The Politics of Fernando Pessoa(newleftreview.org)
newleftreview.org
The Politics of Fernando Pessoa
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii129/articles/nick-burns-the-politics-of-fernando-pessoa
17 comments
A thousand times this. Poema em Linha Reta was one of those things that opened my eyes about human nature when I met the author as a teenager.
> I often think Fernando Pessoa is the #1 thing one misses out on by not speaking Portuguese.
Curiously, I have this same thought whenever I read Pessoa.
Curiously, I have this same thought whenever I read Pessoa.
I'm currently learning European Portuguese, and I can't wait to be able to read Pessoa in the original.
Also, I had no idea pessoa meant person. TIL!
Also, I had no idea pessoa meant person. TIL!
Love that you're picking up a new language, but that sentence sounded oddly specific. It's akin to saying I'm learning Australian or British English as opposed to just English. Yes, there are vocab and sometimes grammatical differences (e.g. I lost the key vs I've lost the key), but it's 99% the same language.
If you go to the OS language selection on your computer, you'll probably find 'Portuguese - BR' (Brazilian) and 'Portuguese - PT' (Portugal). Sometimes you'll find subtitles on Netflix described as either Brazilian Portuguese or Portugal's Portuguese. It's the same language, but the difference is way greater than australian and british english. Sentence structure varies, some vocabulary, etc.
As someone who is familiar with both, they're slowly becoming different languages. The pronounciation is radically different, the grammar has already differed in some pronouns and conjugations (e.g. gerund) for a long time, vocabulary differences are slowly accumulating and we'll see how orthography continues to evolve. We're not quite at the Scots vs. English point yet especially because of shared media but it won't surprise me if it doesn't take too much longer to surpass that.
I don't find it that odd. As I'm sure you know, there are fairly large differences in pronunciation. Larger than the differences between European and Latin American Spanish, for example. I read once somewhere that in Brazil, if a Portuguese person is being interviewed on TV (on the news, for example), often times they will add subtitles. I am also learning Portuguese and whenever I search for resources, I make sure they are for the Brazilian variety.
Everyone in Portugal has to study some of his work when we are about 17 or so. For your average 17th year old this is of course an absolute waste of time but I did have enough sensibilities at the time to appreciate it and maybe it’s time I revisit. I remember Alvaro de Campos being my favorite but I think I would gravitate more towards Alberto Caeiro nowadays.
Anyway I wonder how his work translates to English… I don’t want to be snobbish but I think a lot would be lost.
> In 1926 Pessoa published, anonymously in a republican newspaper, a bizarre interview he fabricated with a fictitious Italian antifascist who pronounces Mussolini a madman, and then goes on to declare that fascism is only a ruse. The world is ‘directed by special forces’, whose nature he declines to elaborate. The document is a mishmash of genuine antifascist sentiments held by Pessoa and an irrepressibly crankish streak of his own. When the Italian embassy wrote to complain that Angioletti did not exist, Pessoa happily forged another letter as Angioletti maintaining that he did
This is hilarious, not just because it's trolling fascists but because it's completely consistent with Pessoa's belief that fictional characters can be just as "real" as real people. Reminds me of this passage from Book of Disquiet:
> No one, I suppose, genuinely admits the real existence of another person. We may concede that the person is alive and that he thinks and feels as we do, but there will always be an unnamed element of difference, a materialized inequality. There are figures from the past and living images from books that are more real to us than the incarnate indifferences that talk to us over shop counters, or happen to glance at us in the trams, or brush against us in the dead happenstance of the streets. Most people are no more for us than scenery, generally the invisible scenery of a street we know by heart.
> I feel more kinship and intimacy with certain characters described in books and certain images I’ve seen in prints than I feel with many so-called real people, who are of that metaphysical insignificance known as flesh and blood. And ‘flesh and blood’ in fact describes them rather well: they’re like chunks of meat displayed in the window of a butcher’s, dead things bleeding as if they were alive, shanks and cutlets of Destiny.
> I’m not ashamed of feeling this way, as I’ve discovered that’s how everyone feels. What seems to lie behind people’s mutual contempt and indifference, such that they can kill each other like assassins who don’t really feel they’re killing, or like soldiers who don’t think about what they’re doing, is that no one pays heed to the apparently abstruse fact that other people are also living souls.
This is hilarious, not just because it's trolling fascists but because it's completely consistent with Pessoa's belief that fictional characters can be just as "real" as real people. Reminds me of this passage from Book of Disquiet:
> No one, I suppose, genuinely admits the real existence of another person. We may concede that the person is alive and that he thinks and feels as we do, but there will always be an unnamed element of difference, a materialized inequality. There are figures from the past and living images from books that are more real to us than the incarnate indifferences that talk to us over shop counters, or happen to glance at us in the trams, or brush against us in the dead happenstance of the streets. Most people are no more for us than scenery, generally the invisible scenery of a street we know by heart.
> I feel more kinship and intimacy with certain characters described in books and certain images I’ve seen in prints than I feel with many so-called real people, who are of that metaphysical insignificance known as flesh and blood. And ‘flesh and blood’ in fact describes them rather well: they’re like chunks of meat displayed in the window of a butcher’s, dead things bleeding as if they were alive, shanks and cutlets of Destiny.
> I’m not ashamed of feeling this way, as I’ve discovered that’s how everyone feels. What seems to lie behind people’s mutual contempt and indifference, such that they can kill each other like assassins who don’t really feel they’re killing, or like soldiers who don’t think about what they’re doing, is that no one pays heed to the apparently abstruse fact that other people are also living souls.
For those who never heard of him the intro from wikipedia does a good job summarizing his style, which the article goes into more depth:
"Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he created approximately seventy-five others, of which three stand out, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that they did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. These imaginary figures sometimes held unpopular or extreme views."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Pessoa
"Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he created approximately seventy-five others, of which three stand out, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that they did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. These imaginary figures sometimes held unpopular or extreme views."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Pessoa
Or just open up the book of disquiet without any context about the author. It’s better that way.
Excited to see Fernando Pessoa on HN. He's easily my favorite poet. The Book of Disquiet is under appreciated and I've recommended it to many friends.
When I think of Pessoa, I can't help but think of a few lines by the Chinese poet Hanshan (1): "Meanwhile the moon of our mind shines bright. / How can phenomena compare?"
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanshan_(poet)
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanshan_(poet)
That turgid, wall-of-text article is the absolute antithesis of Pessoa's beautiful, philoso-dream writings.
These things are highly subjective but he's easily my favorite 20th century poet. So creative, incredibly deep, yet so accessible. But as these things go, there's always a loss of fidelity in translation, particularly to non-Romance languages.
If anyone wants to tap straight into Pessoa's world with two flawless poems, you can't go wrong with "Tabacaria" (Tobacco Shop — https://www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/pessoa/TobaccoShop.htm...) and "Poema em Linha Reta" (Poem in a Straight Line — https://thenewloud.tumblr.com/post/11328170683/poem-in-a-str...).
"If only I could eat chocolate / with as much truth as you do!"