A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe

by Fernando Pessoa

  1919 On January 19 a monarchy is proclaimed in Lisbon and Oporto by military juntas organized in the preceding months. The royalist forces, quickly subdued in the south, are defeated in the north one month later. Ricardo Reis, a supporter of the monarchy, supposedly emigrates to Brazil. Pessoa actively collaborates in Acção, a small, right-wing journal highly critical of the Republican government. In October his stepfather dies in Pretoria. In November Ophelia Queiroz, nineteen years old, is hired as a secretary in a firm where Pessoa sometimes works.

  1920 On March 1 Pessoa writes his first love letter to Ophelia Queiroz. Besides exchanging letters, they meet each other for walks and ride the streetcar together. He breaks off with her in a letter dated November 29. In late March Pessoa’s family—his mother and three grown children from her second marriage—arrives in Lisbon. His two half brothers soon leave for England, where they will study at the University of London, get married, and settle. Pessoa, his mother, and his half sister, Henriqueta, rent an apartment on the Rua Coelho da Rocha, 16, where Pessoa will reside until his death.

  1921 Pessoa founds a small company and publishing house, Olisipo, which publishes, in December, two books of his English poems, whose contents include “Epithalamium” (written in 1913) and a revised version of “Antinoüs.”

  1922 Olisipo republishes Canções (Songs), a book of poems by the openly homosexual António Botto (first published in 1920). In May Pessoa publishes, in the magazine Contemporânea , a dialectical satire titled “The Anarchist Banker.” In October he publishes, in the same magazine, eleven of the poems that will make up Mensagem (1934).

  1923 Olisipo publishes a booklet, Sodoma Divinizada (Sodom Deified), by Raul Leal. In response to a campaign by conservative students against the “literature of Sodom,” the government bans various books deemed immoral, including Sodoma Divinizada and António Botto’s Canções. Pessoa self-publishes several handbills—one in his own name and another signed by Álvaro de Campos—criticizing the students and defending Raul Leal. In July Pessoa’s sister gets married and takes their semi-invalid mother to live with her and her husband.

  1924 Founds the magazine Athena, whose first issue (October) features twenty odes of Ricardo Reis, previously unknown to the public.

  1925 The fourth and fifth (and last) issues of Athena present Alberto Caeiro to the public, with a total of thirty-nine poems. Pessoa’s mother dies in March, and in the fall his sister and brother-in-law move back to the Rua Coelho da Rocha. In November she gives birth to Manuela Nogueira, Pessoa’s only niece.

  1926 Pessoa’s translation of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is serialized in the magazine Illustração (January 1926-February 1927), though with no mention of the translator. Pessoa and his brother-in-law found and publish six issues of the Revista de Comércio e Contabilidade (Business and Accounting Magazine). A coup d’état in May establishes a military dictatorship.

  1927 The literary review Presença is founded in Coimbra. The young editors consider Pessoa, who is not especially well known, to be Portugal’s most significant living writer, and they regularly publish his work throughout the rest of his life. One of the editors, João Gaspar Simões, will publish the first biography of Pessoa, in 1950. Pessoa’s sister and her family move to Évora, where they will live for three years.

  1928 Pessoa publishes a booklet titled O Interregno (The Interregnum), which defends and justifies military dictatorship as a necessary “State of Transition” in Portugal, wracked by political instability and without (according to the booklet’s arguments) a “national ideal” or a tradition of strong public opinion to support a British-style, constitutional government. (In a bibliographical note dating from 1935, Pessoa will repudiate O Interregno.) António de Oliveira Salazar becomes the finance minister in April. In August Pessoa creates his last heteronym, the Baron of Teive, who, frustrated because of his inability to produce finished works, decides to commit suicide.

  1929 Publishes, for the first time since 1913, passages from The Book of Disquiet, now attributed to the “semiheteronym” Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper who lives and works in downtown Lisbon. (Pessoa will leave, at his death, more than five hundred passages of this work, many of which are scattered among his papers and notebooks. The first edition of The Book of Disquiet, compiled by scholars, will not be published until 1982.) In September Pessoa and Ophelia Queiroz rekindle their relationship, exchanging letters and occasionally seeing each other. On December 4 Pessoa writes Aleister Crowley’s publisher to correct the natal horoscope published in the occult master’s autobiographical Confessions. Crowley (1875-1947), also known as Master Therion, acknowledges the mistake and strikes up a correspondence with Pessoa.

  1930 Writes his last letter to Ophelia Queiroz on January 11. In September Aleister Crowley comes to Lisbon with a girlfriend, who quarrels with him after several weeks and abruptly leaves the country. Crowley, abetted by Pessoa, stages a fake suicide that receives national and international news coverage, with Pessoa being interviewed and providing false testimony. Pessoa plans and partly writes, in English, a detective novel based on the pseudo-suicide.

  1931 Luís Miguel Rosa Dias, Pessoa’s only nephew, is born to his half sister Henriqueta.

  1932 Henriqueta and her family begin to spend long periods at a house in Estoril, where Pessoa often visits. On July 5 Salazar is appointed prime minister and becomes, in practice, a dictator.

  1933 A new constitution marks the inception of Salazar’s so-called Estado Novo (New State).

  1934 Publishes, in the fall, Mensagem (Message), the only book of his Portuguese poetry to see print in his lifetime. The book is awarded a prize by the National Office of Propaganda.

  1935 Publishes, on February 4, an impassioned article against a proposed law that would ban Freemasonry and other “secret societies.” (The National Assembly unanimously ratifies the law in April.) In the ceremony where Pessoa’s and another poetry prize are awarded, on February 21, Salazar’s speech informs writers that their creative and intellectual productions should not only respect “certain limitations” but also obey “certain guidelines” dictated by the Estado Novo’s “moral and patriotic principles.” Pessoa, who did not attend the ceremony but read the speech in the newspaper, is outraged and takes to writing anti-fascist poems. The poetry of his last year also reflects, at the personal level, an increasingly felt solitude. On November 29, beset by fever and strong abdominal pains, Pessoa is taken to the French hospital of Lisbon. There he writes, in English, his last words: “I know not what tomorrow will bring.” Tomorrow brings death, at around 8 p.m. On December 2 he is buried in Lisbon at the cemetery of Prazeres, where one of the survivors of the Orpheu group delivers a brief address to a small crowd.

  Notes on the Selection, Editing, and Translation

  To publish Pessoa involves hard decisions, and a certain betrayal of the original. I don’t mean the betrayal that comes from the incapacity of one language to replicate another—a problem faced by all translations—but the betrayal deriving from decisions the editor or translator is forced to make, since Pessoa did not. The majority of Pessoa’s unpublished writings (and he published relatively little) was left in an unfinished state, which means that 1) they were not fully fleshed out, or 2) they were structurally complete but dotted with blank spaces for words or phrases the author meant to fill in later but never did, or 3) they were marked up with a number of alternate phrasings—in the margins or between the lines—for a final revision that wasn’t carried out. Pessoa, an incontinent writer, was too busy turning out new poems and prose pieces to dedicate a great amount of time to revising and polishing. He did revise and polish, but he had difficulty arriving at finished products that satisfied him.

  The rough and fragmentary nature of Pessoa’s work occurred by default; it was not an aesthetic he cultivated. 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. They proceed from a full-fledged individual created by him, like the lines spoken by a character in a drama he might write.

  The heteronymic works of Fernando Pessoa have been produced by (so far) three people’s names—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. These individuals should be considered distinct from their author. Each one forms a kind of drama, and all of them together form another drama. Alberto Caeiro, deeming himself born in 1889 and dying in 1915, wrote poems with a definite orientation. The other two were his disciples, each descending (as disciples) from a different aspect of that orientation. Ricardo Reis, who considers himself born in 1887, isolated and stylized the intellectual and pagan aspect of Caeiro’s work. Álvaro de Campos, born in 1890, isolated the work’s (so to speak) emotive side, which he designated as “sensationist” and which—in combination with other, lesser influences, most notably that of Walt Whitman—gave rise to various compositions. These are generally of a scandalous and irritating nature, particularly for Fernando Pessoa, who in any case has no choice but to write and publish them, however much he disagrees with them. The works of these three poets form, as I’ve said, a dramatic ensemble, and the intellectual interaction of their personalities as well as their actual personal relationshipshave been duly studied. All of this will go into biographies to be accompanied, when published, by astrological charts and perhaps photographs. It’s a drama divided into people instead of into acts.

  (If these three individuals are more or less real than Fernando Pessoa himself is a metaphysical problem that the latter—not privy to the secret of the Gods and therefore ignorant of what reality is—will never be able to solve.)

  (FROM A “BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY” DRAWN UP BY PESSOA AND PUBLISHED IN 1928)

  A few more notes on this subject. . . . I see before me, in the colorless but real space of dreams, the faces and gestures of Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos. I gave them their ages and fashioned their lives. Ricardo Reis was born in 1887 (I don’t remember the month and day, but I have them somewhere) in Oporto. He’s a doctor and presently lives in Brazil. Alberto Caeiro was born in 1889 and died in 1915. He was born in Lisbon but spent most of his life in the country. He had no profession and practically no schooling. Álvaro de Campos was born in Tavira, on October 15, 1890. . . . Campos, as you know, is a naval engineer (he studied in Glasgow) but is currently living in Lisbon and not working. Caeiro was of medium height, and although his health was indeed fragile (he died of tuberculosis), he seemed less frail than he was. Ricardo Reis is a wee bit shorter, stronger, but lean. Álvaro de Campos is tall (5 ft. 9 in., an inch taller than me), slim, and a bit prone to stoop. All are clean-shaven—Caeiro fair, with a pale complexion and blue ey
es; Reis somewhat dark-skinned; Campos neither pale nor dark, vaguely corresponding to the Portuguese Jewish type, but with smooth hair that’s usually parted on one side, and a monocle. Caeiro, as I’ve said, had almost no education—just primary school. His mother and father died when he was young, and he stayed on at home, living off a small income from family properties. He lived with an elderly great-aunt. Ricardo Reis, educated in a Jesuit high school, is, as I’ve mentioned, a physician; he has been living in Brazil since 1919, having gone into voluntary exile becauseof his monarchist sympathies. He is a formally trained Latinist, and a self-taught semi-Hellenist. Álvaro de Campos, after a normal high school education, was sent to Scotland to study engineering, first mechanical and then naval. During some holidays he made a voyage to the Orient, which gave rise to his poem “Opiary.” An uncle who was a priest from the Beira region taught him Latin.

  How do I write in the names of these three? Caeiro, through sheer and unexpected inspiration, without knowing or even suspecting that I’m going to write in his name. Ricardo Reis, after an abstract meditation that suddenly takes concrete shape in an ode. Campos, when I feel a sudden impulse to write and don’t know what.

  (FROM A LETTER DATED 13 JANUARY 1935)

  ALBERTO CAEIRO

  I’m not a materialist or a deist or anything else. I’m a man who one day opened the window and discovered this crucial thing: Nature exists. I saw that the trees, the rivers and the stones are things that truly exist. No one had ever thought about this.

  I don’t pretend to be anything more than the greatest poet in the world. I made the greatest discovery worth making, next to which all other discoveries are games of stupid children. I noticed the Universe. The Greeks, with all their visual acuity, didn’t do as much.