F. Coelho: Probably Luís Furtado Coelho, who gave Pessoa lessons in “Swedish gymnastics” for several months in 1907. In a magazine article published in 1933, Pessoa reported that he was “a cadaver waiting to die” when he began the lessons, three times a week, but that “Furtado Coelho put me in such a state of transformation that today—I note modestly—I still exist, though with what advantage to European civilization I cannot judge.”
one that prompts: “one to strive with” in the original.
page 13
what I dream of: “that I dream” in the original.
in her either: “to her also” in the original.
page 14
[An Unsent Letter to Clifford Geerdts]: See the introduction to this section for an explanation of this letter. Geerdts was the other star pupil who, along with Pessoa, ranked at the top of the class at Durban High School. Though Geerdts was better in math and science, Pessoa had a higher overall rating, which would have entitled him to a full-paid scholarship to study at Oxford or Cambridge, but only students enrolled for the last four years at the high school were eligible. Pessoa had missed a year when his family traveled to Portugal in 1901–02, and so the scholarship went to Geerdts.
page 15
Two Prose Fragments: Both passages were published in Páginas Íntimas, the second [20/1–7] with many errors of transcription and without being attributed to Search, whose signature appears on the manuscript.
page 16
character, will lead to an: “character, lead to one” in the original.
“A Winter Day”: A long, fragmentary poem by Alexander Search.
Jean Seul projects: Including “France in 1950,” in this volume.
Charles Binet-Sanglé: Author of La folie de Jésus (The Madness of Jesus), whose thesis was that the “hallucinations” of Jesus, considered from a psychological point of view, are reasonable proof that he suffered from “religious paranoia.” The second volume of a two-volume edition of this work (Paris: 1908) is in Pessoa’s library. Both “The Mental Disorder of Jesus” and “The Portuguese Regicide and the Political Situation in Portugal” (alluded to earlier in the sentence that names Binet-Sangle) are listed among five writing projects on a brief “résumé” for Alexander Search [48C/2] drafted no more than a year before this passage. The Portuguese monarchy, already under fierce pressure in 1908, toppled in 1910.
page 17
Rule of Life: [28/43]. Probably dates from around 1910.
page 18
Pessoa wrote his only complete play (...) in 1913: But Pessoa indicated in a letter that his play was considerably revised before its publication in 1915, in the first issue of Orpheu (a magazine discussed in SENSATIONISM AND OTHER ISMS). Perhaps it could not have been said of the primitive version, which Pessoa did not preserve, that “the mature author is all contained here, in seed form.”
page 20
By “static drama” (...) onto reality: This explanation, which applies not only to The Mariner but also to the various “static dramas” that Pessoa never completed, was left by the author among his papers. The translation is based on a new reading of the manuscript [18/115] that varies considerably from the version published in Pádginas de Estética.
page 35
To Fernando Pessoa: Written in 1929 and published the same year, but with a fictitious date of composition, 1915, the same year The Mariner was published.
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THE MASTER AND HIS DISCIPLES: The opening quotation by Pessoa, written in English, continues: “I need all the concentration I can have for the preparation (...) of a literary creation in a, so to speak, fourth dimension of the mind.” The same manuscript [14B/5] contains a partial rough draft of a letter sent to Aleister Crowley (see note on p. 329) on January 6, 1930.
page 38
Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro: The first two passages were published in 1931, in the magazine Presença.
page 39
Ribatejo: An inland region just north of Lisbon and extending almost to Coimbra.
page 43
transpontine: This word, meaning “on the far side of the bridge,” is even rarer in Portuguese (transpontino/a) than in English. Perhaps Pessoa used it to mean “far-flung, esoteric.”
page 46
Auguste Villiers de I’Isle Adam (1839–89), a French writer, was regarded as a precursor by the Symbolists. The quoted sentence means: “The gods are those who never doubt.”
page 47
that Ricardo Reis aptly titled: In the original, Campos is complimenting Reis for the neologism employed in the title Poemas Inconjuntos, rendered here as Uncollected Poems but whose more exact meaning is “miscellaneous poems that don’t form a whole.”
page 49
“Opiary”: “Opiário,” published in 1915, in the first issue of Orpheu, and dedicated to Mário de Sá-Carneiro.
“Triumphal Ode”: “Ode Triunfal,” also published in the inaugural issue of Orpheu. This was the first Álvaro de Campos poem he wrote. See his letter of January 13, 1935, to Adolfo Casais Monteiro for an explanation of how Campos’s “pre-Caeiro” poems were written.
“Slanting Rain”: “Chuva Oblíqua,” a sequence of so-called Intersectionist poems, published in 1915 in the second issue of Orpheu. The last of the six poems can be found in Fernando Pessoa & Co. under the title “Oblique Rain.”
page 50
Translator’s Preface to the Poems of Alberto Caeiro: The first passage is from a handwritten text [14B/12] first published in Pessoa por Conhecer. The second one [21/89–90], typed, was published in Páginas Íntimas.
page 51
to be the thing that is: “to be the thing to be” in the original.
page 52
Or in other words: “This comes to this” in the original.
Cesário Verde (1855–86) was the most modern poet of his generation. His verses—full of vivid and concrete images, and often set in the streets of downtown Lisbon—had an even greater influence on Álvaro de Campos’s poetry.
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though: “but” in the original.
though the greater genius (mastership apart): “though, mastership apart, the greater genius” in the original.
(Ode II, ad finem): The reference is to “Triumphal Ode,” in which Campos sings of “ordinary, sordid people” whose “eight-year-old daughters (and I think this is sublime!)/Masturbate respectable-looking men in stairwells” (tr. R. Zenith, Literary Imagination, Spring 2000).
for it: “for the idea of that” in the original.
page 55
[On Álvaro de Campos]: The manuscript [14A/66–67] is hard to decipher. A somewhat different, less complete transcription was published in Pessoa por Conhecer.
“Naval Ode”: I.e., “Maritime Ode” (“Ode Marítima”), Campos’s (and Pessoa’s) longest poem.
page 56
“The pink ribbon (...) his suit”: The first line seems to be a shorthand allusion to three verses from “Time’s Passage” (fifth stanza from the end as published in Fernando Pessoa & Co.). The other two lines are a paraphrase of verses found in Campos’s unfinished “Martial Ode.” The three lines appear in Portuguese in the original text, which is otherwise written in English.
“Salutation to Walt Whitman”: One of Campos’s long “odes” from the 1910s. Part of it is published in Edwin Honig and Susan Brown’s Poems of Fernando Pessoa (New York: Ecco Press, 1986).
[On the Work of Ricardo Reis]: The translation is based on a reading of the manuscript [21/110] that differs, in the last paragraph, from the one published in Páginas Íntimas.
Page 57
“the god who was missing”: From the eighth poem in Caeiro’s The Keeper of Sheep.
page 58
SENSATIONISM AND OTHER ISMS: The two notebooks cited in the second paragraph of the introduction are catalogued as 144C and 144D2 in the archives. In the latter notebook Pessoa initially defined Paulismo as “the insincere cultivation of artificiality” but then wrote the word
“sincere” above “insincere,” which he did not cross out. The items to be included in Europa’s first two issues can be found on a table of contents typed by Pessoa [48G/32].
page 61
Preface to an Anthology of the Portuguese Sensationists: This English-language text was untitled and unsigned, according to the note that accompanied its first publication in 1952 (the whereabouts of the original manuscript are unknown), but one of the paragraphs edited out of the version published here indicates that it was a preface for an anthology of the Portuguese Sensationist writers it discusses. The editors of Páginas Íntimas attributed the preface to Álvaro de Campos, based on the first-person remarks toward the end. But Campos, according to his biography, returned for an extended visit to Portugal in early 1914, not in 1915 (which is when the prefacer says he arrived, the same year Orpheu was published), and the reference to Portugal’s landscape seems to be that of a foreigner rather than of someone who, like Campos, was born and raised in Portugal. Campos, moreover, never wrote more than brief notes in English, even though he was fluent in the language. The preface writer is doubtless Thomas Crosse, whose translation projects included the work of the Portuguese Sensationists, according to a note in the archives [143/5].
page 62
his static drama The Sailor: I.e., The Mariner.
Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) was a Belgian Symbolist playwright and poet whose dramatic work influenced Pessoa’s.
“Naval Ode”: I.e., “Maritime Ode.”
page 63
“Salutation to Walt Whitman,” in the third Orpheu: The third issue of Orpheu, though it never saw print (until sixty-seven years later, in 1984), was typeset in 1917, but without Campos’s “Salutation to Walt Whitman.” This means that Crosse’s preface, which mentions Sá-Carneiro’s suicide on April 26, 1916, was probably written later that year or in early 1917.
page 64
All Sensations are Good ...: The original Portuguese was published in Pessoa Inédito.
[Intersectionist] Manifesto: The original Portuguese was published in Pessoa Inédito. The word “Manifesto,” followed by a colon, appears at the top of the text, which seems to be notes toward an Intersectionist manifesto.
page 66
Sensationism: The original is a hastily penned sketch for an article that Pessoa planned to write for Orpheu. Less than half of it was published, with various errors of transcription, in Páginas Íntimas. The translation here is of the complete text, which takes up eight pages [20/116–119], the last two of which contain sentences that develop ideas presented earlier. Those sentences have been integrated at the appropriate points.
page 67
“criticism” fulfills its Danaidean role: At the behest of their father Danaus, all but one of the fifty Danaides murdered their bridegrooms and were condemned in Hades to pouring water into a bottomless vessel.
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only number of Portugal Futurista: Published in November of 1917, the single-issue magazine also contained poems by Fernando Pessoa (including “The Mummy,” translated in Fernando Pessoa & Co.) and Mário de Sá-Carneiro, poetry and prose by José de Almada-Negreiros, a previously unpublished poem of Apollinaire (in French), a Portuguese translation of Marinetti’s manifesto The Music Hall, and artwork by Santa Rita Pintor and Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso.
5th of December, 1917: Date of a coup d’état that replaced Portugal’s democratic government with a military dictatorship led by Sidonio Pais. Ineffectual as a head of state but endowed with charisma, Pais achieved quasi-legendary status after his assassination in December of 1918, and in 1920 Pessoa wrote and published a long poem titled “To the Memory of the President-King Sidónio Pais.” In that poem as well as in Pessoa’s larger program of “mystical nationalism,” the deceased leader served as an ideal symbol—a modern King Sebastiao. See the section PORTUGAL AND THE FIFTH EMPIRE.
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should be translated (...) since November 1917, it is due: “should be translated, and the fact that, though it has been in print since September (?) 1917, I only now translate it, is due” in the original.
and (all things well considered): “or even, all things well considered,” in the original.
Christism: Christianity. See the note on p. 333.
page 71
Campos was born in Lisbon on the 13th of October, 1890: In later texts, including his January 13, 1935, letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro (in this volume), Pessoa wrote that Campos was born in the Algarvian town of Tavira on October 15, 1890.
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Intersectionist manifesto in Europa (...) Sensationist manifesto in Orpheu: On the table of contents for Europa cited earlier in these Notes, the Ultimatum is attributed to Pessoa, who also referred to it in a letter dated October 4, 1914. In Pessoa’s personal notes it is named as one of two manifestos to be published in Orpheu [48D/5].
“The Futurist (. ..) cant make it our”: [88/8]. None of the early drafts of the Ultimatum has been published.
Jean Jaurès (1859–1914), an important leader in the French Socialist party, was assassinated by a zealous nationalist for opposing war with Germany.
Ernest Renan (1823–92) was a French philologist, critic, and historian.
Maurice Banès (1862–1923), a French nationalist politician and writer, reorganized the “Ligue des Patriotes” in 1914 and wrote numerous patriotic articles during the war.
Action: Refers to Action Franchise, a right-wing political movement whose views were propagated in a newspaper of the same name, founded in 1899.
Paul Bourget (1852–1935) was a French novelist, poet, and the author of Essays of Contemporary Psychology.
Majuba and Colenso: South African towns where the British were defeated by the Boers in (respectively) 1881 and 1899.
Empire Day: May 24, the birthday of Queen Victoria, formerly a holiday to commemorate the help England received from its colonies during the Boer War of 1899-1902. Now called Commonwealth Day.
Kilkenny cat: One of a pair of Irish cats fabled to have fought until only their tails remained.
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Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938) changed his last name from Rapagnetta. He married a duke’s daughter and had subsequent liaisons with a countess, a marchioness, and the actress Eleonora Duse.
Maurice Maeterlinck: See the note above, on p. 324.
Pierre Loti (1850–1923) was a novelist and member of the French Academy.
Edmond Rostand (1868–1918) wrote social dramas, including Cyrano de Bergerac. The tand-tand-tand mimics the sound of a drum.
Wilhelm II (1859–1941) was crowned kaiser of Germany in 1888. Aggressive and energetic, his absolutist form of leadership prompted Chancellor Bismarck to resign in 1890. He continued Bismarck’s program of unifying, modernizing, and militarizing Germany. His politics of nationalist expansion, founded on the notion of German superiority, was perhaps the single greatest cause of World War I.
Otto von Bismarck (1815–96) became chancellor of Germany when Wilhelm I was proclaimed kaiser, in 1871. He was the statesman who did most—by means of war, diplomacy, and effective political administration—to create a strong, unified, and industrialized Germany.
David Lloyd George (1863–1945), from Wales, was head of Britain’s Liberal Party and served as prime minister from 1916 to 1922.
Eleutherios Venizelos (1864–1936), Greek premier who supported the Allies in World War I, in opposition to King Constantine I, who backed the Central Powers.
Aristide Briand (1862–1932), French premier in World War I, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926.
Eduardo Dato Iradier (1856–1921), leader of the Spanish Conservative Party, was prime minister in 1914-18 and again in 1920–21.
Paolo Boselli (1838–1932) was the Italian prime minister in 1916–17.
page 74
Horatio Herbert Kitchener (1850–1916) was the British commander-in-chief in the Boer War and then in India. Appointed secretary of war in 1914, he brilliantly organized Britain’s army b
ut drowned on a ship sunk by German submarines while on his way to Russia for a diplomatic mission.
K-brand doorjamb: Seems to evoke Austria’s subservience to the German kaiser.
Von Belgium: Belgium, from 1914 to 1917, was ruled by the autocratic German general Friedrich Wilhelm Freiherr von Bissing.
sanbenitos: The sackcloth garments worn by condemned heretics at the autos-da-fe of the Spanish Inquisition.
fighting spirit buried in Morocco: Spain, granted a protectorate in Morocco in 1912, suffered heavy losses at the hands of the Riff tribesmen who continuously rose up in arms.
humiliated in Africa: The English Ultimatum of 1890 obliged Portugal to renounce its claims to a vast territory—covering parts of modern-day Zambia and Zimbabwe—that would have linked Angola to Mozambique. The title of Campos’s manifesto is probably meant as a riposte to the English Ultimatum.
Pedro Álvares Cabral (1467–C.1520) discovered Brazil in 1500 when he was attempting to round the southern tip of Africa.
page 74–5
Alfred Fouillée (1838–1912), a French philosopher, two of whose books were in Pessoa’s personal library: Esquisse psychologique des peuples européens and La philosophie de Platon: Théorie des idées et de I’amour.
The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa Page 36
