An outstanding Portuguese writer

Last week, in this column, I focused on the gathering importance of Alain Badiou, the French philosopher and writer, as a formidable intellectual presence. One of the writers he deeply admires is the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa ( 1888-1935) is emerging as one of the most important European poets; he has begun to exercise the same kind of fascination that Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Wallace Stevens engender in English-speaking countries. During his lifetime ( Pessoa died at the comparatively young age of 47), he was hardly known even in Portugal. However, after his death, his reputation began to soar both in Portugal and Brazil. Today, he is celebrated as a significant and representative voice of European modernism.

Fernando Pessoa is virtually unknown in Sri Lanka. Even in other Anglophone countries, it is only during the last few years that his work has begun to generate the kind of interest he richly deserves. The eminent American literary critic, Harold Bloom, in his book "The Western Canon", has written glowingly about him. Bloom said that, Pablo Neruda and Fernando Pessoa are the two most representative poets of the twentieth century. Similarly, the celebrated cultural critic George Steiner showered praise on his prose work, "The Book of Disquiet", which is an intimate diary that amounts to a near-novel.

The Nobel prize-winning Mexican author, Octavio Paz, was also extravagant in his praise of Fernando Pessoa's work. Paz said that, 'Pessoa is among the modernist giants in whose shadow we live, and who made our century one of extraordinary poetic richness.'

Pessoa was born in Lisbon on 13 June 1888. His father died when Pessoa was five years old, and in the following year he married the Portuguese consul in South Africa and they all sailed for Durban where they took up residence. Pessoa stayed in South Africa until the age of seventeen. He mastered the English language, and not surprisingly his early efforts at creative writing were in English. He was fond of English literature and this left an indelible mark on his imagination.

At the age of seventeen he returned to Portugal and never left the country. He came back with the intention of pursuing higher studies in Lisbon, but later abandoned the idea. He earned a living as a translator, while writing critical essays and poems most of which were not published. After his death, nearly 25,000 pieces of his writings "essays, aphorisms, poems, plays" were found in various stages of completion in a trunk of his. Very little of his creative writings were published during his lifetime. One of the poets that influenced him greatly is Walt Whitman, and many of his works bear the distinct imprint of Whitman's poetry. For example, in the poem titled "Salutation to Walt Whitman" he says.

From here in Portugal, with all past ages in my brain I salute you, Walt,

I salute you, my brother in the universe

I, with my monocle and tightly buttoned frock coat,

I am not unworthy of you.

O One of his works that merits close analysis is "Message" that can be regarded as a celebration of the achievements and glories of Portugal.

It deals with well-known personages in Portuguese history, but he gives them a new inflection; he constructs a new spiritual narrative to understand better the past of his native land. This is a poem, as Harold Bloom rightly points out, that reminds us of Hart Crane's poem "The Bridge". In this poem, Hart Crane delineates urban America in a critical light but holds out the prospect of a national regeneration that keeps the initial promise. English readers keen to acquire a deeper understand of Fernando Pessoa's work could read with profit works such as "The Keeper of Sheep", "The Poems of Fernando Pessoa", "Always Astonished" and "The Book of Disquiet". One central theme that dominated his writings is the tedium of life and the anguish of loneliness. This theme emerges from his deep desire to understand the complexities of self-identity. As he proclaims -

Between sleep and dream,

Between me and my mind

Is what I think I am,

Flows a river without end

These themes are intertwined with his obsession with the nature of reality and the many faces it presents to us. As the following passage illustrates, poetry is the unveiling of unreality.

Through his incandescent intensity, he is able to give permanent shape to fleeting emotions and make his imaginary worlds come alive with conviction.

Between the moonlight and the foliage

Between the stillness and the grove

Between the fact of night and the fact of breeze,

A secret passes.

My soul follows it as it passes.

Clearly, Pessoa is of his epoch and was not insensitive to the convulsions of national life; however his primary focus of interest was the kaleidoscope of changing interior landscapes of the mind. And he is more interested in self-introspection than self-exculpation.

A distinctive feature of Pessoa's poetry is what he referred to as heteronyms. What he meant by this is the interplay of different imaginary authors brought to life by a real author within his or her oeuvre.

This is very different from writing anonymously or deploying a pseudonym. As a child, in his writings, Pessoa wrote under the name of different imaginary authors, and this practice continued throughout his life. In all, it is estimated that he pressed into service more that eighty such imaginary authors.

However, it seems to me, that there are four among them who stand out by their compelling personalities and individual talent; they are Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Alvaro de Campos and Bernardo Soares. What is interesting about this move is that Pessoa is able to give his imaginary characters, distinctive physiognomies, philosophies, attitudes to life, writing styles and rhetorical strategies. They often criticize each other; hence, these imaginary characters carry complete conviction and put into play a distinct poetic discourse that has now come to be associated with the poetry of Pessoa.

This concept of heteronym proponed by Fernando Pessoa deserves closer analysis, in view of the fact that it holds great promise for understanding the nature of poetic discourse and poetic subjectivity.

Basically, to my mind, there are two approaches to the decoding of Pessoa's effort. First, we can construct a meta -personality of Pessoa, as some critics have done, and bring the competing personalities, under one master poetic authorship. The second approach is to allow the heteronyms to function as sovereign beings without seeking to herd them into a narrow and unified shelter.

Poetry is polyphonic, multi-faceted and Pessoa was constantly troubled by the protean nature of poetic identity. Hence, it seems to me the better course of action is not to impose a meta-personality and undermine the individual life of the rival voices. Pessoa distinguished himself as a writer of verse and prose. His booking prose "The Book of Disquiet" is an intimate diary. It is an inexhaustible jumble of descriptions, observations, reflections, aphorisms, images, dreams, hallucinations, that display vividly his restless mind. This book was written under the name of Bernado Soares ; it was another heteronym of his. "The Book of Disquiet" is fragmentary and incomplete; it is a work in progress; this very tentativeness and hesitancy constitute a part of its seductive power. The book is full of statements driven by the force of paradox. Here are some examples; "Some people have one great dream in life which they fail to fulfill. Others have no dream at all and fail to fulfill even that." "I do not know if I exist" it seems possible to me that I might be someone else's dream". "Life is the hesitation between exclamation and a question". "I ask and continue. I write down the question, I wrap it up in new sentences, unravel it to form new emotions". "I have no ambition, no desires. To be a poet is not my ambition, it's simply my way of being alone." "The outside world exists like an actor on a stage: it's there, but it's pretending to be something else. "George Steiner thought very highly of "The Book of Disquiet", and rated it as a defining text of the modern world; he remarked that "the fragmentary, the incomplete, is the essence of Pessoa's spirit." It is indeed true that Pessoa is a powerful voice of European literary modernism. However, with "The Book of Disquiet", with its fragmentation, playfulness, divided subjectivities, he seems to have entered the terrain of post-modernity. Prof. John Gray of the University of London remarked that, "Long before post-modernism became an academic industry, Pessoa lived deconstruction.

Yet few of those who write so laboriously about postmodern irony have heard of its supreme practitioner.

Because Fernando Pessoa constantly chose to revisit a set of privileged themes, I feel that there is certain repetitiveness in his work. In addition, some of his metaphysical poetry remains trapped in that rarefied atmosphere. His work is also, at times marked by a disconcerting posturing. Despite these shortcomings, Pessoa is a poet who should be studied closely, and from whom profitable morals can be drawn. For those of us in Sri Lanka, his poetry has a two-pronged relevance. First, he succeeded in combining the desire to reach out into the complexities of the modern while seeking out the voice of tradition as a guiding imperative. Being the insightful poet he was, he knew that the only fruitful way of transcending the past was not by rejecting it but by developing it.

Second, at a time when many modern Sinhala poets are displaying an interest in writing "philosophical poetry", he can serve as an object lesson as he has shown one possible way towards the achievement of this difficult goal.