The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (47 page)

Margarida the seamstress told me that she once talked to you and that she laid into you because you made a pass at her on the next street over, and for once I did feel envious, I admit it, I won’t lie, I felt envious because when someone makes a pass at us it means we’re women, and I’m neither a woman nor a man, because nobody thinks
I’m anything but a creature that fills up the space in this window and is an eyesore to everyone around, God help me.

António (his name’s the same as yours, but how different!), António the car mechanic once told my father that people who don’t produce anything have no right to live, that those who don’t work shouldn’t eat, and that no one’s entitled not to work. And I thought about what I do in the world, about how I do nothing but look out the window at all the people who aren’t crippled and who go back and forth, meeting up with people they like, and then naturally producing whatever’s needed, because it gives them pleasure to do that.

Good-bye, Senhor António. My days are numbered, and I’m only writing this letter to hold it against my chest as if you’d written it to me instead of me to you. I wish you all the happiness I’m able to wish, and I hope you never find out about me so as not to laugh, for I know I can’t hope for more.

I love you with all my heart and life.

There, I said it, and I’m crying.

Maria José

The “Envelope” numbers and the numbers with slashes (sometimes placed in brackets) are archival references for Pessoa’s original manuscripts. They are provided for previously unpublished texts, for texts whose transcription here differs from previously published versions, and for manuscripts that researchers might have difficulty locating in the archives
.

page xi

GENERAL INTRODUCTION: The epigraph is from Álvaro de Campos’s
Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro
. Lisbon’s leading paper in 1935, the
Diário de Notícias
, referred to Pessoa in a headline on December 3 as a “great Portuguese poet”; other papers characterized the late Pessoa in a similar fashion. Archival references for unpublished texts mentioned in the first paragraph: alchemy and the Kabbala, Envelope 54A (among others); “Five Dialogues on Tyranny,” Envelope 92B; “A Defense of Indiscipline,” 92R/27–28; Julian the Apostate, 28/100 (and others); Mahatma Gandhi, 55H/64. As this volume was going to press, the Pessoa Project at the National Library of Lisbon had published a critical edition of the Portuguese poetry dating from 1934–35 and signed by Pessoa himself; editions of the poetry from previous years were under way. Joao Gaspar Simões, in his biography
Vida e Obra
, reported seeing Pessoa’s barber at the funeral.

“To pretend is to know oneself is the last sentence of Álvaro de Campos’s “Environment”; here it is translated more literally than in the full text on p. 200. The Benjamin passage, titled “Standard Clock” and translated by Edmund Jephcott, is complete as quoted except for the final sentence, “Genius is application,” a German maxim (“Genie ist Fleiβ”) that comes from a poem by Theodor Fontane (1819–98).

page 2

Vicente Guedes:
Erstwhile fictional author of
The Book of Disquiet
, whom Pessoa replaced with Bernardo Soares. See the introduction to
The Book of Disquiet
.

page 3

from the same cause:
Tuberculosis.

page 4

these books
: The first five books of the projected series are listed at the top of the typescript [48C/29] for this second part of the preface: “1. Alberto Caeiro (1889–1915)—
The Keeper of Sheep
and other poems and fragments; 2. Ricardo Reis—
Odes;
3. António Mora—
Alberto Caeiro and the Renewal of Paganism;
4. Álvaro de Campos—
Arch of Triumph
(poems); 5. Vicente Guedes—
The Book of Disquiet”
. This order of publication is different from the one indicated in the first part of the preface, which was probably written several months or several years earlier.

page 6

THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN AND HETERONYM: The eleven texts in this section, all written in English, have been placed in approximate chronological order, though with conjecture as a guide. The make-believe newspapers mentioned at the beginning of the introductory essay can be found in Envelope 87 of the Pessoa archives and were published in facsimile in
Pessoa por Conhecer
. The 1903 “edition” of one of the papers—copied into a school notebook whose whereabouts are now unknown—was commented on at length in H. D. Jennings’s
Os Dots Exílios
. Geerdts’s letter to “Faustino Antunes” (Envelope IV of the archives) has been published in several places, including
Pessoa por Conhecer
, where the “Essay on Intuition” [14
⁶
/3o–31] can also be found. The passage cited at the end of the introductory essay [20/10] was published in
Páginas Íntimas
without being attributed to Alexander Search.

page 10

“
I have always had
...”: [138/77]. Previously unpublished.

which brings up:
“which starts” in the original.

page 12

Aunt Rita
: One of the two great-aunts with whom Pessoa was living at the time. His grandmother, who had been living in the same apartment, had died two months earlier.

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 S
ENSATIONISM AND
O
THER
I
SMS
). 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.

page 36

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.

page 54

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.