The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa

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-CARNEIRO

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.