The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (3 page)

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.

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.

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

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

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.