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^M00:00:04 [ Silence ] ^M00:00:21
>> Georgette Dorn: This wonderful symposium was the idea of the
Secretary of State for Culture of Portugal, Dr. Jorge Barreto Xavier.
And it was his idea when he asked Belington [phonetic] that he should
or my big chief, Dr. Belington to have an event honoring Fernando
Pessoa, the world's greatest poet of the early 20th late 19th and
early 20th Century. It is a great pleasure to have Dr. Barreto
Xavier here with us, and the ambassador of Portugal, [inaudible]. We
also want to thank the category deposit of Portugal for helping with
this event. And it is my great pleasure to introduce Richard Zenith,
who is the world's greatest expert on Fernando Pessoa. Richard
Zenith was born in Washington, DC, studied at the University of
Virginia, and has won many, many awards during his illustrious career
for translating for many Portuguese authors, including Fernando
Pessoa, [inaudible], Sophia Mellow [phonetic], but I understand there
are many others. And he has 19 hits in the Library of Congress
catalog. It is a great pleasure to welcome Richard Zenith. Thank
you.
^M00:01:33 [ Applause ] ^M00:01:39 [ Silence ] ^M00:01:45 [Background
Conversation] ^M00:01:48 [Silence] ^M00:01:51
>> Richard Zenith: Thank you very much, Georgette, for that kind
introduction. And it's a pleasure to be here at the Library of
Congress, and I thank everybody, including the Department of Culture
of Portugal, and other the Library itself, and other institutions
and people that made this event possible. And I was born in
Washington, DC so it's a pleasure to be here and talking about Pessoa
in Washington. So my title today is you see what's written there.
And so I've got some images to show, and I'll kind of be going
through Pessoa's life and talking about his work and particularly the
importance of the English language and English language literature
for his own creative work. There are other poets as sorry,
[inaudible]. There are other poets who are as great as Pessoa, but
perhaps none who are so vast.
Pessoa wrote under dozens of different names, but the main ones he
called "heteronyms," "hetero," "other," "nym," "name." And according
to Pessoa, these heteronyms had their own personalities, points of
view, and poetic styles that differed from one to another, and they
differed from Pessoa's own personality, opinions, and literary style
or styles. Pessoa's 3 most important fullfledged heteronyms all
emerged in 1914 when he was 26 years old. Pessoa was born in 1888,
died 1935. I have the wrong book here; [laughter] another one.
^M00:03:42 [ Silence ] ^M00:03:49 So the first of these 3 main
heteronyms that emerged in 1918, the first one was called "Alberto
Caeiro," was born in Pessoa's soul, if you will, in the month of
March. In fact, the first dated poem of Alberto Caeiro is from March
4th, this day, but 101 years ago.
Caeiro was considered the master of the other 2 heteronyms, and
indeed of Pessoa himself. According to his biography, he was born in
Lisbon in 1889, one year after Fernando Pessoa himself, and he died
from tuberculosis already in 1915. Alberto Caeiro lived in the
country, but although he was called a keeper of sheep, he never
actually kept sheep. He claimed to have no philosophy, and aspired
to see things as things, without any added thought. Here's a poem of
Alberto Caeiro, my translation. "I'm a keeper of sheep. The sheep
are my thoughts. And each thought a sensation. I think with my eyes
and my ears. And with my hands and feet, and with my nose and mouth.
To think a flower is to see and smell it. And to eat a fruit is to
know its meaning. That is why on a hot day when I enjoy it so much I
feel sad, and I lie down on the grass and close my warm eyes, then I
feel my whole body lying down in reality. I know the truth, and I'm
happy."
Ricardo Reis [phonetic], another heteronym of Pessoa, was born a few
months born in Pessoa's soul a few months later, also in 1914.
According to his biography, he was born in 1887, not in Lisbon, like
Caeiro, but in El Porto, the second city of Portugal in the north.
Portugal became a republic in 1910, but Ricardo Reis was a royalist.
His last name means "kings." And when a movement to restore the
monarchy was crushed in 1919, Heish, according to this biography,
fled to Brazil. Ricardo Reis wrote Horatian style odes in
Portuguese. He kept a strict meter, but did not rhyme. Alberto
Caeiro had a freeverse style, almost never rhymes, and did not keep
a strict meter. Ricardo Reis, his poetry talks a lot as the poetry
of Horace, about the vanity of life and acceptance of it as such.
One of his odes goes like this, "Let the gods take from me by their
high and secretly wrought will all glory, love, and wealth. All I
ask is that they leave my lucid and solemn consciousness of beings
and of things. Love and glory don't matter to me. Wealth is a
metal. Glory, and echo, and love a shadow. But accurate attention
given to the forms and properties of objects is a sure refuge. Its
foundations are all the world. Its love is a placid universe. Its
wealth is life. Its glory is the supreme certainty of solemnly and
clearly possessing the forms of objects. Other things pass and fear
death, but the clear and useless vision of the universe fears and
suffers nothing. Selfsufficing, it desires nothing but the pride of
always seeing clearly until it no longer sees." So in Ricardo Reis,
there are some things that are similar to Alberto Caeiro, but he
talks a lot about form, and talks about the forms of objects.
Alvara de Campos, the third in this trio of heteronyms, according to
his script he was born in 1890, 2 years after Pessoa in Tavira, in
the Algarve in Southern Portugal. He was a naval engineer who
studied in Glasgow, Scotland, traveled all around the world. And his
motto was, "To feel everything in every way possible." He was a
selfproclaimed futurist, initially, who celebrated machines in the
modern age. His very first poem was called "The Triumphal Ode."
It's a long rant actually, and I'm just going to read some of the
opening. "By the painful light of the factory's huge electric lamps,
I write in a fever. I write gnashing my teeth rapid for the beauty
of all this. For this beauty completely unknown to the ancients.
Oh, wheels, oh gears, eternal [makes sound] bridal convulsions of
raging mechanisms, raging in me and outside me, through all my
dissected nerves, through all the pely [phonetic] of everything I
feel with.
My lips are parched, oh great modern noises, from hearing you at too
close a range. And my head burns with the desire to proclaim you in
an explosive song telling my every sensation, and explosiveness
contemporaneous with you, oh machines. If I could express my whole
being like an engine, if I could be complex like a machine, if I
could go triumphantly through life like the latest model car, if at
least I could inject all this into my physical being, rip myself wide
open and become pervious to all the perfumes from the oils and hot
coals of the stupendous [phonetic], artificial, and insatiable black
flora." And it goes on, and on, and on in this vein. So you can see
that each of these main heteronyms is quite different, and you can
see that Pessoa was very multiple.
Pessoa also wrote a lot of poetry under his own name, and under his
own name his poetry was varied. Pessoa talked about the sub
personalities of Fernando Pessoa himself. Sometimes Fernando Pessoa
himself was a symbolist, kind of a movement from the late 19th
Century. He was also an experimenter and so invented some of his own
movements, his own isms, such as intersectionism, which is a kind of
cubism applied to literature. Fernando Pessoa also wrote esoteric
poems, political and patriotic poems. Pessoa himself tends to rhyme
and maintains a consistent meter. Much of his poetry was also rather
intimate, and apparently autobiographical. I'm going to read to you
now a short poem, signed by Pessoa himself, and this was actually the
first poem he published as an adult. I'm reading my translation.
"Oh, church bell of my village, each of your plaintiff tolls, filling
the calm evening rings inside my soul. And your ringing is so slow,
so as if life made you sad that already your first clang seems like a
repeated sound. However closely you touch me, when I pass by or was
drifting. You are to me like a dream. In my soul your ringing is
distant. With every clang you make, resounding across the sky, I
feel the past further away. I feel nostalgia close by." Pessoa,
with all of his heteronyms and all of the things he did under his own
name, was imminently playful. But the heteronyms were not just a
literary gimmick. In Pessoa's last year in 1935, he wrote a letter
explaining that already as a small child he had invented his first
heteronym, a French knight called "Chevalier de Pas," in whose name
Pessoa wrote letters to himself. [Laughter]
Pessoa's mother was born in the Azores, but came to the mainland as a
small girl. She had a birthday book, which is this birthday book you
see, the "Floral Birthday Book." Now, what was a birthday book, it
was a common thing in Victorian England. The birthday book was to
remember the birthdays of all your relatives and friends. So for
each day of the year there would be a little poem, a flower, in this
particular birthday book, and then a place to write the names of
people who were born on that day. Now, this name you see here, this
is where Pessoa himself, who was maybe 5, 6 years old, wrote the
name, a bit misspelled, of the Chevalier de Pas. And here on another
page of the birthday book he did the same thing. These are the
earliest examples of Fernando Pessoa's handwriting, these 2
signatures. So you can see that already as a small child he wanted
to attribute real existence to his invented characters.
Pessoa so was endlessly multiple already when he was a child.
Now, what made him going back to my title, Englishly Portuguese?
Well, nearly all of Pessoa's formal education was in English. I told
you that that last poem I read, "Oh Church Bell of my Village," was
the first one he published as an adult. But he published several
English poems as a teenager while living in South Africa. Fernando
Pessoa's father died of tuberculosis when Pessoa was 5 years old.
And his mother met and fell in love with a ship's captain, who she
then married. Pessoa was 7 years old. And the ship's captain in all
of this had been named the Portuguese consul general for Durban, the
Port of Natal. Natal was an English colony at that time on the
eastern seaboard of South Africa.
So when Pessoa was 71/2 years old, he went with his mother on this
ship, the Hawarden Castle, down to South Africa, and he spent 9 years
in Durban. This is a postcard of Durban from that time that Pessoa
saved. So it was in Durban that Pessoa had most of his formal
education. In March of 1897, Pessoa, 71/2 years old, almost 8,
enrolled in Saint Joseph's Convent School, which was run by French
nuns. Pessoa knew no English when he arrived, but he quickly learned
English, and he quickly became the best student in the class, even in
English. And so he the school he did a 5year course of study in
just 3 years. He was a brilliant student. Now, Durban was an
interesting place. It was about the city was about half white,
mostly British colonists, but from some other European countries
there were people as well. It was about 1/4 Zulu and 1/4 Indian.
Many Indians had been brought to Natal [phonetic] as indentured
servants. Others went on their own to work as merchants.
Now, one of the Indians who was there in Durban when Pessoa arrived
was Mohandas K. Gandhi. And it was actually Durban that Gandhi began
all of his movement to gain rights initially just he was thinking
about the Indians. And all of this had an effect on Pessoa. Gandhi
was so much admired, which comes out in a text he left later in life.
But I don't have too much time to get into that. What I will say,
though, is that Pessoa had all of this international and multiracial
contact. However, his experience in Durban was really a very English
experience finally, because he was a bit isolated. He was shy,
protected, and the white community there tended to stay to itself.
And Pessoa kept his nose in his books. After the Saint Joseph's
Convent School, he went to the Durban High School. And here is the
teaching staff of Durban High School. The headmaster is there in the
middle with his dog, Jack, that looks a little bit like the
headmaster. [Laughter]
All of these teachers had degrees from British universities, such as
Oxford and Cambridge. And Pessoa, who was welladapted to the
teaching methods then in vogue, received an extraordinarily fine very
English education. That sometimes happens, you know, in colonies
they try to outdo the mother country. And so in a way Durban was
probably more English even than England was. Here you see this is
just a few years later. This is Pessoa with his new family, his
mother, stepfather, and some step siblings. Then in May of 1901,
shortly before turning 13, Pessoa wrote his oldest known poem,
"Separated From Thee." This is the first half of the poem. Pessoa
saved the manuscript. It's not really a very good poem, and I'm
going to move on. Then a couple of months later the whole family
went for a yearlong trip to Portugal, so Pessoa's 13 years old at
this time, traveled on this steamship, the Kurfurst.
And this kind of saved Pessoa for Portuguese literature; because in
that year that's where Pessoa in Portugal Pessoa had his first
burst of real creative activity. He had a lot of time on his hands,
no more classes, and so forth. And so one of the things he did he
invented these newspapers. He would take paper and make this is
one of them, called "Hedoy" [phonetic], which we could translate as
"The Tattler." And this is just one issue of "The Tattler." He had
there were many others. And as you can see, he has these columns,
and then there's in these columns he would fill them with real
news, madeup news, poems. You can see there are some look like
poems. And some of these poems were attributed to other characters,
such as Eduardo Lanca, supposedly was born in Brazil. And there was
Pancracio, and many other names, so there was a whole team of
journalists, maybe about 20 of these journalists that Pessoa made up
at this time. And this was all in Portuguese.
Then but in these poems the English influence is clearly visible.
For instance, there's one poem that you can see Elizabeth Browning's
most famous sonnet behind it, "How Do I Love Thee, Let Me Count The
Ways." And Pessoa's Portuguese poem, the first which is also a
sonnet, the first and the last verse are very similar to Elizabeth
Barrett Browning's. And then he does other things in the middle of
the poem so it's a bit different. And he gives a title which is,
"Antigone," which has nothing to do with Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
but it does have to do with Shelley. Shelley in one of his letters
in a biography that Pessoa read at that time wrote, "Some of us have
in a prior existence been in love with an Antigone. And that makes
us find no full content in any mortal ties," so the idea of having
this in a prior life is, you know, fabulous, other worldly love.
Then in this life there's no one who can really satisfy you in love.
And already as a 14yearold Pessoa, who had just reached puberty,
passed his 14th birthday in Portugal June 13th, seemed to have
decided he would not be finding full content in any earthly love
relationship. Poetry was his passion already as a kid. In another
poem that Pessoa wrote in this time, we can trace influences from
several Portuguese poets, but also a definite influence from Thomas
Gray's famous or at least he used to be famous, elegy written in a
country churchyard. So Pessoa this was from the getgo Pessoa,
he wasn't writing poems inspired by a little girl, a little boy that
he liked and he saw, or his teacher, none of that. He was already
making literature. And so he was writing poems based on other poems
he read. He would steal this and that, make his own thing. So he's
very much a strong poet as defined by Harold Bloom, freely
appropriating what others have written and reworking it, and making
it his own, and attempting to come up with something better.
Well, in the fall of 1902, Pessoa, 14 years old, goes back to Durban
on the S.S. Herzog. And in Durban he had, by the way, already
when he went to Lisbon, he had already completed high school. He was
13 years old. And so then he went to the commercial school to learn
things about business, and to accounting, that sort of thing. And
he did later in life back in Lisbon he worked only as a freelance.
He never held a real job. But as a freelance he would do a lot of
translating and writing letters for firms that did business abroad.
He also tried to open up some firms, none of which were successful.
So while Pessoa was attending the commercial school, he continued to
write and he wrote a lot. There's Pessoa at that time in Durban.
Pessoa kept writing more and more poetry in English. And he
conceived various English language heteronyms, or preheteronyms if
you'd like, because maybe the official heteronyms, the ones that are
really completely different from Pessoa are those first 3 I
mentioned, Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Alvara de Campos. But
Pessoa also sometimes would loosely refer to all his fictional
authors as heteronyms. So at this time he was writing under the name
of various fictional authors that had names such as "Charles Robert
Anon." That was one of the main ones. Charles Robert Anon would
write poetry, prose, and published a humorous poem in the Natal
Mercury, one of the newspapers, the daily newspapers in Durban. That
was in 1904. But that was not the first English poem published by
Pessoa. One year earlier in 1903 he had published a poem by another
heteronym, in the very same paper.
The existence of the poem and the heteronym who supposedly wrote it
were completely unknown for over 100 years; in fact, until 2010. And
it would have remained unknown were it not for small lists of his
early works that he left among thousands of papers in his archive.
On that list, there was a small notation that reads "Miner: Verses
in Natal Mercury." So "Miner," was that maybe the name of another
heteronym, was that a title, what was it? And that's what I
wondered. In the fall of 2010 I traveled to Durban, and after many
hours of searching through old issues of the Natal Mercury, I found a
poem titled "The Miner Song" in the July 11th, 1903 issue. And now
this poem, "The Miner Song" was preceded by a cover letter signed by
one W.W. Austin, which the newspaper also published.
So at the top there you have the cover letter. So in that cover
letter Mr. Austin explained that he had traveled to Australia, filled
in with some miners, who would sometimes compose songs or poems at
night, which he sometimes copied down. And for the newspaper's
appreciation, he was sending the best of the lot, "The Miner Song,"
which he said was written by a young fellow named "Effield." Now,
there you see just the first few verses of "The Miner Song." It goes
on. It's actually a 36line poem, rather long poem. Stylistically
the poem is not obviously by Pessoa, who was still young and really
did not have his own obvious style. But and so there was nothing
there to really prove that that was Fernando Pessoa. And I had some
doubt. You know, he had [inaudible].
But the rouse of a W.W. Austin sending a poem by another made up
character, did seem like something young Fernando might have done.
Once back in Portugal I found in one of Pessoa's notebooks, which is
here, you see a page from that notebook, the opening stanzas of an
earlier unfinished version of "The Miner Song." In that same
notebook there's you see the name of Effield, Karl with a K, P.
Effield, who was supposedly the author of a travel piece, it seems
like, from Hong Kong to Kudat. Most of you probably don't know where
Kudat is; it's in Malaysia. So probably found it on a map. I don't
know, it's a small place. And notice that this Karl F. Effield is of
Boston, USA. So here already and we have a young boy from
Portugal living in South Africa, who invents a poet from Boston, USA,
who travels to the Far East before or after falling in with some
miners in Australia. [Laughter] It's all rather dizzying. And it is
a piquant foretaste of how he would travel imaginatively, poetically,
throughout the rest of his life.
Now, if I lingered on this poem for a bit, there's more than one
reason. In Durban I found only one library with issues of the Natal
Mercury for the first years of the 20th Century. I believe copies
might be found in 2 other libraries in South Africa. In the whole
rest of the world it is possible that there are no other copies of
the Natal Mercury for those years, except here in the Library of
Congress. And in fact in the display, which I have not yet seen, I
just got here a little bit late, but I know that they have a copy
where you can see a digitized copy of which I consulted here as
well, of this song of this poem, "The Miner Song." Pessoa had
other juvenile alter egos, such as Horace James Faber, and Sidney
Parkinson Stool. But the most important of the early heteronyms was
Charles Robert Anon.
Besides the poem of his published in 1904 that I mentioned, there
were other poems signed by him and sent to the Natal Mercury, along
with a cover letter this was in 1905. But the poems and the
letter protested against British imperialism. And the newspaper did
not the newspaper chose not to publish them. So Pessoa was always
very patriotic, and so that could be a whole other lecture on
Imperialism in South Africa. The World War was going on at that
time, and Pessoa took the side of the Boars actually. Well, at least
he did retrospectively later in life. Now, in the fall of 1905,
Pessoa returned to Portugal, sailing yet again in the S.S. Herzog;
went on his own. His family stayed behind. And he went to enter
college to do a course in letters of liberal arts. He was 17 years
old. He kept a diary for a few months in English, and here you see
some of the days.
And notice in the upper righthand corner it's stamped with the name
of C.R. Anon, Charles Robert Anon. So almost every page of this
diary has this stamp. And then there are other poems with the stamp,
or sometimes Charles Robert Anon's signature. So, you know, the
content of the diary is all about Pessoa going to his classes and
whom he sees, what he does with his family. But he attributes it all
to Charles Robert Anon. Pessoa in 1906 invented a new and very
prolific English poet, Alexander Search. And for his first 3 years
back on Portuguese soil, Pessoa wrote poetry almost exclusively in
English. He wrote here you have "The Circle," but wrote over 150
poems in the name of Alexander Search.
Pessoa lived with various aunts, and his paternal grandmother, who
suffered from insanity. There you see when Pessoa comes back to
Lisbon, you can see the grandmother there in the middle. She's got a
kind of mean look. And then those are various aunts, and there's one
cousin in there from the mother's side of his family. And several of
the aunts Pessoa began living with in 1907, may have wondered about
their nephew's own mental stability. And in fact Pessoa worried
about it on account of his paternal grandmother, who was
institutionalized more than once. At the Rua de Bella Vista in
Lisbon where they were living, Pessoa, 2 of his aunts and the old
grandmother, Pessoa at that address sometimes received letters that
were addressed to an Alexander Search. Here you have Alexander
Search, Esquire, with the Bella Vista Lapa [phonetic], as well as to
another invented author, Faustino Antunes.
This was a heteronymic psychiatrist who was created by Pessoa to
write letters to his former some former teachers and colleagues
I'm sorry, former teachers and classmates in Durban. Pessoa or in
the name of a doctor, Faustino Antunes, wrote these people in Durban,
explaining that his client, or patient, Fernando Pessoa, was
suffering from a mental disorder, a very serious mental disorder, and
wanted information, what was Pessoa like, do you remember? Did he
act funny, was he sociable, [laughter] how did he get along? What's
your opinion about Fernando Pessoa? And several people wrote back
answers to Dr. Faustino Antunes, [inaudible]. Pessoa also received
correspondence all of this is the same year, 1907, in his own
name, Fernando Antonio Nogueria, F.A.N., Pessoa at the Rua da Bella
Vista a Lapa. Notice this is actually you can't really tell from
the image, but that's a light brown envelope. It's actually a large
envelope in which he evidently received a copy of "The Scientific
America."
So Pessoa was all over the place and corresponded hither and yon.
Pessoa in 1908 made a small handmade booklet called "The
Transformation Book," or "Book of Tasks," signed with his signature.
And so there he tried to organize all of his writing under various
names he had invented. So there you have Alexander Search. It says
he was born on the same day as Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon June 13th,
but apparently was English. Then there was Pantaleao, which would
write in Portuguese, Jean Seoul, "seoul" means "alone" in French, and
that is Pessoa's only his lone French heteronym, wrote in French,
and Charles James Search was the brother of Alexander Search, and was
a translator and translated also some things written by his brother,
Alexander. So he invented a whole world, you know, a whole family of
these heteronyms that would comment on each other, help each other
out, criticize each other.
Pessoa was always obsessed with the idea of publishing with
newspaper. You know, he invented these newspapers. I showed you one
example when he was young. And his dream was opening up a publishing
house. His grandmother died in 1907, and Pessoa when he was 21 years
old came into an inheritance. It was a rather decent inheritance
from his grandmother. And he spent it all, and then some; opened up
the Empreza Ibis, or Ibis, you know, that wading bird. And but it
was it just operated for a few months, between late 1909 and 1910.
But he never published any literature, he just a bit of printing.
And it was a disaster; so fell completely into debt. In the fall of
1908, Pessoa had begun writing poetry in Portuguese. But he kept on
in English, and in 1910 began furiously writing sonnets in English,
Shakespearean sonnets.
In 1918, Pessoa selfpublished a book of 35 sonnets; this book. And
he sent copies of the book to various publications in England, and
the rest of the British Isles. And some of them published notices,
and there was actually a rather positive review in the Times Literary
Supplement. Now, in the Times Literary Supplement in 1918, the
reviewer remarked that what was remarkable was not so much Mr.
Pessoa's command of English, but his command of Elizabethan English.
And he commented on his ultraShakespearean shakespeareanisms.
Another review mentioned the Tudor tricks of antithesis and
repetition in Pessoa's sonnets. Pessoa was clearly competing with
Shakespeare. [Laughter] This is from the book by the way, this
what you're seeing as notations on the side and the markings are
Pessoa's own in one of his copies that he saved for a second edition.
He thought of some alterations he wanted to make.
So here's an example. I'll just read you a few verses of this
sonnet. "How many masks wear we, and undermasks, upon our
countenance of soul and when if for selfsport the soul itself
unmasks, knows it the last mask off and the face plain?" And then at
the end the closing couplet, "And when a thought would unmask our
soul's masking, itself goes not unmasked to the masking." So
Pessoa's selfmultiplication and heteronyms is both a result and an
illustration of this conviction there is no essence, everything is
masks. This doesn't mean that nothing is true, but the truth is a
shifting quantity. Truth, in a way, is what we say it is. And so
Pessoa was like no other writer before or after, a dramatic poet,
forever performing. For him truth and life itself were in the doing,
and the performing. His perhaps most famous poem begins, "[Speaks
Foreign Language], "The poet is a feigner, or faker, or pretender."
And the idea isn't so much lying to be false, but the idea is that
there is no a priori truth, and so we're always inventing, always
making. That isn't the only truth there can be. Now, there's a
problem with Pessoa's poetry written in English. Pessoa's ambition,
remember, was still to be a great English poet. He wanted to be in
Shakespeare's league. The poetry he wrote in English was to or
the English that's so used for his poetry in English was too
poetical, too bookish. It came from his reading of Shakespeare
milting, English romantic poets, such as Byron and Shelley, Keiths,
Wordsworth. He read and loved them all. This English lacked the
visceral immediacy of a mother tongue. But even Pessoa's Portuguese
poetry was a little hampered by too much learning.
And now at this time in Pessoa's life, 1914 to the beginning of 1914,
enters Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman, who had the chutzpah, the
boldness, to write a "Song of Myself," but it was a song about
everything. Pessoa first read Whitman in around 1907. And this is
the book that he had. And you see the signature at the top, A.
Search, Alexander Search, and even the monograph of A.S., Alexander
Search there to the right. Many of Pessoa Alexander Search has
his own library of about 20 books. [Laughter] So Pessoa read, as I
said, already in 1907 Walt Whitman and was quite impressed. But he
doesn't really know what to do with it. He didn't and he had all
of these readings, and everything that was going into this caldron.
And then he read also Walt Whitman, who was like a doorman fuse that
set it all off. But that only happened really in 1914 with that
explosion of the heteronyms, those major heteronyms.
And that's really where Pessoa just, you know, lets it all out and
becomes a great poet. You know, before 1914 he was an interesting
poet, but not a worldclass poet. So I already read there at the
beginning poems of Alberto Caeiro, so also began doing astrology at
this time, and he left hundreds of astrological charts. And he made
astrological charts also for his heteronyms. So here's one for
Alberto Caeiro, another for Alvara de Campos, and for Ricardo Reis.
Then in 1915 in March Pessoa and his friends published a magazine
called "Orpheu." Now, what you're seeing here in this slide is a
very famous painting many of you have seen it before, of Fernando
Pessoa. It was painted 7 years after his death by one of his good
friends who was also [inaudible], who was also a contributor to
Orpheu Magazine. And that's a little bit before then Pessoa met
[inaudible]. And so you can see there on the table the issue 2 of
the magazine, Orpheu 2.
Now, this magazine is really what brought modernism to Portugal. It
broke with everything, and so literature before and after Orpheu was
something different in Portugal. And at the time the kinds for
instance, that ranting triumphal ode of Alvara de Campos, that came
out in the first edition. And that was one of the poems, and then
there were others by Pessoa and also by his friends that the critics
in the newspapers said, you know, "This is madness. This is crazy.
These guys belong in an insane asylum." And this became this
business, the insane asylum, they kept repeating this in the
newspapers over and over in the various newspapers. And so for the
second issue Pessoa actually recruited a poet named "Angelou Delima,"
who had been living in an insane asylum for 13 years and an issue to
their poems of Angelou Delima.
And so Pessoa and his friends really embraced this idea of madness
because madness I mean, mad people, the problem with mad people is
usually they have too much truth, you know, if truth there is and
what they lack is control. They just say it, you know. So for
Pessoa there was a lot of truth in madness. And this embracing
madness was a way of breaking also with all past conventions and
going beyond what rational minds can conceive and express. So this
was another kind of [speaks foreign language], or feigning, faking,
pretending in Fernando Pessoa. Not by chance, Alvara de Campos was
the most overthetop of the heteronyms, was the one that
participated in the first and the second issue of Orpheu. There were
only 2 issues that actually came out in 1915. Later on Pessoa would
write that Campos was, "The most hysterically hysterical part of me."
[Laughter]
English, meanwhile, became for Pessoa another kind of mask. He used
English to write about sexual matters, and to explore or perhaps
invent his own sexuality. "Antinous" is a long poem, homoerotic
poem, that Pessoa wrote in 1915, and he selfpublished it in 1918, at
the same time he selfpublished the 35 sonnets. And in 1913, he
wrote 3 years before "Antinous," he wrote "Epithalamium" in
English, which is from a heterosexual point of view, but the point of
view of a bride before her wedding; the night before her wedding.
And Pessoa published this actually in 1921. In 1921 Pessoa published
other poems of his in English, and in 2 volumes, and he, again, sent
them around to Great Britain, and but they didn't get much news, much
response then. And Pessoa really at that point gave up trying to be
a great English poet.
Pessoa's most important English poetry he wrote in Portuguese. And I
say that because we can see the influence of English in Pessoa's
Portuguese, particularly in Alvara de Campos, Alberto Caeiro, in
those 2 you see a lot of the influence actually of Walt Whitman as a
part, but you also see in Pessoa's way of writing Portuguese,
something of the English language itself. And so he really made
something quite different in Portuguese poetry. Pessoa was still
would the rest of his life write an occasional poem in English. And
his personal notes were often in English, and he also wrote a lot of
prose. Pessoa's endless multiplication had a spiritual dimension
too. Pessoa was interested in all sorts of religious occurrence,
Christianity, Judaism, Indian religions, mystical religions. He was
very interested in esoteric traditions, such as the Cabala,
Rosicrucianism, Gnosticism I already mentioned astrology.
And Pessoa also dabbled in spiritist practices, such as automatic or
mediumistic writing. Most of this was in well most of this was in
English so automatic writing, which came into vogue in the late 19th
Century. The idea was to in contact often with dead ancestors,
could be other people, and you would ask questions and they would
answer writing through your hands you would get the answers. And so
Pessoa there's a few hundred sheets of this automatic writing in
Pessoa's archives. And the astral spirits he was supposedly in
contact had various names, such as "Warter" [phonetic], or "Henry
Moore." Henry Moore was a reallife figure, a Cambridge Platonist
from the 17th Century, who was a Rosicrucian, and a poet. So these
astral spirits would sometimes struggle for control over the soul of
Fernando Pessoa.
Now, what you see here you probably can't read it too well, what
the spirit was supposedly writing through Pessoa's hand is Henry
Moore. And then towards the end Henry Moore writes, "He is not
warter, because he's talking so it's evidently wondering who is
interfering, who's messing with him? And Henry Moore says, "He is
not warter, he is a man who made Joseph." Joseph was an evil spirit
who also sometimes would crop up in all of this warfare, astral
warfare. And then it says at the end, "He is interrupting." It's
rather badly handwritten, but that's what it says in English, "He is
interrupting." So the idea and then he signs it "Henry Moore."
And then it says, "No more." So by the very handwriting, according
to what's there, it's one spirit was interfering with Pessoa's hand
so that and making it difficult for him to write, or for Henry
Moore to write through him.
Now, the main topic of conversation in all of this automatic
handwriting was Pessoa's virginity. Pessoa was worried because he
was still a virgin. We're talking about 1916, '17, so that Pessoa
was about 28 years old. And so the spirits would encourage him and
say, "Well, now you're going to meet, you know, some woman who's
going to make a man of you," and things like that. And in 1919
Pessoa did meet one of the offices where he would sometimes write
letters and doing things, he met Ophelia Kerarsh [phonetic], who was
born in 1900, which is 19 years old. And it was a relationship I
very much doubt that can't really be proven, it was never
consummated, and but they would write love letters, ride the
streetcar together, and there were 2 periods in 1920 and then they
didn't see each other for 8 or 9 years, and then in 1929 Pessoa
hooked up with her again, but soon realized it wasn't a good idea.
He really wasn't interested.
And I think Ophelia suffered quite a bit. She really loved him.
Pessoa wanted to love her, but he really loved his writing too much,
and he couldn't really just give himself over to her. Well, some of
it is so his heteronyms, especially Alvara de Campos, became
almost as large as life, because Alvara de Campos would also well
actually Alvara de Campos meddled in his relationship with Ophelia,
so would write letters to her, and sometimes there would be a
parenthetical remark that was signed "Alvara de Campos." And Alvara
de Campos once signed an entire letter to Ophelia, telling her that
she would do better to flush her mental image of Pessoa down the
toilet; and these kinds of things. And Pessoa would publish in a
magazine, or a newspaper an article. He commented often on politics,
for instance, and other things.
And sometimes Alvara de Campos in the next issue of the same
magazine, or newspaper, or in another one, would disagree with Pessoa
and say, "Oh, Pessoa's all wrong." So they had this kind of thing
going on. Well, as these heteronyms could be like Campos, larger
than life, with real people kind of the opposite could happen. So
some of the real people in Pessoa's life became symbols. They were
in doubt with a literary status. Pessoa wooed Ophelia with words
from Shakespeare, according to Ophelia, which she told later, with
words from Shakespeare's "Hamlet." And she represented an experience
of a love that he could imagine, but not truly feel, at least not
with her. In 1921 Pessoa founded a shortlived publishing house,
[inaudible], which brought out his English poems, I showed you some
earlier, and 3 other works written by friends.
In 1922 his press just published 5 or 6 titles total. But in 1922 it
published a poetry collection by Antonio Boto, an openly homoerotic
poet, greatly promoted by Pessoa, who also wrote essays and articles
defending this poet's Greek esthetic ideal. Pessoa would even
translate Antonio Boto's poetry into English. Now, apart from
whatever real appreciation he had for Boto's poetry, Fernando seems
to have been living something vicariously through him. He
represented something more than just a good lyric poet. The
[inaudible] Press folded in 1923. Then in 1924, 1925, Pessoa and a
friend founded this magazine, "Athena," which published things by
Pessoa himself, by other friends' translations, and it was in this
magazine also that Pessoa first revealed the poetry of Ricardo Reis
in 1924, and the next year of Alberto Caeiro. And here's from the
magazine a selection of poems of Alberto Caeiro.
Then Pessoa after all that brouhaha with Orpheu sort of became quite
wellknown, but then he began to be a bit forgotten. And but then in
1927 there was a new magazine in [inaudible] that I founded,
"Presenca," by some very bright young poets and critics who
rediscovered Pessoa. And it was in this magazine, "Presenca," that
Pessoa published some of his great poems, such as "Tabacaria," "The
Tobacco Shop," which begins, "I'm nothing," in my translation, "I'm
nothing. I'll always be nothing. I can't want to be something. But
I have in me all the dreams of the world." Heteronomy it's not
really a negation of the eye. Pessoa did not sacrifice himself in
favor of his heteronimic creations. On the contrary, the heteronyms
were his way to be something, since there is no pregiven "I," or the
I if it exists, is inaccessible. Only bits of it emerge through
these others that express the I, but at not the I.
All we can express are lies, unintentional lies, things that are not
quite true, because nothing is definitively absolutely true. So
whatever I present is me, is necessarily not me, a derivative of me.
Pessoa is his own impossibility in writing. His only self is the
self he writes. It is a false self, if you like, an invented self
projected in words. But it's the only self there is, or at least the
only one that can be apprehended. It is forever influx, changing
each day like the weather. Pessoa was reserved, but social. He
liked to frequent cafes, where he would sometimes meet with friends,
and they would talk about literature and share their works, read
things to each other. He also liked to drink. And this is one of
his haunts where he would often go and get a bigasu [phonetic], kind
of a hard kind of brandy, Portuguese brandy. And so Pessoa drank
more and more as he got older.
In 1934 he finally brought out his only published book in Portuguese,
"Mesagin" [phonetic], which was a book of kind of a retelling of
the Portuguese discoveries around the world, and going to Vasco de
Gama going to India. It's about and other facets of Portugal's
history, even it's first founding. And it was also a book looking to
the future and what Portugal could be in the future. He won a prize
for that book in 1934. In 1935 Pessoa this is supposedly the last
photograph of Fernando Pessoa. He began feeling occasionally more
ill. Pessoa all of his life sometimes had bouts of depression. At a
certain point in late November of 1935, he had abdominal pains and
was taken to the hospital. The next day on November 29th, 1935, he
wrote his very last sentence in English. And this is the sentence,
"I know not what tomorrow will bring." The next day he died.
And Pessoa left as his legacy to the world thousands of paper sheets
and scraps with unpublished work, many of which were kept in a trunk.
Here you see the trunk. This is when it was still in the possession
of the family. Pessoa's niece and nephew, these who the
children of a half sister, who are still living actually. The niece
is 89, and the nephew is 85 or 84 maybe. And one of the sheets
contained in that trunk contains this single phrase, "[Speaks Foreign
Language]," "Be plural like the universe." So and this was a
recommendation for Pessoa, but also for us. Thank you. ^M00:55:36
[ Applause ] ^M00:55:48 Is there time for questions?
>> Georgette Dorn: Yes; we do have time for questions, but I want to
invite everybody to go upstairs above us to the far end of the Great
Hall. You'll see a wonderful exhibit that was prepared by my
colleague, Catalina Gomez, who's going to be fielding the questions.
So please be sure to see the small exhibit on the most relevant works
of Pessoa, including the newspaper from Durban. So
>> Richard Zenith: Thank you.
>> Georgette Dorn: questions.
>> Richard Zenith: Questions, comments; about anything.
>> The people who would actually interact with Pessoa, would they
experience him as different at different times?
>> Richard Zenith: Yes; that's a good question. Well, actually some
of these people I mentioned that magazine "Presenca," which
founded in 1927, it was from founded in [inaudible], which is up
the road from Portugal, a few hours up the road. And when they came
they were writing letters to Pessoa in Lisbon, and so it was
sending on poems and prose pieces that he published in the magazine.
And then when a couple of them came to Lisbon, so then they wanted to
meet Pessoa. So they arranged to meet in a caf�. And they were
very frustrated and they got a bit angry because they wrote later
that who appeared was not Fernando Pessoa, but Alvara de Campos.
[Laughter] Now, what exactly that means, you know, your guess is as
good as mine. But I think maybe what it means is that he didn't say,
"I'm Alvara de Campos," but he was probably rather evasive, acted
strange, aloof. Pessoa was shy, and also Pessoa was always kind of
he didn't want he hated to be conventional. He hated to do
what anyone expected. So they had were arriving wanting to see
the great master, and he so he wasn't going to satisfy them. He
was going to be something different. So and there were reports of a
few other people having that sort of an experience, so. Yes.
>> Can you talk about the "Book of Disquiet." It seemed to be a very
challenging effort.
>> Richard Zenith: Yes. The "Book of Disquiet" well I said that
there was that explosion of heteronyms in 1914. And actually 1913
Kasor [phonetic] began working on "Livro do Desassossego," or the
"Book of Disquiet." And it was a book that he didn't quite know
where it was going. He started with the title, and with this idea of
disquiet, which can all seem, you know, like restlessness. And so he
wrote prose pieces, and wonderful prose, kind of poetic prose
sometimes, and with strange descriptions of sometimes Medieval kinds
of scenes of princesses, and strange forests. And then there was
diarylike writings that very soon crept into the "Book of Disquiet,"
where writing about the narrator writes about his own inner
disquiet. And so Pessoa would write, and write, and write, but he
didn't even have a notebook dedicated to the "Book of Disquiet" so
there were all these passages here and there. Then there were a few
he did this wrote quite a bit until 1920, and then for a few
years more or less abandoned it, then came back to it in 1929 with a
vengeance, and wrote a lot of passages. And then it was clearly a
kind of fictional diary.
And Pessoa wondered how he could pull it altogether. He had
different ideas, but he never did pull it altogether. He did leave a
few hundred passages in a large envelope. And but then many others
were scattered around this more than 25,000 sheets that were left in
that they didn't all fit in that one trunk, but in that trunk and
elsewhere. And so it was only researchers compiling, finding the
different pieces, and giving some kind of order because there's no
Pessoa left no order for the book. And but the first Portuguese
edition came out only in 1982 47 years after Pessoa's death. And
then there have been various other editions in Portuguese that order
the material a different way. And it's a bit of open season about
what belongs to the book and what doesn't. But it's really a
fascinating book, and it's certainly one of the great moments of
poetry. And so also the "Book of Disquiet" I'm glad you brought
up the question because I didn't mention it, it's also where you can
really see I think Pessoa's English at work, and his Portuguese. So
and even a bit in the structure, the syntactic structure, yes.
>> Georgette Dorn: One more; one more.
>> Richard Zenith: Okay. [Laughs] I don't know, your choice.
>> Yes; first of all thank you for your wonderful presentation.
>> Richard Zenith: You're welcome.
>> Do you think that there is an element of dissociative identity
disorder [laughter] [inaudible]? And also, what brought to Pessoa?
>> Richard Zenith: Okay; well yes, I get every now and then an email
of someone wondering about a dissociative disorder in Pessoa, or some
other psychiatric psychological circumstance. I won't call it a
problem. And Pessoa, as I mentioned, was worried himself that he
might inherit some psychological troubles from his grandmother, his
paternal grandmother. Well, and so Pessoa wrote also a lot of pages
about the relationship of genius and madness. That was a subject
that interested him greatly. And so I think he well he was
interested in proving his genius because of the madness that was in
his family line. But Pessoa also had this incredible selfcontrol,
you know. And I don't think there was any real dissociative
disorder. I think with Pessoa some often people study Pessoa,
Pessoa scholars, they like to downplay the psychological element and
see the whole business of heteronomy just as a sort of literary
artifice.
I don't agree, because you have this all right from the beginning
with writing Pessoa already has his invented others; they're always
there. But I think what it is, is so it was kind of like a child who
didn't grow up; because it's common that children can have make
believe playmates. And but then we lose that. You know, you know by
the age of 6 Santa Claus isn't real, and yet you still have or
that your doll isn't, you know, really going to go hungry if you
don't feed him or her. But we can you know, a child can well
yet one part of the child knows that, another part of the child still
can believe it. And Pessoa seems to have not lost that capacity to
be a child. And that had a lot to do with him also refusing any
commitments when he grew up. He didn't want to grow up; he didn't
want to assume responsibilities in that way. Okay; thank you very
much.
^M01:03:39 [ Applause ] ^M01:03:52
>> Georgette Dorn: Thank you, Richard. This was a wonderful
lecture, and there's a small reception right here. So please enjoy.
That was very good; thank you. Oops, [inaudible]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us
at loc.gov.