Fernando Pessoa: An Englishly Portuguese, Endlessly Multiple Poet

from the Library of Congress in Washington DC you you this wonderful symposium was the idea of the Secretary of State for culture of Portugal dr. George Georgia but it was some year and it was his idea when he asked Billington that he should are my Big Chief dr. Billington to have an event honoring Fernando Pessoa the world's greatest poet of the early twenties late 19th and early 20th century and it's a great period of dr parra desire here with us in the ambassador of Portugal the ascendency no no Britta we also want to thank this the casually deposit of Portugal for helping with this event and it is my great pleasure to introduce Richards eNOS who is the world's greatest expert on fernando pessoa Richards Edith was born in Washington DC studied the University of Virginia and has won many many awards during his illustrious career for translating the porter of many Portuguese authors including Fernando Pessoa show a middle mellow Sophia mellow brainer understand and many others and he has 19 hits in the library of congress catalog it is a great pleasure to welcome richards in it thank you thank you very much sir is that for that kind introduction and it's a pleasure to be here at the Library of Congress and I think everybody I'm including the department of culture of Portugal and other the live the library itself and other institutions and people that made this event possible and I'm this morning in Washington DC so it's a pleasure to be here and and talking about the Silla in Washington so my title today is you see what's what's written there and so I've got some images to show and I'll kind of be going through Pasillas Pasillas life and talking about his work and particularly the importance of the English language and English English language literature for his own creative work there are other poets as okay there are other poets who are as great as pessoa but perhaps none who are so vast so wrote under dozens of different names but the main ones he called hetero names hetero other name name and according to pessoa these header names have their own personalities points of view and poetic styles they differed from one to another and the differed from Pasillas own personality opinions and literary style or styles the so is the three most important full-fledged hetero names all emerged in 1914 when he was 26 years old pessoa was born in 1988 died in 1935 at the wrong book so the first of these three main header names that emerged in 1918 the first one was called Alberto Cairo who was born in the psoas soul if you will in the month of March in fact the first dated poem of Alberto Kyoto is from March 4th this day but 101 101 years ago Kyoto was considered the master of the other two header names and indeed a pessoa himself according to his biography it was born in Lisbon in 1889 when you're after Fernando Pessoa himself and he died from tuberculosis already in 1915 Alberto Kyoto 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 there's a poem of Alberto Kyoto my translation I'm the 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 in 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 Heche another hetero name of pessoa was born a few months in warm pessoa soul a few months later also 1914 according to his biography he was born in 1887 not in Lisbon like Kyoto but in Oporto the second city of Portugal in the north Portugal became a republic in nineteen 10 but Ricardo how is a Royalist his last name means Kings and when a movement to restore the monarchy was crushed in 1919 fish according to his biography fled to Brazil Ricardo Heche wrote Greece Horatian style ODEs but in Portuguese he kept a strict metre but they're not rhyme Alberto Kyoto had a free verse style rare almost never rhymed and and did not keep a strict meter he carved wish his poetry talks a lot as says the poetry of Horace about the vanity of life and acceptance of it as such one of his oaths goes like this let the gods take from me by their high and secretly wrought will or 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 it's 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 self-sufficing it desires nothing but the pride of always seeing clearly until it no longer sees so in cardinalfish there's some things that are similar to Alberto Cairo but he talks a lot about form and the for talks about the forms of objects although to the camp Bush and the third in this trio of Hatter according to his script he was born in 1890 two years after pessoa into Vida 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 self-proclaimed futurist initially who celebrated machines and the modern age his very first poem was called the triumphal ode so 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 rabbit for the beauty of all this for this beauty completely unknown to the ancients Oh wheels Oh gears it's Arnold bridled convulsions of raging mechanisms raging in me and outside me through all my dissected nerves through all the Papua of everything I feel with my lips are parched oh great modern noises from hearing you at two closer range and my head burns with the desire to proclaim you in an explosive song telling my every sensation an 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 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 header names is quite different and you can see that the soil was very multiple but so it also wrote a lot of poetry under his own name and under his own name his poetry was varied pessoa talked about the subpersonalities of Fernando Pessoa himself sometimes Fernando Pessoa himself was a symbolist and and movement from the late 19th century he was also an experimenter and Android invented some of his own movements his own isms such as intersection ISM 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 autobiography biographical I'm going to reach me now a short poem signed by pessoa himself and this was actually the first poem he published as an adult and reading my translation Oh church bell of my village each of your plaintive 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 always drifting you are to me like a dream and my soul your ringing is distance with every clang you make resounding across the sky I feel the past farther away I feel nostalgia close by pessoa with all of his header and ends and with all of the things he did under his own name was eminently playful but the header names were not just a literary gimmick in Pasillas last year 1935 he wrote a letter explaining that already is a small child he had invented his first header in M a French night called Chevallier de pau in whose name pessoa wrote letters to himself Pasillas mother who was born in the Azores became 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 five six years old wrote the name a bit misspelled of the Chevallier the paw and here on another page of the birthday book he did the same thing these are the earliest examples of Fernando Pessoa as handwriting these two signatures so you can see that already as a small child he wanted to attribute real existence to his invented characters pessoa so it was endlessly multiple already when he was a child now when made him going to back to my title english li portuguese well nearly all the Pasillas formal education was in english i told you that that last poem I read Oh church bell of my village it 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 is father died of tuberculosis from so is five years old and his mother met and fell in love with a ship's captain who knew whom she then married so it 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 that's always English colony at that time in on the eastern seaboard of South Africa so once so it was seven and a half years old he went with his mother on this ship the Hawarden Castle down to South Africa and he spent nine years in Durban this is a post of German from that time that bacillus saved so it was in Durbin that pessoa had most of his formal education in March of 1897 pessoa seven and a half years old almost eight enrolled in st. 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 this school that he did a five-year course of study in just three years he was really in the student now German was an interesting place it was about the city it was about half white you're mostly British colonists but from some other European countries there were people as well it was about one-quarter Zulu and one-quarter Indian many Indians had been brought to natal as indentured servants others went on their own to work as merchants now one of the Indians who was there in German when pessoa arrived it was Mohandas K Gandhi and and it was actually in Durban the Gandhi began hit all of his movement to gain rights initially just he was thinking about the Indians and and and all of this had an effect on pessoa Gandhi was some of them so much admired which comes out in a text he laughs 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 and a multiracial contact however his experience in in Durban was really a very English experience finally because he was a bit isolated was shy protected and the white community they are tended to stay to itself and basilic kept his nose in his books after the st. Joseph's convent school he went to the Durban high school and here's the teaching staff of Durban High School the Headmaster's there in the middle with his dog Jack that looks a little bit like the headmaster they all of these teachers had degrees from British universities such as Oxford and Cambridge and pessoa who was well adapted to the teaching methods and in vogue received an extraordinarily fine very English education as sometimes happens you know in colonies they try to outdo the mother country and so in a way German was probably meant more English even than England was here you see this is actually was a few years later this is pessoa with his new family as mother stepfather and some step-siblings then in May of 1901 shortly before turning 13 pessoa wrote his oldest known poem separated from V this is the first half of the poem so it saved the manuscript it's not really a very good poem and I'm going to move on then a a couple of months later the whole family went for a year-long trip to Portugal so I was 13 years old at this time trouble in this steamship occur first and this kind of saved pessoa for Portuguese literature because in in that year that's where pessoa in Portugal but so I had his first burst a real create creative activity he had a lot of time on his hands no more work classes and so forth and so one of the things he did he invented these newspapers he would take paper and make cut this is one of them Paul Haddad which we could translate as the Tattler and this was just one issue of the TAT of the Tattler he had there were many others and as as you can see there he has these columns and then there's in these columns he would fill them with real news made-up news poems you can see there's some that look like poems and some of these poems were attributed to other characters such as edoardo lengths of who supposedly was born in Brazil and there were spun colosseo and and and many other names so there was a whole team of journalists maybe about 20 of these journalists at pessoa made up at this time and this was all in Portuguese then but in these poems the the English influence is clearly visible for instance there's one poem that you can see Elizabeth Barrett Browning most famous son and behind it how do I love thee let me count the ways and bacillus Portuguese poem the first and the which is also a sonnet the first and last verse are very similar to Elizabeth Barrett Browning sand 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 a knee and that makes us find no full content in any mortal tie so the idea of having this in a prior life it's you know fabulous other world they love then in this life there's no one who can really satisfy you in love and already as a fourteen-year-old pessoa we just reach puberty past his 14th birthday in portugal jun 13 2014 another poem that i wrote in this time we can trace influences from several portuguese poets but also a definite influence from Thomas Grey's famous or at least he used to be famous elegy written in a country churchyard so beside this was from the get-go so he wasn't writing poems inspired by a little girl a little boy that he liked and he saw his teacher none of that he was already making literature and so he was - he was writing poems based on other poems he'd read he would steal this and that make his own thing so he's a very much a strong poet as defined by harold bloom freely appropriating whether what others have written then reworking it and making it his own and attempting to come up with something better well in the fall of 1902 so 14 years old goes back to German on the SS Hertzog 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 and 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 so at that time in Durban but so it kept writing more and more poetry in English and he conceived various english-language hetero names or pre header names if you like because maybe the the official hetero names the ones that are really completely different from pessoa those first three I mentioned over to Kyoto Ricardo Hesh and all that is accomplished but pessoa also sometimes will loosely refer to all his fictional authors as veterans so at this time he was writing under the name of various fictional authors that had names such as Charles Robert Anand that was one of the main ones Charles Robert anon would write poetry prose and he 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 header in him in the very same paper the existence of the poem and the header who supposedly wrote it were completely unknown for over a hundred years in fact until 2010 and they would have remained unknown were not for a small list Pasillas early works that he left among thousands of papers in his archive on that list there was a small there's a small notation that reads minor verses in natal mercury so minor was that maybe the name of another hetero name 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 issues of the natal mercury I found a poem titled the minor song in the July 11th 1903 issue and now this poem the minor song was preceded by a cover letter signed by 1ww 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 filling with some miners who would sometimes compose songs or poems at night which he sometimes copied down and for the newspapers appreciation he was sending the best of the lot the miners song which he said was written by a young fellow named F field now there you see just the first few verses of the miner son goes on it's actually 36 line poem rather long poem stylistically the poem was not obviously Waipa so who was still young and really did not have his own obvious style but and and so there was nothing there to really prove that that was for 9 to pessoa and I had some doubt you know he had the left that skipped a minor a minor maybe this is the minor something maybe the same but the ruse 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 and one of Pasillas notebooks which is here you see a page from that notebook the opening stanzas of an earlier unfinished version of the minor song and that same notebook there's you see the name of f-feel Carl with a kpf field who was supposedly the author of a travel piece it seems like from Hong Kong to ku - most of you probably don't know we're crew dad 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 carl PF field is of boston u.s.a so 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 it's all rather Disney and it is a peak went for taste of how he would travel he mad imaginative leap Oh ethically throughout the rest of his life now if I lingered on this poem from 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 two 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've have a copy where you can see I think a digitized copy of which which I consulted here as well of this song of this poem the minors song but so I had other juvenile alter egos such as Horace James Faber and Sidney Parkinson stool but the most important of the early head Ernest was Charles Robert Anand besides the poem of his published in 1904 that I mentioned their other poems signed by him and sent to the natal mercury along with a cover letter this is a 1905 but the the poems and and the letter protested against British imperialism and the newspaper did not show the newspaper chose not to publish them so pessoa was was always very patriotic and and so that would be a whole nother lecture on imperialism in South Africa the world war went was going on at that time and and pasilla took the side of the Boers actually at least he did retrospectively later in life now in the fall of 1900 five pessoa returned to Portugal sailing yet again in the SS Hertzog went on his own his family stayed behind and he went to enter college to do a course in letters 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 right-hand corner it's stamped with the name of C R anon Charles Robert anon so almost every page of his diary it has a stamens and then there's other other poems with the stamp or sometimes Charles Robert anons signature so you know the the content of the diary is all about the soul going through his glasses 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 three 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 the soul 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 and then those are various aunts and there's one cousin in there from from the mother side of his family and several of the ants he began living with in 1907 may have wondered about their nephews own mental stability and in fact was so worried about it on account of his but gran grandmother who was institutionalized more than once at the who at the bellavista in Lisbon where they were living pessoa is two of his aunts and the old grandmother Pasillas at that address sometimes received letters that were addressed to it aleksander search there you have Alexander search Esquire who the bellavista lapa as well as to another in invented Arthur Faustino and punished this was a heterodyne amic 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 dr. Fouch do you know Anthony's 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 how did he get along what's your opinion about Fernando Pessoa and and the several people wrote back answers to doctor of 1501 too nice and he's restless archive pessoa also received correspondence all of this is the same year 1990 no seven in his own name Fernando Antonio Nogueira fa n pessoa at the hood the bellavista lapa notice this is actually a 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 the Scientific American so Besson was was all over the place and correspond at hither and yon pessoa in 1908 he made a hand a small a handmade booklet called the transformation book or book of tasks sign with his signature and and so there he tried to organize his all of his writing under the various names he'd invented so you there you have Alexander search it says he was born on the same day as Fernand episodes in Lisbon June 13 what apparently was English then there was Punta Leone which who write in Portuguese Jean Sol Sol means alone in French and that is so as only his alone French hetero name 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 so invented a whole world you know a whole family of these header names it would comment on each other help each other out criticize each other pessoa was always obsessed with the idea of publishing and with with newspapers you've been in those newspapers they showed you one example and he was young and his dream was hoping a publishing house he his grandmother died in 1907 and pessoa news 21 years old came into an inheritance it was a rather decent inheritance from his grandmother and he spent it all and Ben's son opened up the impreza Ivysaur Ibis you know that waiting bird and but it was it just operated for a few months in between late 1909 and 1910 but never published any literature just did a bit of printing and it was a disaster but so fell completely into debt in the fall of 1908 so I had begun writing poetry and Portuguese but he kept on in English and in 1910 began furiously writing sonnets in English Shakespearean sonnets in 1918 so a self-published a book of 35 sonnets this book and he sent copies of the book to various publications in England's and and the rest of the the British Isles and some of them published notices and there was actually a rather positive review in The Times Literary Supplement and in the times that are a supplement in 1918 the reviewer remarked that what was remarkable was not so much mr. pessoa command of English but his command of Elizabethan English and he commented on his Ultra Shakespearean Shakespearean isms another review mentioned the tutor tricks of antithesis in repetition and Pasillas songs but so was clearly competing with Shakespeare this is from the book by the way this what you're seeing those notations in the side and the markings or pessoa zone the in one of his copies that he's saved for a second edition he thought of some alterations he wanted to make so 'men example just read read you a few verses of this son how many masks where we and under masks upon our countenance of soul and when if for self sport the soul itself unmasks knows if the last mask off in the face plane and at the end the closing couplet and when a thought would unmask our souls masking itself goes not unmasked to the masking so the so is self multiplication and hetero names is both a result and end 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 the soul was like no other writer before or after a dramatic poet forever performing for truth and life itself were in the doing in the performing his perhaps most famous poem again soup wet and we'll finish adored the poet is a Feiner 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 always making that is the only truth there can be now there's a problem with Pasillas poetry written in English so as ambition remember was it 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 Zoe used for his poetry in English was too poetical too bookish it came from his reading of Shakespeare Milton English Romantic poets such as Byron Shelley Keats Wordsworth he read and loved them all this English lacked the visceral immediacy of a mother tongue but even Pasillas Portuguese poet poetry was a little hampered by too much learning and now at this time in Pasillas life 1913 beginning of 1914 enters Walt Whitman Walt Whitman who had the chutzpah the boldness to write a song of myself' that was a song about everything pasilla first read Whitman in around 1907 and this is the book that he had and you can see the signature of the top a search alexander search and even the monograph of a s alexander search there to the right many of so Alexander's search had his own library of about 20 books so pessoa read as I said already 1907 Walt Whitman and was quite impressed but he doesn't really know what to do with it he didn't and and he had all of these readings and and and everything that was going into this to this cauldron and and then he read also Walt Whitman who was like a dormant fuse that said it set it all off but that only happened really in 1914 with that explosion of the heteronomous those major header names 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 world-class poet so I already read there at the beginning poems of Alberto Kyoto pessoa also began doing astrology at this time and he left hundreds of astrological charts and he made astrological charts also veterans serious one for Alberto Kyoto another for all that is accomplished and for Ricardo crash then in 1915 in March pessoa and his friends published a magazine called or fail now what you're seeing here in the slide is a Fame very famous painting many of you've seen it before of Fernando Pessoa it was painted some years after his death by one of his good friends who was also al-madinah idiot who was also a contributor to Orfeo magazine and that's was a little bit before them so I met or mother- and so you can see there on the table the issue two of the magazine were failed to now this magazine is is really what brought modernism to Portugal it broke with everything and and so literature before and after or fail with something different imports ago and at the time the kinds for instance that ranting triumphal ode of Alvarez compost that came out in the first issue and that was one of the poems and then the others by episode and also by his friends that the critics from the newspaper said yeah as madnesses is crazy these guys belong in an insane asylum and and and and this became this business of the insane asylum they kept repeating this in the newspapers over and over all in the various newspapers and it's over the second issue pessoa actually recruited a poet named angel de lima who had been living in an insane asylum for 13 years and an issue - their poems of angel de lima and so the so 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 lacked was control they just say it you know so for pessoa there was a lot of truth in madness and and this embracing madness was a way of breaking also with all past conventions and and going beyond what rational minds can conceive and express so this was another kind of finishing man to orphaning faking pretending in fernando pessoa not by chance all that had accomplished it was the most over the top of the head ramse was the one that participated in the first and the second issue of warfare there were only two issues actually came out in 1915 later on pessoa would write that compas was the most hysterically hysterical part of me 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 the Besson wrote in 1915 and he self-published it in 1918 at the same time he self-published the thirty-five sonnets and in 1913 he wrote two years before in cinemas 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 priscilla published this actually in 1921 in 1921 so publish other poems if is in English and in two volumes and he again sent them around to Great Britain and but they didn't get much news much response then and episode really at that point gave up trying to be a great English poet so his most important English poetry he wrote in Portuguese and I say that because we can see the influence of English in Pasillas Portuguese particularly in Oliver to accomplish an Alberto Kyoto in those two you see a lot of the influence of Walt Whitman and support but you also see in episodes way of writing Portuguese something of the English language itself and so he really made something something quite different in Portuguese poetry pessoa with still for 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 Pasillas endless multiplication had a spiritual dimension to pessoa was interested in all sorts of religious currents Christianity Judaism Indian religions mystical religions he was very interested in esoteric traditions such as the Kabbalah Rosicrucianism Gnosticism I already mentioned Australia G and pessoa also dabbled in Spiritist practices such as automatic or mediumistic writing most of this was in hand what most of this was in English so automatic writing which came into vogue in the late 19th century the idea was you were in contact often with dead ancestors it could be other people and you would ask questions and they would answer writing through your hands you would get the answers and so there's a few hundred sheets of this automatic writing in Pasillas archives and the astral spirits he was supposed to in contact had various names such as warder or Henry Moore Henry Moore was a real-life figure a Cambridge plate inist from the 17th century who was a Rosicrucian and a poet so these astral spirits would sometimes struggle for control over this soul of Fernando Pessoa now what you see here you probably can't read it too well what the spirit who is supposedly writing through Pasillas hand is Henry Moore and and then towards the end Henry Moore writes he is not warder because he's talking because so it's evidently wondering who is interfering who's messing with him and and Henry Moore says he is not water he is a man who made Joseph Joseph was an evil spirit who also sometimes would crop up and and all of this warfare astral warfare and then it says at the end he is interrupting 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 says no more so by the very handwriting according to what was there is one spirit was interfering with Pasillas Pasillas hand so that and making it difficult for him to write or for Henry Moore to right through him now the main topic of conversation in all of this automatic handwriting was Pasillas virginity the soul was worried because he was still a virgin I'm talking about nineteen sixteen seventeen so that so was about 28 years old and and so the spirits would encourage and say well no you're gonna meet you know some woman who's gonna make a man of you and things like that and in 1919 so I did meet one of the offices where he would sometimes write letters and do things he met Oh Oh philia kadosh was born in 1900s was just nineteen years old and it was a relationship I very much doubt that can't really be proven that was never consummated and but they would write a lot of letters right the street guard together and there were two episodes in nineteen twenty and then they didn't see each other for eight or nine years and then 1929 pessoa hooked up four with her again that soon realized it wasn't a good idea he really wasn't interested and I think Oh philia suffered quite a bit she really loved him so I wanted to love her but he he really loved his his writing too much and and he couldn't really just give himself over to her well some of his Pasillas header names especially offered to accomplish became almost as large as life because all that had accomplished would also well actually all that accomplish metals in his relationship with home failure so would write letters to her and sometimes there would be a parenthetical remark that was signed over to the campos and all of it accomplished one site an entire letter to Ofelia telling her she would do better to flush her mental image of pessoa down the toilet and these kinds of things and so so would publish in a magazine or a newspaper an article he commented off and on politics for instance and other things and sometimes all to accomplish in the next issue of the same magazine or newspaper and another one would disagree with but so-and-so is all wrong so they had this kind of thing going on well as these header names could be like compost larger-than-life with real people kind of the opposite could happen so some of the real people and so as I became symbols they were endowed with a literary status pessoa wooed Oh failure with words from Shakespeare according to a failure which he told my late Oh 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 her in 1921 pessoa founded a short-lived publishing house ELISA pool which brought out his English poems I showed you some earlier and three other works written by friends in 1922 his press just published five or six titles total but in 1922 it published a poetry collection by Antonio Balta an openly homeowner on ago it greatly promoted by pessoa who also wrote essays and articles defending this poets Greek aesthetic ideal so would even translate on Tonio botos poetry into english now apart from whatever real appreciation he had for Balto's poetry Fernando seems to been living something vicariously through him he represents in something more than just a good lyric poet the oldest it will press folded in 1923 then in 1924 1925 pessoa and a Fred founded this magazine Athena which published things by pessoa himself by other friends translations and it was in this magazine also that so first revealed the poetry of Ricardo Hesh in 1924 in the next year of Alberto Kyoto and here's from the magazine selection Scalia's selection of poems of Alberto Cairo then pessoa after all of that brouhaha with Orfeo episode became white quite well-known but then he began to be a bit forgotten and but then in 1927 there was a new magazine in Queen Maat I found it present presents and by some very bright young poets and and critics who rediscovered pessoa and it was in this magazine but a sense the pessoa published some of his great poems such as tobacco dia 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 haven't me all the dreams of the world heteronomy it's not really a negation of the eye but so it did not sacrifice himself in favor of his hetero Nemec creations on the contrary the hetero names were his way to be something since there is no pre given eye or the eye if it exists is inaccessible only bits of it emerge through these others that Express the eye but are not the eye or we can express our 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 a self he writes it is a false self if we like and invent itself projected in words but it's the only self there is or these the only one that can be apprehended it is forever in flux changing each day like the weather but so it was reserved but social he likes a frequent cafes where he would sometimes meet with friends and they would talk about literature share their share their works read things to each other he also liked to drink and this is a one of his haunts where he would often go and get a big ass'll heart hard kind of brandy Portuguese brandy and so pessoa drank more and more when as he got older in 1934 he finally brought out his only published book in Portuguese Simenson 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 was about and and other facets of Portuguese history even in Portugal's history of in its first and it was also booked looking to the future and what Portugal could be in the future he went a prize for that book in in 1934 in 1935 pessoa this is supposedly the last photograph of Fernando Pessoa he began feeling occasionally more ill E+ of all his life sometimes had bouts of depression in a certain point in in November late November 1935 he had abdominal pains and was taken to the hospital the next day on November 29 1935 he wrote his very last sentence in English and this is a sentence I know not what tomorrow will bring the next day he died and so I 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 Pasillas 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 say plural como una ver su be plural like the universe so that and this was a recommendation for Priscilla but also for us thank you invite everybody to go upstairs above us to the far end of the Great Hall to 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 Dublin so questions questions comments about anything yes that's a good question well actually some of these people I mentioned that that magazine presents er which founded in 1927 it was from founded in Queen but I which is up the road from from Portugal a few hours up the road and when they came they were writing letters to porch a pessoa and lisbon and and so was sending on poems and prose pieces that they were published in the magazine and then when a couple of them came to Lisbon one suddenly wanted to meet pessoa so they arranged to meet in a cafe and they were very frustrating they got a bit angry because they wrote later that who appeared was not Fernando Pessoa but Alvin of the compost 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 all over the comm push but he was probably rather evasive acted strange aloof pasilla was shy and and 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 were arriving wanted to see the great master and he so he wasn't gonna 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 yes the book of disquiet well I said that there was that explosion of hetero names in 1914 and actually 1913 the sort began working on the leaders of this of Sagan where 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 and with this idea of disquiet which can also mean you know like Restless restlessness and and so he wrote prose peace is a wonderful prose kind palenik prose sometimes and and with strange descriptions of sometimes a medieval kinds of scenes of princesses and in strange forests and and then there was diary like writings that that soon very soon crept into the book of disquiet we're writing about the narrator writes about his own inner disquiet and so pasilla would write and write and write but he didn't even have a notebook dedicated to the book of disquiet so there are all these passages here and there then there he did this quite a bit until 1920 them for a few years more or less abandon 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 pasilla wondered how he could pull it all together he had different ideas but he never did pull it all together he did leave a few hundred passages in a large envelope and but then many others were scattered around these more than 25 thousand sheets that were left and now they didn't all fit in that one trunk but in that trunk at elsewhere and and so it was only researchers compiling finding the different pieces and giving some kind of order because there's no soul left no order for the book and but the first Portuguese Edition came out only in 1982 47 years after episodes death and then there have been various other editions in Portuguese the 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 certainly one of the great one of the great moments of poetry and so and also the book of disquiet I'm glad you brought up the question because I didn't mention it's also where you can really see I think but so is English at work in his Portuguese I mean even a bit in the structure the syntactic structure yeah okay okay well yeah I can't every now and then an email of someone wondering about a dissociative disorder and pessoa or or some other psychiatric psychological circumstance I won't call it a problem and and bestow as I mentioned was worried himself that he might inherit some psychological troubles from his grandmother's paternal grandmother well and so pasilla wrote also a lot of pages about the relationship of genius and madness that was a subject that interested him greatly and and so I think he was he was interested in proving his genius because of the the madness that was in his family line but also had this incredible self-control and I don't think there was any real dissociative order I think with pessoa some often people who study bacillus scholars they like to deep downplay the psychological element and see the whole business of heteronomy just as a sort of literary artifice I don't I don't agree because you have this all right from the beginning with writing pessoa already has his invent and others they're always there but I think what it is is so was a kind of a 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 by the age of six Santa Claus isn't real and yet you still have it or that your doll isn't you know really gonna go hungry if you don't feed him or her but but we can your child canst well yet one part of the child knows that another part of the child still can believe in and pessoa seems to not lost that capacity to be a child and and that had a lot to do with him also refusing any commitments when he grew up he didn't want to he didn't want to grow up he wants to assume responsibilities and that one okay thank you very much Thank You Richard this was a wonderful lecture and it's a small reception right here so please enjoy this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov

Channel: Library of Congress

Views: 29,149

Keywords: Library of Congress, Fernando Pessoa (Author), Poetry

Id: r788Xw6xU0U

Length: 64min 12sec (3852 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 22 2015