“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.

In 1920 Pessoa’s mother, once more a widow, also returned from South Africa to Lisbon, accompanied by three grown children from her second marriage. Pessoa’s half brothers soon emigrated to England, and Pessoa thought to do the same toward the end of his life, though probably not very seriously. Since stepping off the Herzog, the ship that had brought him back to Lisbon in 1905, Pessoa had never strayed far from his native city, which became a more frequent reference in his writing as he got older, especially in The Book of Disquiet.