In 1968, when an interviewer asked Jorge Luis Borges what he thought of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, the great explorer of the literary labyrinth responded, "Who is he?" Portugal, alas, is one of the most overlooked outposts of Europe. The...
[more]In 1968, when an interviewer asked Jorge Luis Borges what he thought of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, the great explorer of the literary labyrinth responded, "Who is he?" Portugal, alas, is one of the most overlooked outposts of Europe. The North's snobbery towards the South is one of the causes; the other is the fascist dictator Salazar, who cast a cultural pall over the country for much of the twentieth century.
Though positioned at the fringe of Europe and held back by an autocratic regime, Portugal produced one of Modernism's greatest poets -- a writer who easily stands alongside Germany's Rilke, Spain's Lorca, France's Apollinaire, and Ireland's Yeats.
But Pessoa has, until recently, been conspicuously neglected; a master of disguises, he might have welcomed this fate.
Pessoa was a poet who refused to be himself. He was a poet of mirrors, of the overlapping layers of consciousness, of the many facets of identity that refuse to be unified under one rubric. Self, in Pessoa, was always in tension with Other. As Edwin Honig commented, "The other contains the various fragments of an 'I' that the poet tries to mask and reveal at the same time." The masks Pessoa employed are his 'heteronyms' (his term), a system of alternative identities that go beyond mere pseudonyms.
There was Alberto Caeiro, the pastoral visionary; Alvaro de Campos, the Futurist; Ricardo Reis, the refined classicist; and finally Fernando Pessoa himself, the Symbolist. Each of these four personae had his own poetic style, his own view of the universe, even his own height, birthplace, and in some cases, his own date and time of death. (A fifth identity was Bernardo Soares, a bookkeeper who only wrote prose.) Like a consummate actor, Pessoa commented, 'To pretend is to know thyself.' Each of his heteronyms had a seemingly authentic voice and life.
The subject matter of each is starkly different. Caiero writes, "My soul is like a shepherd/ knows the wind and sun/ and goes hand in hand with the Season/ to follow and listen." Then we turn to the poetry of Campos and read, "I am tired/ I have a terrible cold." Or if we flip the page to Ricardo Reis: "Hate you, Christ, I do not, or seek. I believe/ In you as in the other gods, your elders."
Pessoa discovered within himself multiple voices, multiple identities: "I am a nomadic wanderer through my consciousness," he wrote. What his exploration unearthed cannot simply be reduced into one man, one poetry, or one philosophy. A poetic oeuvre springs forth that is novelistic, for Pessoa conceived his poets like characters in a novel. It is also a play -- both the actor and the performance. The journey enabled the poet to become all-inclusive, omniscient. He put down the pen and examined his own mind, and through self-scrutiny discovered the universal.
Standing at the dawn of the twentieth century, Pessoa crawled inward to discover the complicated forces operating in modern man. "To feel is to create," he wrote. "To feel is to think without ideas, and therefore, feeling is understanding, given that the universe has no ideas...Feeling opens the doors of the prison in which thought locks the soul." To read Pessoa is to delve into a world where the maxim, the desire to express the truth, is the only rule. Finally, the poet is among us, in all his manifestations.
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