#10861 #537317 5-10-18

Fernando Pessoa: the poet with many faces

The first biography of Fernando Pessoa in English

“Fernando Pessoa is not easy to get to know. Even during his lifetime
his friends remarked on a certain quicksilver quality about him that
made it appear as though he was always slipping through their hands
[...]. There still remains the barrier of his reticences, his pudor and his
sensitivity and the constant retreat behind the masks by which he could
both conceal and reveal. [...] We join him in his search for self-identity.
Perhaps because we feel it is a search for our own self-identity. Or it
may be a game. Or a ritual. Or a religion. It can be any of these accord-
ing to how the puckish spirit of Fernando Pessoa rules.”

—Hubert D. Jennings

Pessoa
essoa
Fernando
The Poet with Many Faces is the first biography of Fernando Pessoa in
English. Written in the early 1970s by Hubert D. Jennings, the book
was intended for publication in 1974, when the Carnation Revolution
in Portugal interrupted the editorial plans. The once lost typescript is

Hubert D. Jennings
published here for the first time, together with an anthology of more
than 50 poems by Pessoa and his heteronyms—some translated from
the original Portuguese by Jennings and others written in English by
Pessoa himself. This volume also includes notes and a critical apparatus
prepared by the editor Carlos Pittella, a foreword by renowned Prof.
George Monteiro and an afterword by Filipa de Freitas.
the poet with many faces:
a biography and anthology
ISBN 9780943722436
52300 >

Hubert D. Jennings
9 780943 722436 Edited by Carlos Pittella

Capa 3.indd 1
CMYK 10/05/2018 00:57:24
F P ,
The Poet With Many Faces:
a biography and anthology

Hubert D. Jennings

Edited by Carlos Pittella

With a foreword by George Monteiro
and an afterword by Filipa de Freitas

Providence •
Fernando Pessoa, The Poet with Many Faces: a biography and anthology

Gávea-Brown Publications at Brown niversity

Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies

The Hubert Jennings Papers are held by Brown niversity Library.

2018 All rights of this edition are reserved to Gávea-Brown Publications and
the editor Carlos Pittella.

Manufactured in the nited States of America

Edited with the generous support of the Jennings family

Author: Hubert D. Jennings

Editor: Carlos Pittella
Foreword by George Monteiro
Afterword by Filipa de Freitas
Design and cover art by Gabriela Lissa Sakajiri

For all inquiries, please contact:

Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Box O, Brown niversity,
Providence, RI 02912 Gavea.Brown gmail.com

ISBN: 978-0-943722-43-6 (paperback)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018937768

2 4 6 8 7 5 3 1 M&G 22 21 20 19 18
Contents

I Foreword
George Monteiro
V Editor’s Note
Carlos Pittella

[Fernando Pessoa, The Poet With Many Faces]

1 Author’s Preface
4 Chapter 1: Infancy
13 Chapter 2: Fernando Pessoa in South Africa
59 Chapter 3: Lisbon Revisited
76 Chapter 4: Foreign Correspondent
85 Chapter 5: To Pretend is to Know
91 Chapter 6: The Shepherd and his Disciples
111 Chapter 7: The Accident of Sex
133 Chapter 8: Initiation
159 Chapter 9: Lowly Living and Extravagant Thinking
178 Chapter 10: I Pass and I Remain, like the niverse
189 Acknowledgements

[Anthology]
192 Poems of Alberto Caeiro
206 Poems of Álvaro de Campos
230 Odes of Ricardo Reis
236 Poems of Fernando Pessoa

249 Critical Apparatus

Carlos Pittella
271 Afterword
Filipa de Freitas
283 Index
287 Bibliography
297 Biographical Notes
To F.E.G. Quintanilha,
in memoriam
 Then take your face away
from here, for it is enough to
frighten a rhinoceros, let alone
an English gentleman

Fernando Pessoaa

a Translation by Jennings from the short story “Os Rapazes de Barrowby.”

 Foreword

In some way each person is unique. But not every person is in-
teresting. Hubert D. Jennings was both unique and interesting.
I first heard of Jennings in Brazil in 1969 while I was a Ful-
bright appointee to teach American literature at the niversidade de
São Paulo. Once, while making small talk with my chairman, some-
how the subject of a recently granted Ph.D. at .S.P. came up. “His
dissertation on Fernando Pessoa’s education in South Africa was,”
he said, “indebted to the information supplied to him by someone
named Jennings. So, in a way, he owed his degree to a stranger.”
The next significant time I ran into Jennings’s name was
nearly a decade later when, in 1977, he was listed as the co-author
of a ground-breaking paper on Fernando Pessoa’s love letters to the
young Ofélia Queiroz. The paper was read by Jennings’s co-author.
Jennings did not attend the conference. As it happened, the paper
was not published in the conference proceedings because Pessoa’s
heirs did not permit quotation of his unpublished letters to Ofélia.a
Fast forward another eight years to a second .S. confer-
ence on Pessoa, this time in Nashville, Tennessee, at Vanderbilt
niversity. Jennings was in attendance, and I was presented to

a Thirty-five years later the paper finally appeared in Pessoa Plural, n.º 4
(S J , 2013).

I
 him for the first time. The first thing he said when he learned my
name was that I was the one who refused to print his paper in the
proceedings, where upon his co-author quickly hustled him away.
He was gone before I could explain the situation concerning the
non-publication of the co-authored paper. As I soon surmised, his
co-author had not explained what had happened or, at best, had
not made the details of the situation clear to him. I never saw Jen-
nings again or had any contact, by mail or otherwise.
Little did I know of Jennings’s extraordinary career after
the late 1960s, how after fulfilling a student supplicant’s request
for information, he became so thoroughly engrossed in the mat-
ter of Fernando Pessoa and his vast oeuvre that he—Jennings—not
only scoured his subject’s work but learned Portuguese so that
there was nothing in the papers and publications that he would
miss. He published on the subject of Pessoa’s years in South Afri-
ca and left copious notes on the writer who became the means to
a professional career in the decades of his long retirement for his
work as an educator in Durban.
Fast forward again—to the mid-2010s, when Jennings’s
heirs were looking for a place to deposit Jennings’s papers, some
institution that would recognize their worth and give them the
attention the collection deserved. To make a long story short,
they courted Brown niversity, and the niversity, with the
support of the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies,
courted them. As it happened, I was asked to look into the papers
and offer a judgment on their worth to the niversity. Suffice it
to say that I soon determined that Jennings was an even more im-
portant Pessoa scholar than I had thought and that the Jennings
papers, including his own unpublished poetry, were a unique
trove of biographical and critical materials.
And there was a shining gem—the unpublished manuscript
of an original study of Fernando Pessoa, which besides an account
of the poet’s life and a critical interpretation of his work included a
II
modest selection of the poems in Jennings’s own translations. Ready
in the early 1980s (though, perhaps, even sooner) Fernando Pessoa,
The Poet with the Many Faces did not achieve print in Jennings’s
lifetime. A pity, since Jennings’s voice was one that had much to
contribute to Pessoan studies. Publication of it now does not make
up for its failure to be published when it was first written, but it
does serve to remind us of the importance of a neglected scholar
and his acute and profound understanding of the subject to which
he devoted much of his last three decades. It’s late, but not too late,
to welcome this book to the record of Pessoa’s grand and unique
achievement. It fills a gap in Pessoan studies that scholars did not
know existed.

George Monteiro
March 8, 2018

III
 Editor’s Note

Born in England in 1896, Hubert D. Jennings was eight years

younger than Fernando Pessoa. Though they never met in per-
son, both were deeply connected to Durban High School (D.H.S.),
where each spent years of their lives due to the caprices of fate.
Pessoa was first to arrive at D.H.S. Born in Lisbon in 1888,
he moved to Durban in 1896. His father had died of tuberculosis in
1893, after which his mother remarried a Portuguese commandant
who became the new consul of Portugal in Durban. Thus, after at-
tending St. Joseph’s Convent School for three years, Pessoa found
himself enrolled at D.H.S. in 1899, where he studied until 1904 (with
an interruption to visit family in Portugal between 1901 and 1902).
For Jennings, World War I was the life-changing crossroads:
after serving with His Majesty’s Armed Forces and losing one eye
in the war, Jennings was part of a generation of British veterans
who travelled to far corners of the world. In 1923, Hubert arrived
in South Africa, taking a job as teacher at D.H.S., where he worked
until 1935, then moving on to different schools in South Africa.
When D.H.S. was about to complete its first centennial, Hu-
bert was invited to write a celebratory book, which would be pub-
lished in 1966 as The D.H.S. Story—1866-1966. The volume is a
unique chronicle of the school, with chapters on the lives of former
pupils, two of those dedicated to Pessoa—the alum whose fame was
increasing since his early death in 1935. Jennings’s book included the

V
 first biographical sketch of Pessoa in English, and a lovely short story
reimagining the young Portuguese poet in his classroom—a remark-
able piece of creative writing seldom seen in institutional works.
Still in 1966, Hubert took his author’s fee and spent it on a
visit to Portugal, accompanied by his wife Irene. It was then that
he met the surviving members of the Pessoa family: Fernando’s
half-brother Luiz Miguel Nogueira Rosa (“Michael”), his wife Eve,
Fernando’s half-sister Henriqueta Madalena Dias (“Teca”) and her
husband, Col. Francisco Caetano Dias (“Chico”). They played a key
role in securing a scholarship from the Gulbenkian Foundation for
Hubert to spend eighteen months in Portugal, from 1968 to 1969.
In his seventies, Hubert took the grant as an opportunity to
immerse himself both in the Portuguese language and in the tens
of thousands of papers that Pessoa left. He was already correspond-
ing with Armand Guibert, Alexandrino Severino, Maria da En-
carnação Casquinho, Michael, Teca and Chico—but it was in Lis-
bon that he got to meet and collaborate with pioneering scholars
and translators such as Georg Rudolf Lind, Ant nio Pina Coelho,
Jacinto do Prado Coelho, Peter Rickard and F.E.G. Quintanilha.
The result from Hubert’s time in Portugal was Fernando Pessoa, The
Poet with Many Faces, which its author initially subtitled “a study
and anthology”—perhaps downplaying the importance of the first
biography of Pessoa in English.a
Written in the early 1970s (probably completed by 1972),
Jennings’s book was intended for publication in 1974, when the
Carnation Revolution in Portugal interrupted the editorial plans.
In an article published in the journal Contrast in 1979, Jennings
describes the tortuous path of his work:

a The first biography of the poet, Vida e Obra de Fernando Pessoa, was writ-
ten in Portuguese by João Gaspar Simões (Bertrand, 1950). A more recent biogra-
phy, also in Portuguese, was authored by José Paulo Cavalcanti Filho, with the title
Fernando Pessoa: Uma Quase Autobiografia (Record, 2011).

VI
 Like others, I wrote a book to explain’ Pessoa but which got no farther
than the rest. But I did not try to pin on to it any preconceived theories
and, knowing the background better and falling upon some unpublished
material, I was able to throw more light on Pessoa’s stay in South Africa.
Quintanilha thought highly of the book and tried hard to get it published
by the Portuguese Institute of Higher Culture. His efforts were cut short
by two unhappy events: first, I heard that he had committed suicide [...]
and, secondly, the Portuguese revolution broke out and Quintanilha’s
friend, the vice-president of the Institute, lost his post. Attempts to pub-
lish it in England and South Africa failed, and I therefore decided to sub-
mit the part which seemed most worthwhile to preserve as a university
thesis. [...] I sent it to Cardiff because Wales was my old university and
because of Quintanilha, to whom I dedicated the work.

Jennings received his MA degree at the age of 80. Though we have

not located a copy of his thesis, it was, with all likelihood, developed
into the two books Jennings would later publish about Pessoa’s life
in South Africa: Os Dois Exílios (1984), in Portuguese, and Pessoa in
Durban (1986), an English version of the same book.b It is clear that
the seed for both his thesis and books lies in Chapter 2 of The Poet
with Many Faces: “Fernando Pessoa in South Africa.”
In spite of Jennings’s affirmation that he adapted, from The
Poet with Many Faces, what “seemed most worthwhile to preserve
as a university thesis,” it will hopefully become evident to any
reader that the whole of the book should be known—not only
because of its historical value, but also because there is still no
English biography of Pessoa available in English, as Filipa de Fre-
itas explains in the afterword of this volume, titled “The Miss-
ing Introduction to Fernando Pessoa.” The adjective “missing” is
polysemic, suggesting not only the lack of such an introductory
book, but also the fact that Jennings’s typescript was given as lost

b In fact, Jennings’s book on Pessoa in Durban was initially written in En-

glish, but the Portuguese version—translated by Ant nio Sabler and revised by Jen-
nings—happened to be published first.

VII
 until 2013. As Matthew Hart recounts in his tribute to Hubert
published in Pessoa Plural:

in May, 2013, [...] Peter Ibbotson, the husband of Hubert’s granddaugh-

ter, Jeannine, discovered a large box stowed in the rafters of his Johannes-
burg garage. The box contained an archive of Hubert’s papers and books,
enough to fill a small trunk. That material fell into two quite different
parts. One was a mass of literary papers, correspondence, and the types-
cript of an unpublished book about Pessoa [The Poet with Many Faces].
[...] The other part of the archive consisted of four hardcover notebooks
[called A Cracked Record and numbered one to five in Roman numerals].

(H , 2015: 468-469)

In 2015, the Hubert Jennings archive was donated to Brown

niversity, to be housed at the John Hay Library. Since then,
I have had the honor to work with its contents and study its
deep relationship with the Fernando Pessoa archive held at the
National Library of Portugal (Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal,
commonly abbreviated as BNP).c
Editing is always a challenging work. In the case of The
Poet with Many Faces, there are two added layers of difficulties: 1)
the fact that the book was written almost half a century ago; and
2) the complexity of Pessoa’s work, which is mirrored in diverg-
ing transcriptions and translations.
The first challenge reveals both dated and still-relevant sides
of Jennings’s work. If this book had been published in the early
1970s, when it was written, it would have added immensely to
the growing field of Pessoan studies, not only by introducing the
poet’s life and work to the Anglophone world, but also by present-
ing dozens of previously unpublished documents. Curiously, some

c In 2015, the journal Pessoa Plural dedicated a special issue to the Jennings
archive, which in 2016 was printed as the book People of the Archive: the contribution
of Hubert Jennings to Pessoan studies (Gávea-Brown). Also in 2016, Brown Univer-
sity held an international colloquium dedicated to Hubert Jennings.

VIII
of those texts remain unpublished to date; some others, cited in
the book, could not be located, since Jennings consulted Pessoa’s
papers while they were still housed at the poet’s family home—i.e.,
before they were transferred to the BNP, where they would re-
ceive call numbers. Therefore, any document mentioned by Jen-
nings is a needle in the haystack of more than 35 thousand papers.
On the other hand, there are aspects of the work—such as
dated language and disproven conjectures—which would be revised
if Jennings had the chance to do so today. If, as his editor, I could
dialogue with Hubert, this volume would certainly have less foot-
notes—which allowed me to add, clarify and, sometimes, amend a
passage. Whenever I spotted a factual mistake, I corrected it, record-
ing the original text in the critical apparatus. Whenever a hypoth-
esis raised by Jennings has been disproved by more recent scholarly
work, I left a footnote directing the reader to those developments.
Nevertheless, whenever a phrase just sounded dated to my ears, I left
it as it was written, avoiding the temptation to erase the birthmarks
of the book as a child of the 1970s. The same should be said about
the British expat perspective of Hubert on the Anglo-Boer Wars, a
conflict with very different names to a Boer or a ulu (Hubert, as a
British veteran, would have his own worldview, which should not
be tampered with by an editor).
The second editorial challenge is perhaps more easily ex-
plained. Since the writing of The Poet With Many Faces, critical
editions of Pessoa’s work have come to light—notably the collec-
tions published by Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda (INCM)
and, more recently, by Tinta-da-china. In several cases, these
editions present a source text very different from the one Hubert
used for his translations—the 1965 edition of Obra Poética de Fer-
nando Pessoa organized by Maria Aliete Galhoz. In other cases,
Hubert used as sources the manuscripts themselves accessed at
Pessoa’s family home; but those were sometimes taken as illegible

IX
 or were mistranscribed by Jennings. Therefore, some texts re-
quired occasional retranscriptions or retranslations.
At last, Jennings’s typescript is published: a biography in ten
chapters, followed by an anthology of more than fifty poems by
Pessoa and his three heteronyms. Anyone in search of an introduc-
tion to Fernando Pessoa in English need look no further.

- - o - - o o o o o - - o -- -

This book would not have been published without the generosity
and continued support of the Jennings family, particularly Chris-
topher Jennings, Jeanne Jennings and Bridget Winstanley, who
not only donated the Hubert Jennings archive to Brown Univer-
sity, but also funded its inventorying and scholarly research. The
editorial work was closely followed by my postdoctoral advisors,
Prof. Onésimo Almeida at Brown niversity and Prof. Jer nimo
Pizarro at niversidad de los Andes, who are a constant and en-
viable source of wisdom; together with Prof. Paulo de Medeiros,
they gave me the honor to guest-edit the issue of Pessoa Plural that
announced the Jennings archive to the world. Prof. José Camões
at the Centre for Theatre Studies of the niversity of Lisbon,
Prof. Nelson Vieira, who headed the Department of Portuguese
and Brazilian Studies when I joined Brown niversity, and Janet
Blume, who now leads it, have unfailingly and enthusiastically en-
couraged my work. Colleagues and students at the Department of
Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown niversity contributed
in too many ways to be counted; I thank all of them, as well as the
staff at Brown niversity Library, who now guard the precious
Hubert Jennings Papers. Karen Eberhart, David Mittelman, Patri-
cia Figueroa and Joseph Rhoads were instrumental to digitize, cat-
alogue and host the Jennings papers at the Brown Digital Reposi-
tory, which allowed me to navigate the archive in light speed and

X
see connections that would have gone unnoticed otherwise. Mat-
thew Hart started everything, by kindly inviting me into his home
in NYC to meet the unearthed trove; we shared some of its first
great discoveries. Patricio Ferrari, José Barreto, Antonio Cardiello,
Nicolás Barbosa, Susan Brown, Patricia Silva, José Correia and, last
but not least, Filipa de Freitas helped me locate several documents
in Pessoa’s archive and to double-check references in rare publi-
cations. Lizzie Krontiris and her maieutics provided sound advice
and helped clarify the purpose of footnotes in this volume. Kate
Beall and Armanda Silva made my research and this book possible,
by helping take care of administrative issues, always with patience
and kindness. Gabriela Lissa Sakajiri, who did the book cover and
design, is the lynx-eyed artist that every editor wishes to work
with. Dear Professor George Monteiro, who opened the Jennings
colloquium, graciously provided the perfect foreword for this vol-
ume. My brother Pedro, my parents Antonio and Ana and my par-
ents-in-law Bob and Charlotte, helped me navigate all challenges
of moving cross-country with a young child, in order to complete
this project; my wife Stephanie and daughter Moema know that
no words are enough to thank them, and I can only try: thank you.

Carlos Pittella * d

Providence, April 2018

*d Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown niversity, Department of Por-

tuguese and Brazilian Studies; affiliated with the niversity of Lisbon, Centre for
Theatre Studies.

XI
 Fernando Pessoa,
The Poet with Many Faces:
a biography and anthology
Typescript by Jennings (H. Jennings Papers, BDR: 705875)
 Author’s Preface

Fernando Pessoa is not easy to get to know. Even during his life-
time his friends remarked on a certain quicksilver quality about
him that made it appear as though he was always slipping through
their hands. Pierre Hourcade,a one of his earliest French admirers,
has put on record that at one moment he and Fernando Pessoa
would be chatting together in a café intimately and, at the next,
Fernando had left him and seemed to have vanished into thin air.
For those of us who have come afterwards and can only know
him through his work, it is still the same. There still remains the barrier
of his reticences, his pudor and his sensitivity and the constant retreat
behind the masks by which he could both conceal and reveal. His voice
seems to come to us from behind a curtain: sometimes so loud and clear
(as in the “Triumphal Ode”b) as to be almost deafening; at other times
as faint, remote yet infinitely stirring as the music he puts into “Plenilu-
nie”—“a flute that enchants heard more in the mind than in the actual

a See H , 2016.
b In Portuguese, “Ode Triunfal” (P , 1915b).

1
 tranquil hearing as it wavers upon the air and trembles into silence.”c
But each voice (and there are many others) is equally compelling. We
have to follow. We join him in his search for self-identity. Perhaps be-
cause we feel it is a search for our own self-identity. Or it may be a
game. Or a ritual. Or a religion. It can be any of these according to how
the puckish spirit or Fernando Pessoa rules.

o–o–o–o–o–o–o–o–o–o–o

Fernando Pessoa has only slowly come to be known since his death
in 1935 and least of all in the English speaking world with which
he has had so many clear associations. Edouard Roditi wrote an
article, “The several names of Fernando Pessoa” for the Chicago
review Poetry in 1955, and in 1960 in South Africa, the country
of Pessoa’s boyhood, appeared John M. Parker’s study of Pessoa
in Three Portuguese Poets. Before this, another South African, Roy
Campbell, had begun those exquisite translations of Pessoa’s lyrics
of which he had, however, completed only three, when in 1957
death intervened. It was a chance remark by Roy Campbell’s
(contained in a letter to a friend of both of us) that first brought
the name Pessoa to my notice.d “I have just discovered,” he wrote,
“that Fernando Pessoa, the finest poet in any language in this half-
century, also went to the Durban High School.”e

c In Portuguese, “Plenilunio,” a short poem originally published by Pessoa

in 1917. Jennings notes: “This is only an approximation of the lovely but almost
untranslatable poem that appears in P (1965: 134).” The untranslatability is
partly due to extensive use of alliteration by the poet. See facsimile of the original
Portuguese publication.
d Jennings’s first book was The D. H. S. Story ( J , 1966), which was
written on the centenary of the Durban High School and included chapters on
Pessoa and on Campbell.
e This assertion is quoted, with a few variations, in multiple works by
Jennings—probably due to Jennings sometimes quoting it from memory; the main
variations are “finest/greatest,” “in this half-century/of this century” and “also went/
had also gone.” Here we edit the version that Jennings uses most often.

2
 Some two years later, I wrote, (at the suggestion of another
South African poet, Uys Krige) to Armand Guibertf in Paris, for more
information about the Portuguese poet Roy Campbell regarded so
highly, and received in return some of the studies and translations
which the French writer had just published. I shall always be grateful
to these three men and particularly to the last mentioned, whose
limpid prose and verse have done so much towards establishing
Pessoa’s reputation beyond the borders of his native land.

“Plenilunio” by Pessoa (1917a: 23)

f See letters from Krige and Guibert to Jennings in H , 2015a.

3
Anthology
 I. Poems of Alberto Caeiro

Draft of Poem V of The Keeper of Flocks (BNP/E3, 67-15v)

192
 1. The Keeper of Flocks, I
[c. 4-III-1914]

Never have I kept flocks,

But it is as if I’d kept them.
My soul is like a shepherd,
It knows the wind and the sun
5 And goes hand in hand with the seasons
Following and observing.
All the peace of unpeopled Nature
Comes to sit at my side.
But I am sad as a sunset is
10 Or as we imagine it is
When the edge of the plain grows chilly
And we feel the night coming in
Like a moth through the window.

But my sadness is peaceable

15 Because it is natural and right
And just what should be in my soul
When already it thinks it exists
And the hands pluck flowers without its knowing.

Like a sound of cattle bells

20 From beyond a bend in the road,
My thoughts are content.
Only I’m sorry I know they’re content,
Because if I could not know that,
Instead of being content and sad,
25 They’d be happy and content.

Thinking’s uncomfortable like walking in the rain

When the wind is rising and it looks as though it rains even more.

I have no ambitions or desires.

Even being a poet is not my ambition.
30 It is just my way of being alone.

And if sometimes in imagination

I’d like to be a young lamb

193
 (Or indeed to be the whole flock
That goes straggling over the hillside
35 And a thousand happy things at once),
It’s only because I feel what I write at sunset,
Or when a cloud passes its hand over the light above
And a silence runs through the grass outside.

When I sit down to write verses

40 Or, passing through roads and footpaths,
I write verses on paper which is in my mind,
I feel I have a crook in my hand
And I seem to see my self as if it were
Striding along the top of the ridge,
45 Looking at my flock and seeing my ideas,
Or looking at my ideas and seeing my flock,
And smiling vaguely like someone who doesn’t know what is
being said
And wants to pretend he knows.

I salute all those who will read me,

50 Doffing my large hat to them
When they see me standing at the door
As the coach passes over the crest of the hill.
I salute them and wish them sun,
And rain, when rain is wanted,
55 And that their homes contain
Near an open window
A favourite chair
Where they can sit, reading my verses.
And as they read my verses through, may they think
60 That I am just a natural thing—
For example, the ancient tree
In the shadow of which, as children,
They tumbled down, tired of playing,
And wiped the sweat from their hot faces
65 With the sleeves of their gingham aprons.

194
Biographical Notes

The Poet Fernando Pessoa (Lisbon, 1888-1935) is a trilingual author whose

work in verse and prose is plural in nature. The 100 fictional authors invented
by him form a dramatic constellation unique in the history of literature. Pessoa
deemed three of his fictitious authors—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and
Álvaro de Campos—“heteronyms,” while reserving for himself the designation
“ortonym.” He was the director of and a collaborator on numerous literary
journals in Portugal, the author of Livro do Desassossego [Book of Disquiet]
and, in the day-to-day, an international correspondent in various commercial
firms. Pessoa left a universally acclaimed body of work written in Portuguese,
English, and French that continues to be studied worldwide.

The Author Hubert Dudley Jennings (Hornsey, 1896-1991) was born in

the County of Middlesex, now Greater London. After fighting in World War
I, he moved to South Africa and worked as a teacher at Durban High School
(D.H.S.), the same institution where the young Fernando Pessoa had studied
two decades earlier. When invited to write a history of D.H.S., he became
interested in the famous Portuguese poet who had attended the school. In his
seventies, Jennings received a grant to study in Portugal, where he arrived
in 1968 and stayed for eighteen months, learning Portuguese, researching
Pessoa’s manuscripts and bearing witness to the downfall of Salazar. Jennings
published three groundbreaking books for Pessoan studies and left a literary
estate important both in itself and in its relationship with Pessoa’s archives in
Portugal. The Hubert Jennings papers, which include the original typescript of
The Poet with Many Faces, are housed at Brown University Library.

The Editor Carlos Pittella (Rio de Janeiro, 1983) is a poet, researcher

and educator, author of Civilizações Volume Dois (2005), co-author of
Como Fernando Pessoa Pode Mudar a Sua Vida (2017) and editor of Pessoa’s
Fausto (2018). He holds a master’s degree and doctorate in literature, both
from P C-Rio. In 2012 he received a grant from the Luso-American
Development Foundation to research the Pessoa archive at the National
Library of Portugal. During 2014-2015 he spent nine months traveling by
land, from Portugal to Nepal. In 2015, Pittella guest-edited Pessoa Plural n.º 8,
which was dedicated to Hubert Jennings and later printed as the book People
of the Archive; the volume was launched in 2016, at a colloquium in honor
of Jennings at Brown niversity. Pittella is a postdoctoral research associate
at Brown niversity (Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies) and
affiliated with the niversity of Lisbon (Centre for Theatre Studies).

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Fernando Pessoa
The Poet With Many Faces
was set in the typefaces
Merriweather and Cardo, and
printed by M&G on paper 55#
Natural Antique, FSC Certified,
in the spring of 2018