In May Pessoa publishes, in the magazine Contemporânea , a dialectical satire titled “The Anarchist Banker.” In October he publishes, in the same magazine, eleven of the poems that will make up Mensagem (1934).

1923 Olisipo publishes a booklet, Sodoma Divinizada (Sodom Deified), by Raul Leal. In response to a campaign by conservative students against the “literature of Sodom,” the government bans various books deemed immoral, including Sodoma Divinizada and António Botto’s Canções. Pessoa self-publishes several handbills—one in his own name and another signed by Álvaro de Campos—criticizing the students and defending Raul Leal. In July Pessoa’s sister gets married and takes their semi-invalid mother to live with her and her husband.

1924 Founds the magazine Athena, whose first issue (October) features twenty odes of Ricardo Reis, previously unknown to the public.

1925 The fourth and fifth (and last) issues of Athena present Alberto Caeiro to the public, with a total of thirty-nine poems. Pessoa’s mother dies in March, and in the fall his sister and brother-in-law move back to the Rua Coelho da Rocha. In November she gives birth to Manuela Nogueira, Pessoa’s only niece.

1926 Pessoa’s translation of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is serialized in the magazine Illustração (January 1926-February 1927), though with no mention of the translator. Pessoa and his brother-in-law found and publish six issues of the Revista de Comércio e Contabilidade (Business and Accounting Magazine). A coup d’état in May establishes a military dictatorship.

1927 The literary review Presença is founded in Coimbra. The young editors consider Pessoa, who is not especially well known, to be Portugal’s most significant living writer, and they regularly publish his work throughout the rest of his life. One of the editors, João Gaspar Simões, will publish the first biography of Pessoa, in 1950. Pessoa’s sister and her family move to Évora, where they will live for three years.

1928 Pessoa publishes a booklet titled O Interregno (The Interregnum), which defends and justifies military dictatorship as a necessary “State of Transition” in Portugal, wracked by political instability and without (according to the booklet’s arguments) a “national ideal” or a tradition of strong public opinion to support a British-style, constitutional government. (In a bibliographical note dating from 1935, Pessoa will repudiate O Interregno.) António de Oliveira Salazar becomes the finance minister in April. In August Pessoa creates his last heteronym, the Baron of Teive, who, frustrated because of his inability to produce finished works, decides to commit suicide.

1929 Publishes, for the first time since 1913, passages from The Book of Disquiet, now attributed to the “semiheteronym” Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper who lives and works in downtown Lisbon. (Pessoa will leave, at his death, more than five hundred passages of this work, many of which are scattered among his papers and notebooks. The first edition of The Book of Disquiet, compiled by scholars, will not be published until 1982.) In September Pessoa and Ophelia Queiroz rekindle their relationship, exchanging letters and occasionally seeing each other. On December 4 Pessoa writes Aleister Crowley’s publisher to correct the natal horoscope published in the occult master’s autobiographical Confessions. Crowley (1875-1947), also known as Master Therion, acknowledges the mistake and strikes up a correspondence with Pessoa.

1930 Writes his last letter to Ophelia Queiroz on January 11. In September Aleister Crowley comes to Lisbon with a girlfriend, who quarrels with him after several weeks and abruptly leaves the country. Crowley, abetted by Pessoa, stages a fake suicide that receives national and international news coverage, with Pessoa being interviewed and providing false testimony. Pessoa plans and partly writes, in English, a detective novel based on the pseudo-suicide.

1931 Luís Miguel Rosa Dias, Pessoa’s only nephew, is born to his half sister Henriqueta.

1932 Henriqueta and her family begin to spend long periods at a house in Estoril, where Pessoa often visits. On July 5 Salazar is appointed prime minister and becomes, in practice, a dictator.

1933 A new constitution marks the inception of Salazar’s so-called Estado Novo (New State).

1934 Publishes, in the fall, Mensagem (Message), the only book of his Portuguese poetry to see print in his lifetime. The book is awarded a prize by the National Office of Propaganda.

1935 Publishes, on February 4, an impassioned article against a proposed law that would ban Freemasonry and other “secret societies.” (The National Assembly unanimously ratifies the law in April.) In the ceremony where Pessoa’s and another poetry prize are awarded, on February 21, Salazar’s speech informs writers that their creative and intellectual productions should not only respect “certain limitations” but also obey “certain guidelines” dictated by the Estado Novo’s “moral and patriotic principles.” Pessoa, who did not attend the ceremony but read the speech in the newspaper, is outraged and takes to writing anti-fascist poems. The poetry of his last year also reflects, at the personal level, an increasingly felt solitude. On November 29, beset by fever and strong abdominal pains, Pessoa is taken to the French hospital of Lisbon. There he writes, in English, his last words: “I know not what tomorrow will bring.” Tomorrow brings death, at around 8 p.m. On December 2 he is buried in Lisbon at the cemetery of Prazeres, where one of the survivors of the Orpheu group delivers a brief address to a small crowd.

Notes on the Selection, Editing, and Translation

To publish Pessoa involves hard decisions, and a certain betrayal of the original. I don’t mean the betrayal that comes from the incapacity of one language to replicate another—a problem faced by all translations—but the betrayal deriving from decisions the editor or translator is forced to make, since Pessoa did not. The majority of Pessoa’s unpublished writings (and he published relatively little) was left in an unfinished state, which means that 1) they were not fully fleshed out, or 2) they were structurally complete but dotted with blank spaces for words or phrases the author meant to fill in later but never did, or 3) they were marked up with a number of alternate phrasings—in the margins or between the lines—for a final revision that wasn’t carried out. Pessoa, an incontinent writer, was too busy turning out new poems and prose pieces to dedicate a great amount of time to revising and polishing. He did revise and polish, but he had difficulty arriving at finished products that satisfied him.

The rough and fragmentary nature of Pessoa’s work occurred by default; it was not an aesthetic he cultivated.