More than a diligent genius surrounded by his unfinished creations, Pessoa was a creator god standing at the center of his orbiting creatures, who were themselves creators, or subcreators, with Pessoa’s literary works circling them as satellites. It was a dynamic system, in which all the elements interacted, meaning that even the apparently finished works were in truth fragments, since they were only what they were (and still are) in relationship to the rest of the system. The only whole thing—Pessoa’s one perfect work—was the system in its totality.

Fernando Pessoa, English Writer

 

Pessoa’s original literary ambition was, naturally enough, to become a great English writer. All of his schooling as a child in South Africa was in English, his extracurricular readings were mostly in English, and his first poems, stories, and essays were all in English. In 1903, when he was just fifteen years old, Pessoa won the Queen Victoria Memorial Prize for the best English composition submitted by examinees (of which there were 899) seeking admission to the University of the Cape of Good Hope. It’s no wonder that Pessoa, after returning to Portugal in 1905, continued to write almost exclusively in English for three or four years. By 1912 Portuguese had overtaken English as his main language of written expression, and it was clear, from several articles he published on contemporary Portuguese poetry, that he was setting the stage for his own arrival. But his English poetical ambitions did not totter. He self-published slim collections of his English poetry in 1918 and 1921 and organized yet another book of verses, The Mad Fiddler, which he submitted to an English publisher in 1917. It was turned down, and the self-published volumes—which Pessoa sent to various British journals and newspapers—received guardedly favorable reviews. At that point Pessoa’s production of English poetry dropped off considerably (though he continued to write poems in English up until the week before he died), and he redirected his British publishing hopes to the realm of prose. In the 1930s he was writing various long essays directly in English, including Erostratus, and he felt confident that he would be able to publish “The Anarchist Banker” (1922) in an English version, for which he translated a few pages.

With few opportunities for him to speak the language, Pessoa’s English inevitably strayed from standard usage as he got older, sometimes lapsing into Portuguese syntactical patterns, but even as a student at Durban High School his English was not quite like everyone else’s. Pessoa had little social involvement with his classmates, and Portuguese was the language spoken at home, so that his excellent mastery of English derived mostly from the many books he read and studied. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the language of his English poetry tended toward the archaic (“Mr. Pessoa’s command of English is less remarkable than his knowledge of Elizabethan English,” commented a review of his 35 Sonnets (1918) in the Times Literary Supplement), and if his English prose often delighted in being humorous and colloquial, the humor was literary and the colloquial expressions came from Dickens, not from what Pessoa heard on the streets of Durban.

Though he readily admitted that his French was deficient, Pessoa seems not to have realized that his English was different from what an Englishman speaks. This was probably because Pessoa, who is reported to have spoken his second language with no accent, also spoke and wrote it with absolute fluency, in the most literal sense of the word. His English was spontaneous, it flowed without impediment, but it was his English—a bit stiffer, wordier, and more bookish than the native variety. This difference proved fatal when he applied his English to poetry, where the words themselves are the artistic point. But the words of prose are less self-referential, and here Pessoa’s English often served him quite well—occasionally crabbed sentences and infelicities rubbing shoulders with lapidary expressions that no native English writer could have cut with more grace and precision.

About This Edition

 

The universe of Pessoa’s prose is so vast and varied that no single volume could ever hope to represent it adequately, but this edition attempts to give at least a sense of how far it reaches, and by what diverse paths. The selections are drawn from the whole length of Pessoa’s writing life, beginning in his teens; from the three languages in which he wrote, namely Portuguese, English, and French; from the various genres that his prose entails—drama, fiction, essay, criticism, satire, manifesto, diary, epigram, letters, autobiography, and automatic writing; and from more than a dozen of his literary personas. Although I theoretically object to heavy editorial intervention, the nature of this edition, and of this author and his oeuvre, has led me down that road. Pessoa’s work is so fragmentary, and at the same time so interconnected, that any partial presentation—anything less than the whole universe—is liable to create wrong impressions. My introductions, by supplying background information, are meant to minimize that danger.

Works published by Pessoa are (with one exception) presented here in their entirety, and his letters are presented virtually entire; the occasional excluded paragraph usually deals with a specific personal or literary matter that would interest few readers. Most of the works not published in Pessoa’s lifetime are bunches of fragments, whose individual integrity—in the case of the Portuguese texts—I have endeavored to maintain. The pieces taken from The Book of Disquiet, for instance, are complete pieces; none has been abridged. A few fragments from other Portuguese works have been cut short, but not cut and spliced.

The writings in English, on the other hand, have been frequently pruned. Rather than “clean up” grammatically problematic passages through heavy editing, I have usually removed them. And Pessoa’s critical writings in English, which often run on at some length, have been freely excerpted. Pessoa’s English has been quietly edited in the following ways: the spelling has been Americanized, the punctuation has sometimes been altered, a few words have been transposed, erroneous pronouns have been replaced, and an occasional definite article has been added or dropped. All other changes to the English texts are recorded in the notes or else indicated by brackets (in the case of an added word or two).