Selected English Poems

Auteur

Fernando Pessoa is one of the great poets of the 20th Century, and is still something of a mystery to readers outside Portugal and Brazil, where his work has been elevated to classic status. Most puzzling for his readers, perhaps, is the fact that Pessoa wrote under a series of of other names (heteronyms, as he called them) and confusingly also under the 'orthonym' Fernando Pessoa, who is not the same person as the man born with that name. The major poetic heteronyms are Caeiro, Campos and Ricardo Reis, but Pessoa had a whole range of others: journalists, prose-writers, essayists, as well as two English poets in the form of Charles Robert Anon and Alexander Search, heteronyms used by Pessoa before the break-through year of 1914, when Reis, Caeiro and Campos all came into existence. Little of his work was published in book form during his lifetime: two slim volumes of English verse and the mature collection Mensagem (Message), but he left a trunk full of manuscripts and fragments (some 25,000 all told) and these have been mined by scholars ever since.

Texte du rabat

Pessoa wrote a large number of poems in English, some of them in the guise of early heteronyms (such as Alexander Search and Charles Robert Anon) which prove to be fascinating precursors of the later, modernist work in Portuguese. While not the equal of the masterly Caeiro, Campos, Reis or Pessoa-himself, these poems deserve to be better known and at least available in the English-speaking world.Pessoa was educated in English in Durban, as the stepson of a Portuguese diplomat, and was completely bilingual. He translated several books from English for Portuguese publishing houses. The sometimes startlingly frank content of the earlier English poems (published privately in Lisbon) may well have prevented their wider dissemination in more prudish British circles. What is not so well-known is that Pessoa continued to write poetry in a bookish form of English throughout his life and this volume is an attempt to show the nature of that work to its originally intended audience: an anglophone readership.