PORTUGUESE STUDIES

Volume 24 Number 22008

Pessoa: The Future of the Arcas

Founding Editor:Helder Macedo

Guest Editors:Jerónimo Pizarro

Steffen Dix

Editors: Francisco Bethencourt

Juliet PerkinsDavid Treece

AbdoolKarim Vakil

Editorial Assistant:Richard Correll

Production Editor:Graham Nelson

Published byMANEY PUBLISHING

for theMODERN HUMANITIES RESEARCH ASSOCIATION

issn 0267–5315

© 2008 the modern humanities research association

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Pessoa: The Future of the ArcAs

contentspage

Preface 5

Introduction 6Jerónimo Pizarro & Steffen Dix, guest editors

Fernando Pessoa’s Critical and Editorial Fortune in English: A Selective Chronological Overview 13José Blanco

Shakespeare, the ‘Missing All’ 33George Monteiro

Fernando Pessoa and Antero de Quental (with Shakespeare in between) 51Onésimo T. Almeida

Fernando Pessoa as a Writing-reader: Some Justifications for a Complete Digital Edition of his Marginalia 69Patricio Ferrari

Before Alexander Search: A Report on a Notebook 115João Dionísio

The Disquiet of Archaeology: Fernando Pessoa’s Detective Writings 128Maria de Lurdes Sampaio

Salazar and the New State in the Writings of Fernando Pessoa 168José Barreto

Recent translations published with the support of the Portuguese Institute for Books and Libraries 215

Abstracts 217

PREFACE

The critical fortune of Fernando Pessoa and Pessoan Studies in the English language, as José Blanco’s comprehensive synthesis in this issue documents, is far from the straightforward story of a genius discovered and celebrated. It draws, as do all literary phenomena, upon worldly social, political and institutional histories and investments in the making and meaning by Pessoa across a range of disciplines, cultural genres and spaces, on translations, research and careering, on performance, marketing and sheer pleasure, on subsidies and policies, serendipity and design; between and betwixt them, the internationalization of Pessoa and Portuguese and Lusophone studies, on the one hand, and the geopolitical re-definitions of literary studies, canon and curricula, on the other. Portuguese Studies is an illustration and a part of this story. Since its first issue in 1985, and along the years, its pages have featured an important translation of ‘The Anarchist Banker’ (vol. 7), as well as an article on the Anarchist Banker as the consummate Neo-Liberal (22: 2); contributions to scholarship on Anglophone reception, on Roy Campbell’s Fernando Pessoa manuscript (10), to comparative literature studies, with articles on Pessoa and Wordsworth (5) and Yates (19), Pessoa, Germany and Empire (21: 1), Pessoa’s reception of Nietzsche in António Mora (23: 1), or the Absurd in Beckett and Pessoa’s Faust (24: 1); articles on Álvaro de Campos (1), and Camilo and Campos (7); and studies of the 35 Sonnets (15) and of Mensagem (9).

With the present issue — to all intents and purposes a book-length volume, reviewing and contributing to the state of the Art on Pessoan studies through a reflection on the present and future research on his literary estate — the journal, in its first fully guest-edited volume, thus marks the 120th anniversary of the birth of Fernando Pessoa. For this, we would like to thank Jerónimo Pizarro and Steffen Dix for their timely and felicitous proposal, the Câmara Municipal de Póvoa do Varzim, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Instituto Camões and the Instituto de Ciências Sociais for the generous additional subsidies which have made publication of this extended special issue possible. Last but not least, we would like to record a particular and emphatic word of thanks to Graham Nelson, the journal’s Production Editor, and Richard Correll, our Editorial Assistant, for bringing this truly collaborative issue to press.

The Editors

INTRODUCTION

Like many other modern writers, such as Goethe and Flaubert, Fernando Pessoa was an authentic ‘keeper of papers’.1 Whoever has opened his arcas [trunks] and gone through his espólio [literary estate] has been struck by the fact that anything that could be written on was used and kept, from his childhood to his death: napkins, business cards, bits of posters, book covers, envelopes, notebooks and calendar pages, not to mention writing paper (headed or not) from the offices where he worked, and from the cafés where he used to write or meet his friends. One of his well-known aphorisms (and one of the few imperatives of his work) can be found on a tiny piece of paper: ‘Sê plural como o universo!’ (BNP / E3, 20-68r)2 [‘Be plural like the universe!’]. Hardly a day went by without Pessoa writing a poem, a prose passage, the beginning of a translation or a short reading note; almost all of these were neatly folded into his pocket and then put in the trunks — most likely as a silent pledge to posterity. Over the years at least two trunks were filled with papers. They were like a labyrinth of overlapping papers, whose investigation began in the late 1930s when Luís de Montalvor and other poets, editors, literary critics and friends associated with the magazine presença (without a capital P) initiated the posthumous publication of Pessoa’s writings — a task that is far from concluded to this day. In view of the vast quantity of these fragments, and their open-ended character, this editorial adventure remains as stimulating now as it was then. Pessoa’s restless need to write, his incessant preoccupation with gathering his autographs, his elaborate but slow plans to edit, and a hesitation to publish, all account for the impressive number of papers that exist: currently they are over 30,000. For, to the 27,000 or so documents kept in Portugal’s National Library we must add those still with Pessoa’s heirs (about 10%), the few in the Casa Fernando Pessoa [House of Fernando Pessoa], and those in literary collections and with some anonymous and silent individuals (about 2%). All these papers, written over the course of the last thirty-five years of Pessoa’s life (he died in 1935), are slowly coming into the public domain.

1 ‘O Guardador de Papéis’ was the title of a recent cycle of conferences (Casa Fernando Pessoa, 4 June – 2 July 2008). 2 In full, ‘Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Espólio n.º 3, cota [classification] 20–68 rosto [recto]’. First published in Fernando Pessoa, Páginas Íntimas e de Auto-Interpretação, ed. by Georg Rudolf Lind and Jacinto do Prado Coelho (Lisbon: Ática, 1966), p. 94.

Portuguese Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2, 2008© Modern Humanities Research Association

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In all honesty we cannot claim to know them well enough, and therefore we cannot yet fully define and anthologize the ‘essential’ Pessoa. However we can make a patient contribution to a better knowledge of the author and thus refine his posthumous image. One might say that his editorial future remains almost as open as ever.

This special issue of Portuguese Studies has been conceived mainly to pay tribute to Pessoa in the hundred and twentieth anniversary of his birth (1888–2008) and to reflect upon the destiny of his literary estate. If a relatively short time ago we could still speak of ‘Pessoa’s trunk’3 in referring to all of his preserved written output, today we need at least to adopt the plural, ‘trunks’, and thus say farewell to a famous commonplace. Why? In part, simply because the author’s known papers would no longer fit in just one such container,4 and in part because these documents are to be found in more than one particular place. The Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal (BNP) [Portugal’s National Library] holds most of them and it has recently acquired a new notebook,5 but its archives still lack papers that are in private collections, museums and other archives, not to mention books from Pessoa’s personal library, which contain abundant and valuable marginalia. To accept that the Pessoan collection is actively ‘expanding’ — to quote the literary critic António Guerreiro6 — is to acknowledge that ‘Pessoa’s trunk’ has always been something of a metonymic convenience. Undoubtedly, one would ideally wish all of Pessoa’s autographs to be in one place — indeed, to adapt one of Jorge Luis Borges’ well-known phrases, we could say that ‘paradise’ for a Pessoa scholar would be one single place where all his hand-written or typed texts, on loose pages or in books, could be kept. But this is a utopian wish, since several individuals and archives have in their possession ‘portions’ of the contents, and of the writer’s personal library. Furthermore, a great many of Pessoa’s autographs are scattered; some of the books that comprised his personal library have been lost; and several photographs have recently been auctioned. The risk of these documents being further dispersed is even more obvious today. On the day that one of Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s notebooks was auctioned,7 Luís Miguel Queirós, a journalist and critic on Público, wrote that:

3 ‘Pessoas Truhe: 70 Jahre’ [‘Pessoa’s Trunk: 70 years’] was the title of another group of papers, given at the 6th German Lusitanist Congress (University of Leipzig, 15–18 September 2005). 4 In a text entitled ‘Plan of Life’, from c.1919, Pessoa projected a division of his ‘big box’, when faced with an imminent trip to England: ‘Substitute, in respect to order of papers, my big box by smaller boxes, containing the papers in order of their importance. The big box and the other one at A[ntonio] S[ilvano]’s contain the mere newspapers and reviews I keep’ (BNP / E3, 20–14r). Cf. Pessoa, Páginas Íntimas e de Auto-Interpretação, p. 24. 5 See João Dionísio’s article in this number. 6 António Guerreiro, ‘Um espólio em expansão’, Expresso, 1846, 15 March 2008, Actual, pp. 4–7. 7 This notebook was also acquired by the BNP.

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Milhares de páginas escritas por Fernando Pessoa, incluindo correspondência, poesia inédita e uma grande variedade de outros textos, conservam-se ainda na posse de familiares do poeta. Se o Estado não avançar para a compra deste espólio, é muito provável que alguns dos documentos comecem em breve a ser colocados no mercado.8

[Thousands of pages written by Fernando Pessoa, including corres p ondence, unpublished poetry and a great variety of other texts, are still in the possession of the poet’s relatives. If the State doesn’t take it upon itself to purchase this collection, it is highly likely that some of the documents will soon be put on the market.]

The family has in its possession another collection, which Queirós calls ‘Pessoa’s other trunk’. It is indeed a smaller trunk, of papers that remained with the family after the 27,000 or so documents from the main trunk were sold to the Portuguese State, in 1979. Manuela Nogueira, Pessoa’s niece, has even said that she does not rule out disposing of the first (and larger) trunk kept in her house in Estoril — and we can conjecture that this could also apply to the smaller one. And she is well within her rights. In this context, one can but speculate on the future of the trunks, not only the future of the two physical objects, but also of the papers they contained. Will more books, journals, and photographs be auctioned, and some papers, perhaps? Will the unpublished autographs one day be transcribed, or will we continue to have that feeling that it is always the same texts that are being quoted? Will we unveil dimensions and facets of the writer so far unknown to us or not? Will we be more concerned with ‘embodying Pessoa’ or with the body of the trunks themselves? What new publishing ventures can we foresee?

It is important to stress that the Pessoan literary estate is still far from being critically appraised in its totality, due to the many materials unpublished; it still promises many editorial surprises, as well as to the growing need to revise, in the light of the autographs, the published texts. Hence our need to renew the appeal, made by José Augusto Seabra in 1993, for ‘uma actualização editorial permanente’9 [‘a continuous editorial updating’]. Since most of Pessoa’s writings were unpublished at the time of his death, his ‘work’ occupies a special place within the literary sphere, demanding innovative ways of reading, interpreting and editing. Given that his legacy is a sort of ‘work-in-progress’ (as is our work, also), it can only be read, interpreted and edited as such, as ‘partes sem um todo’ [‘parts without a whole’] (Caeiro), which find themselves within an ongoing process of refoundation. Epistemologically speaking, it could be said that Pessoa’s work does not exist as a steady homogeneous body

8 Luís Miguel Queirós, ‘A outra arca de Pessoa’, Público, 6460, 6 December 2007, P2, pp. 4–7. 9 See the introduction, in Fernando Pessoa, Mensagem, ed. by José Augusto Seabra (Madrid: ALLCA XX, 1993), p. xxvi.

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of texts, but as a heterogeneous and almost infinite reality. Fernando Pessoa’s literary production is not an object in the past, but a corpus in permanent renewal, constantly being updated. Furthermore, many of Pessoa’s ‘books’ allow the reader to become fascinated by his ability to imagine or to construct the book for himself, and consequently his own reading of it. Appealing to yet another of Pessoa’s rare imperatives: ‘Seja eu leitura variada | Para mim mesmo!’ (BNP / E3, 120–42r)10 [‘May I be varied reading | For my own self!’], we can immediately grasp that it would be difficult to impose on Pessoa’s corpus a univocal reading.

Part of the fascination of the Pessoan archives lies in the coexistence of multiple documents attributed to different characters with fictitious biographies: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, Bernardo Soares, António Mora, Alexander Search, Jean Seul de Méluret, among others. It is still possible to ask who was literally ‘more real’, Fernando Pessoa or his ‘psychic companions’. In Un baule pieno di gente, [A Trunk Full of People] Antonio Tabucchi has cogently suggested that if the trunks had only been found some centuries after his death, it might not have been possible to say whether or not a certain retired naval engineer with a slight addiction to drugs and by chance a friend of Fernando Pessoa had actually existed at the beginning of the twentieth century in Lisbon.11

Let us return to 2008 and the different celebrations taking place to pay tribute to Pessoa, such as exhibitions, conferences, debates, artistic productions and publications, including this issue of Portuguese Studies. The Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, King’s College London, is also organizing the symposium ‘Fernando Pessoa: Influences, Dialogues, Responses’ (11–12 December 2008). It is important to point out that there has been a fruitful coincidence between this and other projects carried out by the Department, and our effort to internationalize Pessoan studies. Hence, the desire to increase the number of critical articles and Pessoan texts (with translations) available to the English-speaking public. As José Blanco claims in the first article of this issue, Pessoa, ‘being bilingual’, ‘always considered himself a poet in the English tradition [...] It is therefore difficult to explain why his critical and editorial fortune in English-speaking countries has been so slow and intermittent when in so many European countries he has been quickly recognized as a major literary creator of the twentieth century’. In fact, for Harold Bloom and many other critics, Pessoa already merits a place in the ‘Western

10 Verses from a Portuguese poem dated 26 August 1930. See Poemas de Fernando Pessoa 1921–1930, ed. by Ivo Castro, Edição Crítica, Vol. i, Tomo iii (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional–Casa da Moeda, 2001), p. 208. 11 Tabucchi talks about the possibility of an ‘época de Péricles’ [‘Periclean age’] at the beginning of the twentieth century in Lisbon, inhabited by various outstanding poets with different styles. See Antonio Tabucchi, Un baule pieno di gente: Scritti su Fernando Pessoa (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1990), p. 13.

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canon’, but this canonization has not resulted in a homogenous critical appreciation or a generalized public interest.

This issue of Portuguese Studies is pioneering in that it is the first special issue of a journal solely dedicated to Fernando Pessoa in the UK.12 Thus it responds to José Blanco’s implicit appeal to remedy the lack of critical and editorial visibility of Pessoa’s work in English-speaking countries, and acknowledges that it is our responsibility to do so. To a certain extent all the articles in this issue contain an implicit appeal, which can be deduced from their purpose:

• José Blanco’s, describing Pessoa’s fortune in the English language, both in translation and criticism;

• George Monteiro’s, studying the relationship between Pessoa and Shakespeare, ‘the missing All’ in Pessoan studies;

• Onésimo T. Almeida’s, looking into the relationships and affinities between Pessoa and Antero de Quental, ‘with Shakespeare in between’;

• Patricio Ferrari’s, giving some reasons for a complete digital edition of Pessoa’s marginalia, bearing in mind the modern tradition of studying marginalia that began with the works of Coleridge;

• João Dionísio’s, analysing the genesis of the poetic production of Alexander Search, which partly coincides with the genesis of Charles Robert Anon;

• Lurdes Sampaio’s, reflecting on Pessoa’s detective stories and his fascination with detective fiction — a fascination that we share, in relation to both the person and his work;

• José Barreto’s, compiling Pessoa’s writings on politics and religion, with parti cular reference to Salazar and the New State, over the last six years of his life (1930–35).

Out of these seven, six have important documents annexed, so as to draw the reader closer to the contents of the Pessoan trunks and to contribute to their dissemination. Patricio Ferrari’s Appendix offers an indispensable list of books and journals still in the possession of Pessoa’s family (some of them containing relevant marginalia), and of those that have been lost. The annexed texts that accompany the various articles in this issue confirm the urgent need for a thorough review of previously edited texts and a renewed exploration of the trunks. To give the reader some examples of areas that still deserve more critical attention, we would mention particularly those catalogued by Pessoa as ‘literary appreciations’, ‘philosophy’, ‘psychology’, ‘religion’, ‘sociology’, ‘astrology’, or the more open-ended ones, such as ‘brief productions’ and ‘prose’.

12 In the USA there appeared, in the Fall of 1996, no. 9 of the Indiana Journal of Hispanic Literatures, dedicated to Fernando Pessoa, and, in the Fall of 1999, no. 3 of Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, dedicated to Alberto Caeiro (entitled, ‘Pessoa’s Alberto Caeiro’).

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In respect of the articles in this special volume, there are two issues to address: one more philological, one more philosophical. The former concerns the future of the trunks, and there is no doubt that their fate is uncertain, promising but open-ended. We must still insist upon a continuous revision of Pessoa’s trunks, so that it is possible to carry out a thorough and long-standing study of his work. This revision will certainly throw up some surprises, and will confirm that only through an ongoing effort to edit Pessoa will it be possible to redefine him. This special issue of Portuguese Studies can contribute to the unravelling of an essentially multifarious universe. It is only by carrying out laborious and intensive work with Pessoa’s autographs (including the marginalia) that we will be able to reconstruct more dimensions and facets of a poet who constantly redefined himself through exploring different styles. The latter issue can only briefly be mentioned, but will certainly play an important role in the future. Fernando Pessoa forces a constant redefinition of the nature of his literary work, which is unique and emblematic for European Modernism. In one of Pessoa’s best-known fragments we read the following phrases: ‘Sinto-me multiplo. Sou como um quarto com inumeros espelhos fantasticos que torcem para reflexões falsas uma única central realidade que não está em nenhuma e está em todas’ (BNP / E3, 20-67r)13 [‘I feel multiple. I’m like a room with innumerable fantastic mirrors that twist into false reflections one single central reality that is in none of them and is in all of them’]. That fragmented reality is, in a figurative sense, Pessoa’s, viewed as a posthumous author; he is in none and in all of the editions of his texts. On the subject of the possible variety of Fernando Pessoa’s editions, we are almost obliged to repeat some questions that Michel Foucault raised in 1969 in his famous lecture ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’14 What does a work mean? What is the unit represented by a single piece of work? What are the elements necessary to constitute or define a piece of work? Are Pessoa’s published works the same as the ones he conceived? And if we accept Pessoa as an author, do we need to publish everything that was left in the trunks, all the aphorisms, all the publication plans, all the notes in the margins of his books? Certainly, but as did Foucault in the case of Nietzsche, we also have to question the limits. Do, in fact, all the lists of debts, addresses or shopping lists also have to be published? There is still no theory of Pessoa’s work and it continues to be as problematic as the author’s personality. To cite Foucault again: ‘Le mot “œuvre” et l’unité qu’il designe sont probablement aussi problématiques

13 Cf. Pessoa, Páginas Íntimas e de Auto-Interpretação, p. 93. 14 Michel Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’, in Dits et écrits 1954–1988, 4 vols (Paris: Galli-mard, 1994), ii, 1954–69, pp. 789–821.

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que l’individualité de l’auteur’15 [‘The word “work” and the unity it designates are probably as problematic as the status of the author’s individuality’]. When debating the future of the trunks we simply have to recognize that we are dealing with an enormous diversity of papers that demand repeated and recurrent reading and editing, and only thus can the work and its interpretation continue to be plural and varied.

Finally we wish to thank all the authors, as well as Manuela Nogueira and Luís Miguel Rosa Dias, Pessoa’s heirs. Furthermore, we express our gratitude to the four editors of Portuguese Studies, Francisco Bethencourt, Juliet Perkins, David Treece and AbdoolKarim Vakil, and to Richard Correll, Editorial Assistant. Also to Adelaide Galhano and Sofia Rodrigues, who contributed to the final version of this introduction, and to Carole Garton, Catherine Shaw and Manuel Portela, who translated certain texts of this volume.

We hope that the reading of this special issue encourages new explorations of Pessoa’s ‘universe’.

Jerónimo Pizarro, Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa

Steffen Dix, Instituto de Ciêncas Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa

Editorial note: transcriptions from the originals follow the symbols used in the Pessoa Critical Edition, published by the Imprensa Nacional–Casa da Moeda.

□ blank space* conjectured reading/ / passage doubted by author† illegible word< > autograph segment crossed out< >/ \ substitution by overwriting (<substituted>/substitute\)< >[↑] substitution by crossing out and addition in the in-between line above[↑] addition in the in-between line above[↓] addition in the in-between line below[→] addition in the right-hand margin[←] addition in the left-hand margin

15 Foucault, p. 795. See also Jerónimo Pizarro, ‘Pessoa existe?’, Veredas, Revista da Associação Internacional de Lusitanistas, 9 (2007), 244–59.