This last weekend, the 29th and 30th of March, I was in Brooklyn attending two poetry events, both at Unnamable Books. The first was readings from Fernando Pessoa, organized by Leonor Grave as part of Disquiet Radio, a freeform internet radio program about the life and work of the Portuguese poet, broadcast every Tuesday at 4 PM on Radio Free Brooklyn. The second event was a book release of My Heart Has So Many Flaws, a poetry collection by Robert Walser, translated by my colleague at Sublunary Editions, Kristofer Minta, who is an excellent poet in his own right—as all translators of poetry ought to be. Both events were small, just as the bookstore itself is small, with no more than a dozen and a half people in attendance, the perfect amount for a literary function and considerate towards these two unfortunate writers, who enjoyed very little fame in their lifetimes and likely preferred it that way. Too much attention might have embarrassed them both.
I’ll have more to say about Walser on his birthday, April 15th, but before I write about Pessoa, I’d like to reflect on how lovely it was to travel through the State of New Jersey, just as the trees were coming into blossom. Along the interstate, along the highway thoroughfares, along the margin strips of half-vacated shopping mall complexes, blossoms were feathering lightly into the air, cherry and plum, magnolias of all kinds. The state earned its epithet, as it does every spring, the awakening earth all the more vibrant for those pastel patches, in between the abandoned textile mills and rusted chemical holding tanks, as eloquent as Pessoa and Walser could be about the season, both of them very much having a knack for springtime.
Pessoa might seem like a narrow subject for a weekly radio program, until you consider its limited run (Disquiet Radio will broadcast about a year give or take) and then just how much the poet produced in his brief life for us to examine and interpret. 25,000 manuscript pages were left in a large trunk at the time of his death at the age of 47, the cause commonly given as cirrhosis or some other condition resulting from Pessoa’s alcoholism. One imagines the hinges of the trunk creaking as he shuts it for the last time, motes of dust swirling in the weak November light, his fingers pale against the dark red wood, their motion momentarily arrested, paused in brief uncertainty, and then drawing the lid down, closing it for good.
I got to know Lenore when she reached out to me regarding some of her own translations from Portuguese, specifically of the contemporary writer Teresa Veiga, a project I wish her the best in realizing, regardless of what form might take. Disquiet Radio covers quite different territory, temporally if not geographically speaking. Pessoa died a decade before Veiga was born. The former is now comfortably residing in the canon, while the latter is still writing, or is at least still alive, which provides an excellent occasion for literary work. With canonical writers, there is always a danger of falling into some kind of dull conventional presentation. With the living, there is time to ask, “Am I getting this all wrong? Am I embarrassing you?” But Pessoa being Pessoa, or better stated, Pessoa being Pessoa by not being Pessoa, there is plenty of opportunity to approach his life and work in a fresh way.
A favorite Disquiet episode of mine, both in its subject and presentation, is on the “breakthrough day” of March 8th, 1914. On that day, as Pessoa later claimed, he wrote thirty poems “in a kind of ecstasy”, all of them authored by the “rather complicated bucolic poet” Alberto Caeiro. This was the first of Pessoa’s fictive poetic identities or heteronyms. (In writing about these heteronyms, it’s difficult to use the conventional present tense of literary criticism, as if the heteronyms had lived and died with their creator, which is of course not the case; this is precisely why Pessoa used the technique, an accession to posterity by erasure of the self.)
Unlike Pessoa the city-dweller, Caeiro lived in the countryside, was uneducated for the most part and remained happily ignorant of contemporary literature. He didn’t work as a shepherd but identified closely with them, being at home in the open air, where he could observe the land as it changed with the seasons. Pessoa’s often bitter fatalism is moderated in Caeiro, whose thoughts about fate and mortality reflect the sad but relieved weariness of someone who has worked very hard throughout their life.
Let’s be simple and calm, Like the streams and the trees, And God will love us by making us Ourselves, just as the trees are trees, And the streams are streams, And he will give us greenness in his springtime, And a river to join when we reach our end… And nothing more, because to give us more would be to take from us.
(from The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari)
As Richard Zenith notes in his monumental biography of Pessoa, the manuscripts don’t support the narrative that he later told others, that he composed these works in a flurry of creative ecstasy. They were the result of weeks and months, not hours. However, the creation of Alberto Caeiro marked a turning point in Pessoa’s poetic career. It would be impossible to imagine him without Caeiro or Álvaro de Campos or Ricardo Reis or the myriad other personas that he adopted. He didn’t write 30 poems in one sitting, sure, but the real event was just as spectacular.
Another excellent episode of Disquiet Radio focuses on a less well-known aspect of Pessoa’s career: poetry written under his own name in English. Another colleague at Sublunary, Jessica Sequeira, talked to Leonor about this fascinating (though less essential) body of work, focusing on The Mad Fiddler, a collection Pessoa wrote between 1910 and 1917.
It might seem odd to have a classic Portuguese writer compose in English, and stranger still to have one concentrate so much effort and stake so much of his artistic identity on that work. Not long after he dreamed up Caeiro, Pessoa wrote to several eminent literary critics and editors in Britain, seeking publication for The Mad Fiddler, though none took him up on the offer.
Pessoa was steeped in English as a child growing up in colonial South Africa, where he lived with his mother and stepfather, a military officer attached to the Portuguese consul in Durban. This unique background, at once isolated, repressive, and cosmopolitan—(Gandhi lived in Durban at the same time)—shaped the young Pessoa, leading to a lifelong Anglophilia as well as a preoccupation with Portugal’s own imperial past.
Unlike the clear and direct language of Caeiro, the Mad Fiddler is highly disjointed, filled with grotesque images and archaic language. Like the rest of his poetry, the outlook could be fatalistic, concerned but instead of the gentle rhythms of nature, a ranting obsessive voice pervades, charged with erotic and occult imagery:
She the despised communion owes To vice of tainting holy things And making eucharists of throes When lust thickens with pin‑soft wings For her mouth red till purple is black Supplies a space in the lost rites And intermits our heart‑beats' track Senseward to demon infinites Till on the point of the spasm cast Like a mantle on consciousness The veil is rent in temple waste And the tongue‑flowers remouth from Space
From “Fever-Garden” in The Mad Fiddler
As Leonor and Jessica discuss, editing Pessoa’s poetry can be highly problematic. The vast majority of his work went unpublished during his lifetime, discovered posthumously in that trunk. A state of archival equality exists, with an obscure work like The Mad Fiddler standing alongside The Book of Disquiet, unquestionably Pessoa’s most famous work, in the same jumbled, fragmentary state.
Even though Pessoa wrote the The Mad Fiddler under his own name, The Book of Disquiet feels closer to the actual “person” Pessoa was. Though the excerpts published in his lifetime were ascribed to “Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon” they were signed using his actual name. I’m reminded of how Heinrich von Kleist would ascribe his writing to some anonymous correspondent in the Berliner Abendblätter, with the reading public of the city knowing full well he was behind almost everything the newspaper published.
Soares was not a true heteronym, Pessoa later wrote, but a “mutilation” of his own personality. Perhaps it is this closeness to Pessoa that makes The Book of Disquiet so tricky to interpret. Are Soares’s bitter rants against women and romantic love also the author’s, or a detached ideology that Pessoa constructed, like Caeiro’s pastoralism? Detail can be lost with proximity as well as distance. The eye has a certain range in which it can effectively focus. Objects become blurry, doubled. But the value of Pessoa’s work and life doesn’t hinge on any one interpretation. Just as the poet split his soul into multiples of itself, so we can hold multiple attitudes and ideas about him, taking each trace as it appears and then vanishes in the record of his life.
With its freeform, improvisatory format, Disquiet Radio expresses that essential multiplicity well. Readings from Pessoa and Zenith’s Biography are supplemented with related authors and thematically appropriate music, including Jessica’s music project Lux Violeta, which adapts Latin American poets such as Gabriela Mistral into a sort of sumptuous folk ambient haze. I’m excited to see how this project develops, taking on new aspects as it goes; Pessoa tends to have that effect.