The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa Read Free

in
Message
and 35
Sonnets
) toorganize 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 many of the finished and even unfinished passages from
The Book of Disquiet
But the page of perfectly gauged 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—or so he wrote in a letter breaking off with Ophelia Queiroz, his only paramour—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 what was probably 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 circlingthem 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 his first poems, stories, and essays were all 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 examinees (of which there were 899) seeking admission to 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 three or four 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 he was setting the stage for his own arrival. 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 the self-published volumes—which Pessoa sent to various British journals and newspapers—received guardedly favorable reviews. At that point Pessoa’s production of English poetry dropped off considerably (though he continued to write poems in English up until