The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa Read Free Page A

the week before he died), and he redirected his British publishing hopes to the realm of prose. In the 1930s he was writing 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, sometimeslapsing into Portuguese syntactical patterns, but even as a student at Durban High School his English was not quite like everyone else’s. Pessoa had little social involvement with his classmates, 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 stiffer, wordier, 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 infelicities 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 more than a dozen of his literary personas. 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 introductions, by supplying background information, are meant to minimize that danger.
    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. The pieces taken from
The Book of Disquiet
, for instance, are complete pieces; none has been abridged. A few fragments from other Portuguese works have been cut short, but not cut and spliced.
    The writings in English, on the other hand, have been frequently pruned. Rather than “clean