difficult, grace. This list may seem excessive. I do not see how, without these five conditions, Baudelaire, Coleridge or Yeats can be really read. In any event, the difficulties of Pessoa’s poetry are less great than those of Hölderlin, Nerval, Mallarmé… In all the poets of the modern tradition, poetry is a system of symbols and analogies parallel to that of the hermetic sciences. Parallel, but not identical: the poem is a constellation of signs endowed with their own light.

Pessoa conceived Mensagem as a ritual; that is, as an esoteric book. If one looks at its external perfection, this is his most complete book. But it is a made-up book, by which I do not want to suggest that it is insincere but that it was born of the poet’s speculations, not his intuitions. At first glance it is a hymn to the glories of Portugal and a prophecy of a new empire (the Fifth), which will not be material but spiritual; its dominions will extend beyond historic space and time (a Mexican reader immediately recalls the ‘cosmic race’ of Vasconcelos). The book is a gallery of historic and legendary personages, displaced from their traditional reality and transformed into allegories of another tradition and another reality. Perhaps without entire awareness of what he did, Pessoa vaporizes the history of Portugal and presents another in its place, one purely spiritual that is a negation of what it replaces. The esoteric nature of Mensagem prohibits us from reading it as a simple patriotic poem, as some official critics would like. It has to be added that its symbolism does not redeem it. For symbols to work effectively, they must cease to symbolize, become sensible, living creatures and not museum emblems. As in any work where will plays a greater rôle than inspiration, there are few poems in Mensagem which achieve that state of grace that distinguishes poetry from belles lettres. But those few live in the same magic space as the best poems in the Cancioneiro, alongside some of the hermetic sonnets. It is not possible to define what the space consists of; for me it is that of poetry properly speaking, a real territory, tangible, which another light illumines. No matter that the poems are few. Gottfried Benn said: ‘No one, not even the greatest poets of our time, has left more than eight or ten perfect poems… For six poems, thirty or fifty years’ asceticism, suffering, battle!’

The Cancioneiro: a world of beings and many shadows. Woman, the central sun, is missing. Without woman, the sensible world vanishes, there is not even firm ground, water, nor the embodiment of the impalpable. The terrible pleasures are missing. Passion, that love which is desire for one unique being whoever it may be, is also lacking. There is a vague fraternal feeling with nature: trees, clouds, rocks, all fleeting, all suspended in a temporal void. Unreality of things, a reflection of our own unreality. There is denial, exhaustion, mournfulness. In the Livro de Desassossego [Book of Disquietude], of which only fragments are known, Pessoa describes his moral landscape:

I belong to a generation which was born without faith in Christianity and which ceased to have faith in all other beliefs; we were not enthusiasts for social equality, beauty or progress; we did not seek in easts or wests other religious forms (‘each civilization has a relationship with the religion which represents it: when we lost ours, we lost them all’); some among us devoted themselves to the conquest of the everyday; others among us, of better stock, abstained from public affairs, wanting nothing and desiring nothing; others gave themselves up to the cult of confusion and noise: they thought they were alive when they heard themselves, they thought they loved when they crashed into the externals of love; and others of us, Race without End, spiritual limit of the Dead Hour, lived in denial, discontent and mournfulness.

This is not a picture of Pessoa, but it is the ground against which his figure stands out and with which it is sometimes confused. Spiritual limit of the Dead Hour: the poet is an empty man who, in his helplessness, creates a world in order to discover his true identity. All Pessoa’s work is a search for the lost identity.

In one of his most quoted poems he says that the poet is ‘a pretender who pretends so thoroughly that he comes to pretend that the pain he really feels is pain’. When he tells the truth, he lies; when he lies, he tells the truth. We witness not an aesthetic but an act of faith. Poetry is the revelation of his unreality:

Between the moonlight and the foliage,

Between the stillness and the grove,

Between the fact of night and the fact of the breeze,

A secret passes.

My soul follows it as it passes.

Is the one who passes Pessoa or someone else? The question is repeated down the years and throughout the poems. He does not even know if what he writes is his own. Or rather, he knows that even if it is, it is not: ‘why, deceived, do I judge to be mine what is not mine?’ The search for the I – lost, found, again lost – ends in disgust: ‘Nausea, will of nothing: to exist in order not to die.’

Only from this perspective can the complete significance of the heteronyms be perceived. They are a literary invention and a psychological necessity, but they are something more. In a sense they are what Pessoa could and would have liked to be: in another, deeper sense, what he did not want to be: a personality. In the first movement, they erase the idealism and intellectual convictions of their author; in the second, they show that innocent sagesse, the public square and the philosophical hermitage are illusions. The present instant is as uninhabitable as the future; stoicism is a killing remedy. And yet the destruction of the I – since that is what the heteronyms are – provokes a secret fecundity. The real desert is the I, not only because it locks us up in ourselves, and thus condemns us to live with phantoms, but because it withers all that it touches. Pessoa’s experience, perhaps without his intending it, takes its place in the tradition of the great poets of the modern age, from Nerval and the German romantics on. The I is an obstacle, is the obstacle. That is why any merely aesthetic judgement of his work is inadequate. If it is the case that not everything he wrote was of the same quality, everything, or almost everything, shows the traces of his search. His work is a step towards the unknown. A passion.

The world of Pessoa is neither this world nor the other. The word ‘absence’ could define it, if by absence we understand a fluid state, in which presence vanishes and absence heralds… what? – a moment in which the present no longer is, and that which may be about to be just begins to dawn. The urban desert is covered with signs: the rocks say something, the wind speaks, the lighted window and the solitary corner tree speak, everything is saying something, not this that I am saying but something else, always something else, the something that is not said. Absence is not only privation but presentiment of a presence which never shows itself entirely. Hermetic poems and the songs coincide: in the absence, in the unreality we are, something is present. Amazed among people and things, the poet walks along a street in the old quarter. He goes into a park and the leaves move. They’re on the point of saying… No, they haven’t said anything. Unreality of the world, in the last light of the afternoon. Everything is still, expectant. The poet now knows he has no identity. Like those houses, almost gold, almost real, like those trees suspended in the hour, he too weighs anchor, leaves himself. And the other, the double, the true Pessoa does not appear. He will never appear: there is no other. What does appear, insinuates itself, its otherness, which has no name, what is not said and our poor words invoke. Is it poetry? No: poetry is what is left and consoles us, the consciousness of absences. And again, almost imperceptible, a rumour of something: Pessoa or the imminence of the unknown.

Pessoa-Hamlet by João Abel Manta

1