He would never have published “Salutation to Walt Whitman” or “Un Soir à Lima” as sets of more or less connectable fragments, as they appear here. There are probably poems in this collection that Pessoa, finding them imperfect and imperfectible, would have eliminated, had he ever gotten around to preparing his work for publication. And it’s impossible to know exactly how poem XXXIII in The Keeper of Sheep would have ended, had its author chosen from among the six versions for the concluding verse that litter the manuscript. They’re not litter, of course, but only one version can appear in the body of the text; the rest must be relegated to notes. Hesitancy and multiplicity, which marked Pessoa’s psychological existence, also permeate the written universe he left to posterity.

To make matters even more interesting (or “complicated,” which to Pessoa’s way of thinking was a synonym for “interesting”), the handwriting on the manuscripts sometimes verges on the hieroglyphic. There are passages from “Salutation to Walt Whitman,” for example, that no one has yet managed to decipher. In the first large-scale edition of Pessoa’s poetry, initiated in the 1940s, misreadings of single words and entire sentences were frequent, and the “Salutation,” besides suffering from faulty transcriptions, was presented as a finished poem, for which only a handful of its more than twenty pieces were stitched together to form a false whole that wasn’t even logically coherent, let alone editorially honest. Other poems, such as “I want to be free and insincere” (p. 308), were missing one or more stanzas, or the stanzas were out of order.

Greatly improved editions of Pessoa’s poetry have been made during the last fifteen years. Since even these have occasional errors of transcription, I have consulted all the available manuscripts of the poems contained in the present volume except for those published by the author himself. Divergent readings are accounted for in the endnotes. Where a manuscript contains more than one version of a word or phrase, I have preferred whichever seemed to me to work best; the other versions are referred to as “variants,” and the most significant of these are recorded in the endnotes.

Where the original poem rhymes (generally the case of poems signed by Pessoa himself, occasionally the case of Álvaro de Campos, and almost never the case of Alberto Caeiro or Ricardo Reis), my translation sometimes follows suit, usually in a modified scheme—e.g., one rhyme per four-line stanza instead of two—and with recourse to slant rhymes. Curiously enough, Pessoa’s translations of English and American poems into Portuguese scrupulously conserved the rhyme schemes of the original, but when he translated a few stanzas of Álvaro de Campos’s “Opiary” into English, he dispensed with rhyme entirely. It’s such a waggish poem that I feel it needs rhyme, but I employed a simpler abcb scheme instead of the abba pattern of the original.

I have generally respected Pessoa’s apparently erratic use of uppercase letters: gods in one poem and Gods in another, or universe and Universe occurring in the same poem (“Salutation”). The date of a given poem may refer to its initial composition or to a later revision, with months or sometimes years separating the two. Conjectural dates, based on manuscript and other evidence, appear in brackets, with a question mark indicating that the conjecture is dicey. Poems have been ordered chronologically, as far as possible, except in the case of The Keeper of Sheep and Message, which the author structured according to other criteria, and in the case of Faust, for which very few dates exist.

 

Fernando Pessoa & Co.—Selected Poems, published by Grove Press in 1998, included poems that for the most part had never before appeared in a widely circulating translation into English. There was very little crossover between that volume and the Edwin Honig / Susan Brown Poems of Pessoa (1986). My objective in the present Selected was to avoid crossover with myself. Though this contains a considerably larger number of poems, it is not an enlargement on Fernando Pessoa & Co. In fact only four short poems have here been reprinted (with the gracious permission of Grove Press). As in that earlier work, many of the poems offered in this volume have not heretofore been translated into English, and some have only recently come to light in Portuguese. “Un Soir à Lima,” Pessoa’s moving and highly autobiographical swan song, remained unpublished in Portuguese until the year 2000, and the second and third of the “Uncollected Poems” of Caeiro (pp. 56-57), as well as a dozen or so of the shorter “orthonymic” poems, were first published only within the last five years.

The reader, in approaching the poems written directly in English, needs to make a slight leap. Pessoa’s English, as explained in the Introduction, was fluent but bookish, and his poetic models were Shelley and other English Romantics, or, in the case of his sonnets, Shakespeare.

This book owes much to Manuela Rocha for clarifying my understanding of certain passages in the Portuguese, and to Amanda Booth and Martin Earl, who both spent many hours reading my translations and making suggestions to improve the phrasing in English. Many other friends and acquaintances—too numerous to name—have encouraged and helped me in large and small, practical and “spiritual” ways. If you are one of them, please accept my deeply felt thanks.

R. Z.

IN LIEU OF AN AUTHOR’S PREFACE

Fernando Pessoa’s writings belong to two categories of works, which we may call orthonymic and heteronymic. We cannot call them autonymous and pseudonymous, for that’s not in fact what they are. Pseudonymous works are by the author in his own person, except in the name he signs; heteronymic works are by the author outside his own person.