The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa Read Free Page B

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 areÁlvaro 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 was conceived in 1907 or 1908. Most of Pessoa’s literary criticism is difficult to date, but parts of “Concerning Oscar Wilde” were surely written in the early 1910s. One of Pessoa’s notes suggests that his writings on American millionaires date from around 1915.
    The bibliography contains a complete list of the published Portuguese sources for the translated selections; in cases where there may be doubt, the notes specify which title from the bibliography contains the source text for a given selection. All selections written by Pessoa in English were transcribed directly from the original manuscripts; instances of previous publication are noted. The archival reference numbers for all previously unpublished manuscripts and for all newly transcribed ones are recorded in the notes, which also elucidate historical, biographical, and cultural references. The frequent alternate wordings that Pessoa jotted in the margins of his manuscripts have not been recorded except in one or two instances.
    This edition would never have been possible without the pioneering work of Teresa Rita Lopes. Her various books have made available several hundred previously unpublished poems and prose pieces by Pessoa. Her
Pessoa por Conhecer
, in particular, mapped out vast areas of the Pessoa archives that had been all but unknown.
    Symbols Used in the Text
...... place where the author broke off a sentence or left blank space for one or more words
[?] conjectural reading of the author’s handwriting
[...] 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 an endnote

Thanks ...
     
    to Teresa Rita Lopes for all her distinguished work in the Pessoa archives and for her personal help and encouragement;
to Luísa Medeiros and especially Manuela Parreira da Silva for their help in deciphering;
to José Blanco for his help locating and supplying source materials;
to Manuela Correia Lopes, Manuela Neves, and Manuela Rocha for their help interpreting;
to Anna Klobucka, Carlo Vinti, Didier Povéda, and Oliver Marhall for their research assistance;
to Martin Earl and Amy Hundley for their help in making selections and reviewing the essay matter.
    Richard Zenith
     
    Lisbon
December 2000

The Selected Prose of FERNANDO PESSOA
     

ASPECTS
     
    Pessoa probably wrote this preface, which would have appeared in the first volume of his complete heteronymic works, in the early or mid ig2os. In fact, Pessoa, as was so often the case, left several pieces for the preface—two of them typed, one handwritten—without articulating them into a final version. The handwritten fragment (not published here) explains that the heteronyms embody different “aspects,” or sides, of a reality whose existence is