The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa

By Fernando Pessoa

A selection of prose by “Portugal’s greatest writer of the twentieth century . . . as addictive, and endearing, as Borges and Calvino” (The Washington Post Book World).
 
Building on the wonderful Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems, which was acclaimed by Booklist as “a beautiful one-volume course in the soul of the twentieth century,” translator Richard Zenith has now edited and translated selections from Pessoa’s prose, offering a second volume of this forgotten master’s flights of imagination and melancholy wit.
 
Though known primarily as a poet, Pessoa wrote prose in several languages and every genre—the novel, short stories, letters, and essays. The pieces collected here span intellectual inquiry, Platonic dialogue, and literary rivalries between Pessoa’s many alter egos—a diverse cast of literary voices he called ‘heteronyms’—who launch movements and write manifestos.
 
There are appreciations of Shakespeare, Dickens, Wilde, and Joyce; critical essays in which one heteronym derides the work of another; experiments with automatic writing; and works that toy with the occult. Also included is a generous selection from Pessoa’s masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, freshly translated by Richard Zenith from newly discovered materials.
 
Fernando Pessoa was one of the greatest exponents of modernism. The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa is an important contribution to literature that brings back to life a forgotten but crucial part of the canon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9780802198501

Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa, one of the founders of modernism, was born in Lisbon in 1888. He grew up in Durban, South Africa, where his stepfather was Portuguese consul. He returned to Lisbon in 1905 and worked as a clerk in an import-export company until his death in 1935. Most of Pessoa's writing was not published during his lifetime; The Book of Disquiet first came out in Portugal in 1982. Since its first publication, it has been hailed as a classic.

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ALSO BY FERNANDO PESSOA FROM GROVE PRESS:

Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems

The Selected Prose of FERNANDO PESSOA

Edited and translated from the Portuguese by RICHARD ZENITH

Grove Press

New York

Translation copyright © 2001, 2022 by Richard Zenith

Introduction copyright © 2001 by Richard Zenith

Cover design by Charles Rue Woods

Cover illustration: Portrait of Fernando Pessoa by Jos  de Almada Negreiros, courtesy of the Bridgeman Art Library

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011, or [e-mail].

Published simultaneously in Canada

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This book was set in 10.5-pt. Electra LT by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH

This revised and updated edition was published in March 2022.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN 978-0-8021-5915-1

eISBN 978-0-8021-9850-1

Grove Press

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CONTENTS

E = original of Pessoa in English

F = original of Pessoa in French

INTRODUCTION

Fernando Pessoa the Man and Poet

Fernando Pessoa, Prose Writer

Fernando Pessoa, English Writer

About This Edition

ASPECTS

THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN AND HETERONYM

The artist must be born beautiful . . . E

I have always had in consideration . . . E

I was a poet animated by philosophy . . . E

Three prose fragments (Charles Robert Anon)

Ten thousand times my heart broke . . . E

I saw the little children . . . E

EXCOMMUNICATION E

I am tired of confiding in myself . . . E

An unsent letter to Clifford Geerdts (Faustino Antunes) E

Two prose fragments (Alexander Search)

Bond entered into by Alexander Search . . . E

No soul more loving or tender . . . E

THE MARINER

The Mariner—A Static Drama in One Act

To Fernando Pessoa (Álvaro de Campos)

THE MASTER AND HIS DISCIPLES

Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro (Álvaro de Campos)

Translator’s Preface to the Poems of Alberto Caeiro (Thomas Crosse) E

On the poetry of Álvaro de Campos (I. I. Crosse) E

On the philosophy of Ricardo Reis (Frederico Reis)

SENSATIONISM AND OTHER ISMS

Preface to an Anthology of the Portuguese Sensationists (Sher Henay) E

All sensations are good . . .

Manifesto

Sensationism

THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL COMMENTATOR

"Amid the dust kicked up . . ."

"The most irritating personality trait . . ."

ULTIMATUM (ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS)

Translator’s Preface to Ultimatum E

Ultimatum

from the article What Is Metaphysics? (Álvaro de Campos)

LETTER TO MÁRIO DE SÁ-CARNEIRO

ASTRAL INVESTIGATIONS

Letter to his aunt Anica

30 astral communications (Henry More, Wardour, Voodooist, etc.) E

The Way of the Serpent

Essay on Initiation E

Treatise on Negation (Raphael Baldaya)

LETTER TO TWO FRENCH MAGNETIZERS F

SELECTED LETTERS TO OPHELIA QUEIROZ

Phase 1: Pessoa in love? (March–November 1920)

Phase 2: Pessoa insane? (September–October 1929)

NEO-PAGANISM

The Return of the Gods (António Mora)

Without yet going into the metaphysical foundations . . .

Humanitarianism is the last bulwark . . .

Only now can we fully understand . . .

We are not really neo-pagans . . .

Preface to the Complete Poems of Alberto Caeiro (Ricardo Reis)

The work of Caeiro represents the total reconstruction . . .

When I once had occasion . . .

Alberto Caeiro is more pagan than paganism . . .

For modern pagans, as exiles . . .

PORTUGAL AND THE FIFTH EMPIRE

1. Any Empire not founded on the Spiritual Empire . . .

2. The Fifth Empire. The future of Portugal . . .

3. The promise of the Fifth Empire . . .

4. Only one kind of propaganda can raise the morale . . .

5. What, essentially, is Sebastianism?

6. To justify its present-day ambition . . .

7. An imperialism of grammarians?

8. A foggy morning.

THE ANARCHIST BANKER

PESSOA ON MILLIONAIRES

An Essay on Millionaires and Their Ways E

American Millionaires E

ENVIRONMENT (ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS)

FROM A NOTEBOOK THAT NEVER WAS

I can define myself without any trouble . . .

I always acted on the inside.

I don’t know who I am, what soul I have.

Sometimes, in distracted dreams . . .

Believing in nothing firmly . . .

Doing something contrary to what . . .

Man’s greatest triumph . . .

Between the theoretical life and the practical . . .

In its essence life is monotonous.

For everyone we see and who interests us . . .

EROSTRATUS, OR THE FUTURE OF CELEBRITY E

ON THE LITERARY ART AND ITS ARTISTS

The task of modern poetry E

Shakespeare (I) E

Shakespeare (II) E

The Man from Porlock

Charles Dickens—Pickwick Papers E

Concerning Oscar Wilde E

The art of James Joyce

The art of translation E

Random Note (Álvaro de Campos)

ESSAY ON POETRY (PROFESSOR JONES) E

FRANCE IN 1950 (JEAN SEUL DE MÉLURET) F

APHORISM AND EPIGRAMS

TWO LETTERS TO JOÃO GASPAR SIMÕES

Letter of 11 December 1931

Letter of 28 July 1932

THREE LETTERS TO ADOLFO CASAIS MONTEIRO

Letter of 11 January 1930

Letter of 13 January 1935

Another version of the genesis of the heteronyms

Letter of 20 January 1935

THE BOOK OF DISQUIET (BERNARDO SOARES)

THE EDUCATION OF THE STOIC (BARON OF TEIVE)

PREFACE TO FICTIONS OF THE INTERLUDE

LETTER FROM A HUNCHBACK GIRL TO A METALWORKER (MARIA JOSÉ)

"RÉSUMÉ"

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fernando Pessoa in 1914, the year his three major heteronyms emerged.

COURTESY OF MANUELA NOGUEIRA

INTRODUCTION

¹

Fernando Pessoa has the advantage of living more in ideas than in himself.

Álvaro de Campos

Fernando Pessoa the Man and Poet

When he died on November 30, 1935, the Lisbon newspapers paid tribute, without fanfare, to the great Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who was born in Lisbon in 1888. He was remembered for Mensagem (Message), a book of forty-four poems launched in 1934, but he had also published more than 150 poems in magazines and journals, a couple of which he helped to found and run. The author, a single man survived by a half sister and two half brothers, had the peculiarity of publishing his poetry under three different names besides his own—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos—­which he claimed were not mere pseudonyms, since it wasn’t just their names that were false. They had their own personalities, with biographies, points of view, and literary styles that differed from Pessoa’s. He called these alter egos heteronyms. In addition to poetry, Pessoa had also published over a hundred pieces of criticism, social commentary, and creative prose, including passages from The Book of Disquiet, whose authorship he credited to Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon. Another peculiarity about this author—mentioned by the literary compeer who delivered the brief funeral address—was that he wrote poems in English, some of which he published in chapbooks, for the benefit (according to the compeer) of the literary circles of serene Albion. In fact, scarcely anyone in Portugal had read them. French was the second language of those who had one.

Pessoa’s death marked the emergence of a far larger writer than anyone had imagined. It was a slow birth, which commenced only in the 1940s, when Pessoa’s posthumous editors opened up the now legendary trunk in which the author had deposited his legacy to the world: some thirty notebooks and thousands upon thousands of manuscript sheets containing unpublished poems, unfinished plays and short stories, translations, astrological charts, and nonfiction on a dizzying array of topics—from alchemy and the Kabbalah to American millionaires, from Five Dialogues on Tyranny to A Defense of Indiscipline, from Julian the Apostate to Mahatma Gandhi. The pages were written in English and French as well as in Portuguese, and often enough in an almost illegible script. The most surprising discovery was that Pessoa wrote not under four or five names but under forty or fifty. The editors timidly stuck to poetry by the names they knew—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and Pessoa himself—and further limited their selection to manuscripts that were easy to transcribe. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that reliable, relatively complete editions of poetry by the main heteronyms began to appear, to be followed—in succeeding decades—by more rigorous editions of the poetry signed by Pessoa himself. Pessoa’s English heteronyms and his one French heteronym remained virtually unpublished until the 1990s, when many of the minor Portuguese heteronyms also began to make their way into print.

It’s impossible to know how much psychological and emotional space the heteronyms occupied in their creator. In the real world Pessoa was a loner, by choice and by natural inclination. He was in love once, if at all, and his intimacy with friends was restricted to literary matters. As a young man he moved from one neighborhood to another, staying sometimes with relatives, sometimes in rented rooms, but from 1920 on he lived at the same address—initially with his mother and half sister. After his mother’s death, in 1925, he shared the apartment with his half sister, her husband, and their two children. Family members have reported that the mature Pessoa was affectionate and good-­humored but resolutely private.

Pessoa the child was the same way, according to people who knew him at school in Durban, South Africa, where he lived from age seven to seventeen. His father had died when he was five, and his mother remarried Portugal’s newly appointed consul to Durban, a boomtown in what was then the British colony of Natal. Shy foreigner though he was, Fernando Pessoa quickly stood out among his classmates, none of whom could surpass him in English composition. English writers—including Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Carlyle—were the formative influence on his literary sensibility, and English was the language in which he began to write poetry. Pessoa returned to Lisbon to attend college but dropped out after two years, and it was his proficiency with languages that enabled him to make a living as a freelancer, doing occasional translations and drafting letters in English (he also wrote some in French) for Portuguese firms that did business abroad.

In 1920 Pessoa’s mother, once more a widow, also returned from South Africa to Lisbon, accompanied by three grown children from her second marriage. Pessoa’s half brothers soon immigrated to England, and Pessoa periodically thought of doing the same, though probably not very seriously. After disembarking from the Herzog, the ship that had brought him back to Lisbon in 1905, Pessoa never strayed far from his native city, which he frequently mentioned in his writing as he got older, especially in The Book of Disquiet. In a passage dating from the 1930s (Penguin edition, text 130) Bernardo Soares, the book’s fictional author, called Lisbon the crucial address of the main literary influences on my intellectual development, which were none other than the common, everyday people whom the bookkeeper worked with. Had Pessoa written those words in his own name, they would have been an exaggeration, but the people who were part of the scenery in the Lisbon he inhabited—shopkeepers, restaurant waiters, streetcar operators, sellers of lottery tickets, fruit vendors, delivery boys, and office workers—are a striking presence in his literary work, partly because of the absence of more intimate kinds of social contact: romance, close friendships, family life. It seems, for the same reason, that a few of those almost anonymous people were a strong, if quiet, presence in Pessoa’s sentimental life. It was the case, probably, of the tobacco shop owner who inspired poems signed by Campos and by Pessoa himself. And it was surely the case of the barber who shows up in The Book of Disquiet and in a late poem. Among the family members and the literary people at the funeral on December 2, he was spotted—the barber—paying his last respects.

Fernando Pessoa, Prose Writer

I prefer prose to poetry as an art form for two reasons, the first of which is purely personal: I have no choice, because I’m incapable of writing in verse. To be able to make such a statement, Fernando Pessoa—the greatest Portuguese poet of the last four centuries—lent his typewriter to Bernardo Soares, a literary alter ego who wrote only prose. But what was the point of having Soares write, not just a simple statement of personal preference (or competence), but a five-paragraph eulogy for The Book of Disquiet (text 227) that defended prose as the highest art form, greater than music or poetry? It had to do, perhaps, with Pessoa’s frustrated aspirations. Though Pessoa made his fame as a poet, he embarked on literally hundreds of prose projects large and small: dozens of short stories, twenty or more plays, detective novels, philosophical treatises, sociological and psychological studies, books on Portuguese culture and history, a tour guide of Lisbon, pamphlets about sundry political and economic issues, astrological works, essays on religion, literary criticism, and more. Few of these ever arrived at or near completion, but as the years went by and Pessoa launched new projects, he did not abandon the old ones. The Book of Disquiet, which he worked on steadily from 1913 to 1919, languished in the doldrums in the 1920s, to return in its fullest splendor in the thirties, though it proceeded, as it always had, without firm direction, never finding nor even seeking a port of arrival.

What’s necessary is to sail, it’s not necessary to live! shouted Pompey the Great to his frightened sailors after ordering them to weigh anchor in a heavy storm. Those words, reported by Plutarch, became Pessoa’s motto, which he expressed—like his own self—in multiple versions, including it’s not necessary to live, only to feel (The Book of Disquiet, text 124) and Living isn’t necessary; what’s necessary is to create (in a random note). Pessoa’s world was almost all ocean, dotted by occasional islands of truth and its proverbial companion, beauty, though he realized that those might after all be illusions, the reward of much sailing. Pessoa nurtured a belief in unknown lands that were perhaps worth discovering, but his voyage was essentially one of self-discovery, or self-invention (To pretend is to know oneself)—an existential circumnavigation that would not end until Pessoa did. In the last years of his life, that self-exploration became less inventive and more investigative, more urgently expository, as if Pessoa sensed that time was running out. He tried to get to the heart of the matter he called the soul, and prose—in his letters, in The Education of the Stoic, and especially in The Book of Disquiet—became a privileged vehicle. Which brings us to the second and real reason Bernardo Soares preferred prose to poetry:

In prose we speak freely. We can incorporate musical rhythms, and still think. We can incorporate poetic rhythms, and yet remain outside them. An occasional poetic rhythm won’t disturb prose, but an occasional prose rhythm makes poetry fall down.

Prose encompasses all art, in part because words contain the whole world, and in part because the untrammeled word contains every possibility for saying and thinking.

In Pessoa the untrammeled word did not necessarily probe more deeply than poetry, but it drew a closer, more naked picture of its subject. This was particularly true in the 1930s when, with no more youthful striving after literary effects, that word became truly, completely free.

Pessoa’s prose was even more fragmentary than his poetry, or more conspicuously so. His failure (except in Message and 35 Sonnets) to organize his poetry into neat and orderly books hardly affects our appreciation of the individual poems that would have gone into them, and the same holds true for the hundreds of pages from his unfinished Book of Disquiet. But the page of well-paced dialogue, the exact explanation of a protagonist’s motives, or the paragraph that lays down an astonishingly clear argument necessarily suffers without the rest of the play, the short story, or the essay for which it was written. Suffers, that is, in its ability to make an impact on the reader. Pessoa wanted to make such an impact, even if the only reader would be him, but he couldn’t stand to put the final period to a work that was less than perfect. Most writers put it there anyway, because life is short, but Pessoa’s destiny—so he wrote in a letter breaking off with Ophelia Queiroz, his only sweetheart—belonged to another Law and served Masters who do not relent. He patiently endured under the weight of his written fragments, as if waiting for the Architect to reveal the plan.

In 1928 Pessoa invented his last variation on himself, the Baron of Teive, a proud perfectionist whose major frustration—the one that leads him to commit suicide—is precisely his inability to finish any of his literary works. In that same year, several countries north and east of Portugal, Walter Benjamin published One-Way Street, which contains a seeming homage to Pessoa qua Baron:

To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work throughout their lives. For only the more feeble and distracted take an inimitable pleasure in conclusions, feeling themselves thereby given back to life. For the genius each caesura, and the heavy blows of fate, fall like gentle sleep itself into his workshop labor. About it he draws a charmed circle of fragments.

Pessoa’s charmed circle was not, however, so gently static. More than a diligent genius surrounded by his unfinished creations, Pessoa was a creator god standing at the center of his orbiting creatures, who were themselves creators, or subcreators, with Pessoa’s literary works circling them as satellites. It was a dynamic system, in which all the elements interacted, meaning that even the apparently finished works were in truth fragments, since they were only what they were (and still are) in relationship to the rest of the system. The only whole thing—Pessoa’s one perfect work—was the system in its totality.

Fernando Pessoa, English Writer

Pessoa’s original literary ambition was, naturally enough, to become a great English writer. All of his schooling as a child in South Africa was in English, his extracurricular readings were mostly in English, and while he did write a group of poems in Portuguese during a long holiday in Portugal when he was thirteen years old, back in Durban he would write virtually all his poetry and prose in English. In 1903, when he was just fifteen years old, Pessoa won the Queen Victoria Memorial Prize for the best English composition submitted by the almost nine hundred South Africans who sat for a qualifying exam administered by the University of the Cape of Good Hope. It’s no wonder that Pessoa, after returning to Portugal in 1905, continued to write almost exclusively in English for the next three years. By 1912 Portuguese had overtaken English as his main language of written expression, and it was clear, from several articles he published on contemporary Portuguese poetry that same year, that he was setting the stage for his own grand entrance. But his English poetical ambitions did not totter. He self-published slim collections of his English poetry in 1918 and 1921 and organized yet another book of verses, The Mad Fiddler, which he submitted to an English publisher in 1917. It was turned down, and while the self-published volumes from 1918 received guardedly favorable reviews from several British newspapers, the English poems he published in 1921 aroused virtually no critical interest at all. At that point Pessoa’s production of English poetry dropped off considerably (although he continued to write poems in English up until the week before he died), and he redirected his British publishing hopes to the realm of prose. In the 1930s he set out to write various long essays directly in English, including Erostratus, and he felt confident that he would be able to publish The Anarchist Banker (1922) in an English version, for which he translated a few pages.

With few opportunities for him to speak the language, Pessoa’s English inevitably strayed from standard usage as he got older, sometimes lapsing into Portuguese syntactical patterns, but even when he was a student at Durban High School his English was not quite like everyone else’s. Pessoa had few friends, and Portuguese was the language spoken at home, so that his excellent mastery of English derived mostly from the many books he read and studied. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the language of his English poetry tended toward the archaic (Mr. Pessoa’s command of English is less remarkable than his knowledge of Elizabethan English, commented a review of his 35 Sonnets (1918) in the Times Literary Supplement), and if his English prose often delighted in being humorous and colloquial, the humor was literary and the colloquial expressions came from Dickens, not from what Pessoa heard on the streets of Durban.

Though he readily admitted that his French was deficient, Pessoa seems not to have realized that his English was different from what an Englishman speaks. This was probably because Pessoa, who is reported to have spoken his second language with no accent, also spoke and wrote it with absolute fluency, in the most literal sense of the word. His English was spontaneous, it flowed without impediment, but it was his English—a bit wordier, less supple, and more bookish than the native variety. This difference proved fatal when he applied his English to poetry, where the words themselves are the artistic point. But the words of prose are less self-referential, and here Pessoa’s English often served him quite well—occasionally crabbed sentences and off-key word choices rubbing shoulders with lapidary expressions that no native English writer could have cut with more grace and precision.

About This Edition

The universe of Pessoa’s prose is so vast and varied that no single volume could ever hope to represent it adequately, but this edition attempts to give at least a sense of how far it reaches, and by what diverse paths. The selections are drawn from the whole length of Pessoa’s writing life, beginning in his teens; from the three languages in which he wrote, namely Portuguese, English, and French; from the various genres that his prose entails—drama, fiction, essay, criticism, satire, manifesto, diary, epigram, letters, autobiography, and automatic writing; and from a dozen of his literary personae. Although I theoretically object to heavy editorial intervention, the nature of this edition, and of this author and his oeuvre, has led me down that road. Pessoa’s work is so fragmentary, and at the same time so interconnected, that any partial presentation—anything less than the whole universe—is liable to create wrong impressions. My headnotes for each section, by supplying background information, are meant to help fill in gaps.

Works published by Pessoa are (with one exception) presented here in their entirety, and his letters are presented virtually entire; the occasional excluded paragraph usually deals with a specific personal or literary matter that would interest few readers. Most of the works not published in Pessoa’s lifetime are bunches of fragments, whose individual integrity—in the case of the Portuguese texts—I have endeavored to maintain. A few fragments have been cut short, but not cut and spliced.

The writings in English, on the other hand, have been frequently pruned. Rather than clean up grammatically problematic passages through heavy editing, I have usually removed them. And Pessoa’s critical writings in English, which often run on at some length, have been freely excerpted. Pessoa’s English has been quietly edited in the following ways: the spelling has been Americanized, the punctuation has sometimes been altered, a few words have been transposed, erroneous pronouns have been replaced, and an occasional definite article has been added or dropped. All other changes to the English texts are recorded in the notes or else indicated by brackets (in the case of an added word or two). Bracketed words in my translations from Portuguese and French are editorial proposals for blank spaces left by the author in the original.

The selections have been placed in roughly chronological order, conditioned by thematic considerations. The major displacements are Álvaro de Campos’s Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro, which dates from around 1930; Professor Jones’s Essay on Poetry, whose initial drafts were written in South Africa, before 1905; and Jean Seul’s France in 1950, which dates from 1907–1908. Four sections—ASTRAL INVESTIGATIONS, FROM A NOTEBOOK THAT NEVER WAS, ON THE LITERARY ART AND ITS ARTISTS, and APHORISMS AND EPIGRAMS—contain work by Pessoa from various phases.

Originally published in 2001, this edition of Pessoa’s prose was thoroughly revised and somewhat enlarged in 2021. The transcriptions were checked against the original manuscripts or, in a few cases, against the magazine or newspaper where Pessoa himself published what he wrote; the information in the introduction, the headnotes and the endnotes was updated to reflect recent scholarship; and all my translations from Portuguese and French were carefully reviewed and often emended. I decided against translating apartment floor numbers into the North American scheme (also used in other parts of the world, especially Asia). American readers should therefore keep in mind that first floor in Portugal, as in most of Europe, signifies one floor up from the ground floor; the Portuguese second floor equals the American third floor; and so forth.

For their help preparing this new edition I thank Bartholomew Ryan and especially Martin Earl.

Symbols Used in the Text

. . . . . . place where the author broke off a sentence or left blank space for one or more words

[. . .] illegible word or phrase

[ ] word(s) added by editor

(. . .) omitted text within a paragraph

. . . one or more omitted paragraphs (the three dots, in this case, occupy a separate line)

* indicates a note

About the notes: The call numbers for manuscripts belonging to the Pessoa Archive are listed for a number of the texts included in this volume, especially when previously unpublished or when my transcriptions differ from the original published versions. The archive is divided into envelopes and, within each envelope, documents. To take one example, the call number 55H/64 refers to document 64, located in envelope 55H.

---

1 INTRODUCTION: The epigraph is from Álvaro de Campos’s Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro. Lisbon’s leading newspaper in 1935, the Diário de Notícias, referred to Pessoa in a headline on December 3 as a great Portuguese poet. Archival references for unpublished texts mentioned in the second paragraph: alchemy and the Kabbalah, Envelope 54A (among others); Five Dialogues on Tyranny, Envelope 92B; A Defense of Indiscipline, 92R/27–28; Julian the Apostate, 28/100v (and others); Mahatma Gandhi, 55H/64–65.

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. 207. The Benjamin quotation is excerpted from a brief prose piece, Standard Clock, translated by Edmund Jephcott.

ASPECTS

Around 1920 Pessoa planned to publish, under the general title Aspectos, five volumes of poetry and prose signed by his heteronyms. The project never left the planning stage, but the author wrote three passages—two of them typed, one handwritten—for a preface describing the nature of the alter egos who signed many of his literary works. The handwritten passage explains that the heteronyms embody different aspects, or sides, of a reality whose existence is uncertain. For more details about the heteronyms and their origins, see "Preface to Fictions of the Interlude, Thomas Crosse’s Translator’s Preface to the Poems of Alberto Caeiro," Álvaro de Campos’s Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro, and most especially Pessoa’s letter of January 13, 1935, to Adolfo Casais Monteiro.

The Complete Work is essentially dramatic, although it takes different forms—prose passages in this first volume, poems and philosophies in other volumes. It’s the product of the temperament I’ve been blessed or cursed with—I’m not sure which. All I know is that the author of these lines (I’m not sure if also of these books) has never had just one personality, and has never thought or felt except dramatically—that is, through invented persons, or personalities, who are more capable than he of feeling what they feel.

There are authors who write plays and novels, and they often endow the characters of their plays and novels with feelings and ideas that they adamantly insist are not their own. The case of the present author is essentially the same, though it takes a different form.

Each of the more enduring personalities, lived by the author within himself, was given an expressive nature and made the author of one or more books whose ideas, emotions, and literary art have no relationship to the real author (or perhaps only apparent author, since we don’t know what reality is) except insofar as he served, when he wrote them, as the medium of the characters he created.

Neither this work nor those to follow have anything to do with the man who writes them. He doesn’t agree or disagree with what’s in them. He writes as if he were being dictated to. And as if the person dictating were a friend (and for that reason could freely ask him to write down what he dictates), the writer finds the dictation interesting, perhaps just out of friendship.

The human author of these books has no personality of his own. Whenever he feels a personality well up inside, he quickly realizes that this new being, though similar, is distinct from him—an intellectual son, perhaps, with inherited characteristics, but also with differences that make him someone else.

That this quality in the writer is a manifestation of hysteria, or of so-called dissociation of personality, is neither denied nor affirmed by the author of these books. As the helpless slave of his self-­multiplication, it would be useless for him to agree with one or the other theory about the written results of that multiplication.

It’s not surprising that this way of making art seems strange; what’s surprising is that there are things that don’t seem strange.

Some of the author’s current theories were inspired by one or another of these personalities that consubstantially passed—for a moment, for a day, or for a longer period—through his own personality, assuming he has one.

The author of these books cannot affirm that all these different and well-defined personalities who have incorporeally passed through his soul don’t exist, for he does not know what it means to exist, nor whether Hamlet or Shakespeare is more real, or truly real.

So far the projected books include: this first volume, The Book of Disquiet, written by a man who called himself Vicente Guedes;² then The Keeper of Sheep, along with other poems and fragments by Alberto Caeiro (deceased, like Guedes, and from the same cause),³ who was born near Lisbon in 1889 and died where he was born in 1915. If you tell me it’s absurd to speak that way about someone who never existed, I’ll answer that I also have no proof that Lisbon ever existed, or I who am writing, or anything at all.

This Alberto Caeiro had two disciples and a philosophical follower. The two disciples, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos, took different paths: the former intensified the paganism discovered by Caeiro and made it artistically orthodox; the latter, basing himself on another part of Caeiro’s work, developed an entirely different system, founded exclusively on sensations. The philosophical follower, António Mora (the names are as inevitable and as independent from me as the personalities), has one or two books to write in which he will conclusively prove the metaphysical and practical truth of paganism. A second philosopher of this pagan school, whose name has still not appeared to my inner sight or hearing, will write an apology for paganism based on entirely different arguments.

Perhaps other individuals with this same, genuine kind of reality will appear in the future, or perhaps not, but they will always be welcome to my inner life, where they live better with me than I’m able to live with outer reality. Needless to say, I agree with certain parts of their theories, and disagree with other parts. But that’s quite beside the point. If they write beautiful things, those things are beautiful, regardless of any and all metaphysical speculations about who really wrote them. If in their philosophies they say true things—supposing there can be truth in a world where nothing exists—those things are true regardless of the intention or reality of whoever said them.

Having made myself into what I am—at worst a lunatic with grandiose dreams, at best not just a writer but an entire literature—I may be contributing not only to my own amusement (which would already be good enough for me) but to the enrichment of the universe, because when someone dies and leaves behind one beautiful line of verse, he leaves the earth and heavens that much richer, and the reason for stars and people that much more emotionally mysterious.

In view of the current dearth of literature, what can a man of genius do but convert himself into a literature? Given the dearth of people he can get along with, what can a man of sensibility do but invent his own friends, or at least his intellectual companions?

I thought at first of publishing these works anonymously, with no mention of myself, and to establish something like a Portuguese neo-paganism in which various authors—all of them different—would collaborate and make the movement grow. But to keep up the pretense (even if no one divulged the secret) would be virtually impossible in Portugal’s small intellectual milieu, and it wouldn’t be worth the mental effort to try.

In the vision that I call inner merely because I call the real world outer, I clearly and distinctly see the familiar, well-defined facial features, personality traits, life stories, ancestries, and in some cases even the death, of these various characters. Some of them have met each other; others have not. None of them ever met me except Álvaro de Campos. But if tomorrow, traveling in America, I were to run into the physical person of Ricardo Reis, who in my opinion lives there, my soul wouldn’t relay to my body the slightest flinch of surprise; all would be as it should be, exactly as it was before the encounter. What is life?

This series or collection of books, beginning with the one now published, does not represent a new process in literature but a new way of applying an old process.

I want to be a creator of myths, which is the highest mystery achievable by a member of the human race.

The making of these works does not reflect any state of metaphysical opinion. In other words: by writing these aspects of reality, summed up in the persons who embody them, I am not proposing a philosophy that would insinuate the absence of any reality other than the aspects of an elusive or nonexistent reality. Neither this philosophical belief nor the contrary belief belongs to me. In my métier, which is literary, I’m a professional in the highest sense of the word, meaning that I’m a scientific worker, who doesn’t allow himself opinions extraneous to the literary specialty he’s devoted to. On the other hand, my not having this or that philosophical opinion with respect to the making of these person-books should not lead anyone to suppose I’m a skeptic. Metaphysical speculation has no valid place here and thus need not be characterized one way or the other. Just as metaphysics is absent from the laboratory of the physicist and the diagnoses of a doctor, (. . .) so my personal metaphysical problem does not exist, since it need not and cannot exist, within the covers of these books of mine signed by others.

You should approach these books⁴ as if you hadn’t read this explanation but had simply read the books, buying them one by one at a bookstore, where you saw them on display. You shouldn’t read them in any other spirit. When you read Hamlet, you don’t begin by reminding yourself that the story never happened. By doing so you would spoil the very pleasure you hope to get from reading it. When we read, we stop living. Let that be your attitude. Stop living, and read. What’s life?

But here, more intensely than in the case of a poet’s dramatic work, you must deal with the active presence of the alleged author. That doesn’t mean you have the right to believe in my explanation. As soon as you read it, you should suppose that I’ve lied—that you’re going to read books by different poets, or different writers, and that through those books you’ll receive emotions and learn lessons from those writers, with whom I have nothing to do except as their publisher. How do you know that this attitude is not, after all, the one most in keeping with the inscrutable reality of things?

. . .

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2 Vicente Guedes: Erstwhile fictional author of The Book of Disquiet, whom Pessoa replaced with Bernardo Soares. See the headnote to THE BOOK OF DISQUIET.

3 from the same cause: Tuberculosis.

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