Bracketed words in my translations from Portuguese and French are editorial proposals for blank spaces left by the author in the original.

The selections have been placed in roughly chronological order, conditioned by thematic considerations. The major displacements are Álvaro de Campos’s Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro, which dates from around 1930; Professor Jones’s “Essay on Poetry,” whose initial drafts were written in South Africa, before 1905; and Jean Seul’s “France in 1950,” which was conceived in 1907 or 1908. Most of Pessoa’s literary criticism is difficult to date, but parts of “Concerning Oscar Wilde” were surely written in the early 1910s. One of Pessoa’s notes suggests that his writings on American millionaires date from around 1915.

The bibliography contains a complete list of the published Portuguese sources for the translated selections; in cases where there may be doubt, the notes specify which title from the bibliography contains the source text for a given selection. All selections written by Pessoa in English were transcribed directly from the original manuscripts; instances of previous publication are noted. The archival reference numbers for all previously unpublished manuscripts and for all newly transcribed ones are recorded in the notes, which also elucidate historical, biographical, and cultural references. The frequent alternate wordings that Pessoa jotted in the margins of his manuscripts have not been recorded except in one or two instances.

This edition would never have been possible without the pioneering work of Teresa Rita Lopes. Her various books have made available several hundred previously unpublished poems and prose pieces by Pessoa. Her Pessoa por Conhecer, in particular, mapped out vast areas of the Pessoa archives that had been all but unknown.

Symbols Used in the Text

...... place where the author broke off a sentence or left blank space for one or more words

[?] conjectural reading of the author’s handwriting

[...] illegible word or phrase

[ ] word(s) added by editor

(...) omitted text within a paragraph

... one or more omitted paragraphs (the three dots, in this case, occupy a separate line)

* indicates an endnote

Thanks ...

 

to Teresa Rita Lopes for all her distinguished work in the Pessoa archives and for her personal help and encouragement;
to Luísa Medeiros and especially Manuela Parreira da Silva for their help in deciphering;
to José Blanco for his help locating and supplying source materials;
to Manuela Correia Lopes, Manuela Neves, and Manuela Rocha for their help interpreting;
to Anna Klobucka, Carlo Vinti, Didier Povéda, and Oliver Marhall for their research assistance;
to Martin Earl and Amy Hundley for their help in making selections and reviewing the essay matter.

Richard Zenith

 

Lisbon
December 2000

The Selected Prose of FERNANDO PESSOA

 

ASPECTS

 

Pessoa probably wrote this preface, which would have appeared in the first volume of his complete heteronymic works, in the early or mid ig2os. In fact, Pessoa, as was so often the case, left several pieces for the preface—two of them typed, one handwritten—without articulating them into a final version. The handwritten fragment (not published here) explains that the heteronyms embody different “aspects,” or sides, of a reality whose existence is uncertain. For more details about the heteronyms and their origins, see “Preface to Fictions of the Interlude,” Thomas Crosse’s “Translator’s Preface to the Poems of Alberto Caeiro,” Alvaro de Campos’s Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro, and most especially Pessoa’s letter of January 13, 1935, to Adolfo Casais Monteiro.

The Complete Work is essentially dramatic, though it takes different forms—prose passages in this first volume, poems and philosophies in other volumes. It’s the product of the temperament I’ve been blessed or cursed with—I’m not sure which. All I know is that the author of these lines (I’m not sure if also of these books) has never had just one personality, and has never thought or felt except dramatically—that is, through invented persons, or personalities, who are more capable than he of feeling what’s to be felt.

There are authors who write plays and novels, and they often endow the characters of their plays and novels with feelings and ideas that they insist are not their own. Here the substance is the same, though the form is different.

Each of the more enduring personalities, lived by the author within himself, was given an expressive nature and made the author of one or more books whose ideas, emotions, and literary art have no relationship to the real author (or perhaps only apparent author, since we don’t know what reality is) except insofar as he served, when he wrote them, as the medium of the characters he created.

Neither this work nor those to follow have anything to do with the man who writes them. He doesn’t agree or disagree with what’s in them. He writes as if he were being dictated to. And as if the person dictating were a friend (and for that reason could freely ask him to write down what he dictates), the writer finds the dictation interesting, perhaps just out of friendship.

The human author of these books has no personality of his own. Whenever he feels a personality well up inside, he quickly realizes that this new being, though similar, is distinct from him—an intellectual son, perhaps, with inherited characteristics, but also with differences that make him someone else.

That this quality in the writer is a manifestation of hysteria, or of the so-called split personality, is neither denied nor affirmed by the author of these books. As the helpless slave of his multiplied self, it would be useless for him to agree with one or the other theory about the written results of that multiplication.

It’s not surprising that this way of making art seems strange; what’s surprising is that there are things that don’t seem strange.

Some of the author’s current theories were inspired by one or another of these personalities that consubstantially passed—for a moment, for a day, or for a longer period—through his own personality, assuming he has one.

The author of these books cannot affirm that all these different and well-defined personalities who have incorporeally passed through his soul don’t exist, for he does not know what it means to exist, nor whether Hamlet or Shakespeare is more real, or truly real.

So far the projected books include: this first volume, The Book of Disquiet, written by a man who called himself Vicente Guedes;* then The Keeper of Sheep, along with other poems and fragments by Alberto Caeiro (deceased, like Guedes, and from the same cause),* who was born near Lisbon in 1889 and died where he was born in 1915. If you tell me it’s absurd to speak that way about someone who never existed, I’ll answer that I also have no proof that Lisbon ever existed, or I who am writing, or anything at all.

This Alberto Caeiro had two disciples and a philosophical follower. The two disciples, Ricardo Reis and Alvaro de Campos, took different paths: the former intensified the paganism discovered by Caeiro and made it artistically orthodox; the latter, basing himself on another part of Caeiro’s work, developed an entirely different system, founded exclusively on sensations. The philosophical follower, António Mora (the names are as inevitable and as independent from me as the personalities), has one or two books to write in which he will conclusively prove the metaphysical and practical truth of paganism. A second philosopher of this pagan school, whose name has still not appeared to my inner sight or hearing, will write an apology for paganism based on entirely different arguments.

Perhaps other individuals with this same, genuine kind of reality will appear in the future, or perhaps not, but they will always be welcome to my inner life, where they live better with me than I’m able to live with outer reality. Needless to say, I agree with certain parts of their theories, and disagree with other parts. But that’s quite beside the point. If they write beautiful things, those things are beautiful, regardless of any and all metaphysical speculations about who “really” wrote them. If in their philosophies they say true things—supposing there can be truth in a world where nothing exists—those things are true regardless of the intention or “reality” of whoever said them.

Having made myself into what I am—at worst a lunatic with grandiose dreams, at best not just a writer but an entire literature—I may be contributing not only to my own amusement (which would already be good enough for me) but to the enrichment of the universe, for when someone dies and leaves behind one beautiful verse, he leaves the earth and heavens that much richer, and the reason for stars and people that much more emotionally mysterious.

In view of the current dearth of literature, what can a man of genius do but convert himself into a literature? Given the dearth of people he can get along with, what can a man of sensibility do but invent his own friends, or at least his intellectual companions?

I thought at first of publishing these works anonymously, with no mention of myself, and to establish something like a Portuguese neopaganism in which various authors—all of them different—would collaborate and make the movement grow.