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. In a passage dating from the 1930s (Text 130) Bernardo Soares, the book’s fictional author, called Lisbon the “crucial address” of “the main literary influences on my intellectual development,” which were none other than the common, everyday people whom the bookkeeper worked with. Had Pessoa written those words in his own name, they would have been an exaggeration, but the people who were part of the scenery in the Lisbon he inhabited—shopkeepers, restaurant waiters, streetcar operators, sellers of lottery tickets, fruit vendors, delivery boys, office workers, schoolchildren—are a striking presence in his literary work, partly because of the absence of more intimate kinds of social contact: romance, close friendships, family life. It seems, for the same reason, that a few of those almost anonymous people were a strong, if quiet, presence in Pessoa’s sentimental life. It was the case, probably, of the tobacco shop owner who inspired poems signed by Campos and by Pessoa himself. And it was surely the case of the barber who made cameo appearances in The Book of Disquiet and elsewhere. Among the family members and the literary people at the funeral on December 2, he was spotted—the barber—paying, or repaying, a kind of respect.
Fernando Pessoa, Prose Writer
“I prefer prose to poetry as an art form for two reasons, the first of which is purely personal: I have no choice, because I’m incapable of writing in verse.” To be able to make such a statement, Fernando Pessoa—the greatest Portuguese poet of the last four centuries—lent his typewriter to Bernardo Soares, a literary alter ego who wrote only prose. But what was the point of having Soares write, not just a simple statement of personal preference (or competence), but a five-paragraph eulogy for The Book of Disquiet (Text 227) that defended prose as the highest art form, greater than music or poetry? No point at all. It probably just reflected how Pessoa felt, in the persona of Bernardo Soares and even in his own person, on the 18th of October, 1931, the day he wrote it. Pessoa made his fame as a poet, but he embarked on literally hundreds of prose projects large and small: dozens of short stories, twenty or more plays, detective novels, philosophical treatises, sociological and psychological studies, books on Portuguese culture and history, a tour guide of Lisbon, pamphlets about sundry political and economic issues, astrological works, essays on religion, literary criticism, and more. Few of these ever arrived at or near completion, but as the years went by and Pessoa launched new projects, he did not abandon the old ones. The Book of Disquiet, which he worked on furiously from 1913 to 1919, yawed in the doldrums in the 1920s, to return in its fullest splendor in the thirties, though it proceeded, as it always had, without firm direction, never finding nor even seeking a port of arrival.
“What’s necessary is to sail, it’s not necessary to live!” shouted Pompey the Great to his frightened sailors after ordering them to weigh anchor in a heavy storm. Those words, reported by Plutarch, became Pessoa’s motto, which he expressed—like his own self—in multiple versions, including “It’s not necessary to live, only to feel” (The Book of Disquiet, Text 124) and “Living isn’t necessary; what’s necessary is to create” (in a random note). Pessoa’s world was almost all ocean, dotted by occasional islands of truth and its corollary, beauty, though he realized that those might after all be illusions, the reward of much sailing. There was also, as if it were a motive for the voyage, a not too insistent hope, or belief, in unknown lands that were perhaps worth discovering. But it was essentially a voyage of self-discovery, or self-invention (“To pretend is to know oneself”)—an existential circumnavigation that would not end until Pessoa did. In the last years of his life, that self-exploration became less “inventive” and more investigative, more urgently expository, as if Pessoa sensed that time was running out. He tried to get to the heart of the matter he called the soul, and prose—in his letters, in The Education of the Stoic, and especially in The Book of Disquiet— became a privileged vehicle. Which brings us to the second and real reason Bernardo Soares preferred prose to poetry:
In prose we speak freely. We can incorporate musical rhythms, and still think. We can incorporate poetic rhythms, and yet remain outside them. An occasional poetic rhythm won’t disturb prose, but an occasional prose rhythm makes poetry fall down.
Prose encompasses all art, in part because words contain the whole world, and in part because the untrammeled word contains every possibility for saying and thinking.
In Pessoa the untrammeled word did not necessarily probe more deeply than poetry, but it drew a closer, more naked picture of its subject. This was particularly true in the 1930s when, with no more youthful striving after literary effects, that word became truly, completely free.
Pessoa’s prose was even more fragmentary than his poetry, or more conspicuously so. His failure (except in Message and 35 Sonnets) to organize his poetry into neat and orderly books hardly affects our appreciation of the individual poems that would have gone into them, and the same holds true for many of the finished and even unfinished passages from The Book of Disquiet But the page of perfectly gauged dialogue, the exact explanation of a protagonist’s motives, or the paragraph that lays down an astonishingly clear argument, necessarily suffers without the rest of the play, the short story, or the essay for which it was written. Suffers, that is, in its ability to make an impact on the reader. Pessoa wanted to make such an impact, even if the only reader would be him, but he couldn’t stand to put the final period to a work that was less than perfect. Most writers put it there anyway, because life is short, but Pessoa’s destiny—or so he wrote in a letter breaking off with Ophelia Queiroz, his only paramour—belonged to “another Law” and served “Masters who do not relent.” He patiently endured under the weight of his written fragments, as if waiting for the Architect to reveal the plan.
In 1928 Pessoa invented what was probably his last variation on himself, the Baron of Teive, a proud perfectionist whose major frustration—the one that leads him to commit suicide—is precisely his inability to finish any of his literary works. In that same year, several countries north and east of Portugal, Walter Benjamin published One-Way Street, which contains a seeming homage to Pessoa qua Baron:
To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work throughout their lives. For only the more feeble and distracted take an inimitable pleasure in conclusions, feeling themselves thereby given back to life. For the genius each caesura, and the heavy blows of fate, fall like gentle sleep itself into his workshop labor. About it he draws a charmed circle of fragments.
Pessoa’s charmed circle was not, however, so gently static. 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) s
eeking 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). 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
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br /> 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.
The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa Page 2
