>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. [ Silence ] >> Georgette Dorn: This wonderful symposium was the idea of the Secretary of State for Culture of Portugal, Dr. Jorge Barreto Xavier. And it was his idea when he asked Belington [phonetic] that he should -- or my big chief, Dr. Belington to have an event honoring Fernando Pessoa, the world's greatest poet of the early 20th -- late 19th and early 20th Century. It is a great pleasure to have Dr. Barreto Xavier here with us, and the ambassador of Portugal, [inaudible]. We also want to thank the category deposit of Portugal for helping with this event. And it is my great pleasure to introduce Richard Zenith, who is the world's greatest expert on Fernando Pessoa. Richard Zenith was born in Washington, DC, studied at the University of Virginia, and has won many, many awards during his illustrious career for translating for many Portuguese authors, including Fernando Pessoa, [inaudible], Sophia Mellow [phonetic], but I understand there are many others. And he has 19 hits in the Library of Congress catalog. It is a great pleasure to welcome Richard Zenith. Thank you. [ Applause ] [ Silence ] [Background Conversation] [Silence] >> Richard Zenith: Thank you very much, Georgette, for that kind introduction. And it's a pleasure to be here at the Library of Congress, and I thank everybody, including the Department of Culture of Portugal, and other -- the Library itself, and other institutions and people that made this event possible. And I was born in Washington, DC so it's a pleasure to be here and talking about Pessoa in Washington. So my title today is -- you see what's written there. And so I've got some images to show, and I'll kind of be going through Pessoa's life and talking about his work and particularly the importance of the English language and English language literature for his own creative work. There are other poets as -- sorry, [inaudible]. There are other poets who are as great as Pessoa, but perhaps none who are so vast. Pessoa wrote under dozens of different names, but the main ones he called "heteronyms," "hetero," "other," "nym," "name." And according to Pessoa, these heteronyms had their own personalities, points of view, and poetic styles that differed from one to another, and they differed from Pessoa's own personality, opinions, and literary style or styles. Pessoa's 3 most important full-fledged heteronyms all emerged in 1914 when he was 26 years old. Pessoa was born in 1888, died 1935. I have the wrong book here; [laughter] another one. [ Silence ] So the first of these 3 main heteronyms that emerged in 1918, the first one was called "Alberto Caeiro," was born in Pessoa's soul, if you will, in the month of March. In fact, the first dated poem of Alberto Caeiro is from March 4th, this day, but 101 years ago. Caeiro was considered the master of the other 2 heteronyms, and indeed of Pessoa himself. According to his biography, he was born in Lisbon in 1889, one year after Fernando Pessoa himself, and he died from tuberculosis already in 1915. Alberto Caeiro lived in the country, but although he was called a keeper of sheep, he never actually kept sheep. He claimed to have no philosophy, and aspired to see things as things, without any added thought. Here's a poem of Alberto Caeiro, my translation. "I'm a keeper of sheep. The sheep are my thoughts. And each thought a sensation. I think with my eyes and my ears. And with my hands and feet, and with my nose and mouth. To think a flower is to see and smell it. And to eat a fruit is to know its meaning. That is why on a hot day when I enjoy it so much I feel sad, and I lie down on the grass and close my warm eyes, then I feel my whole body lying down in reality. I know the truth, and I'm happy." Ricardo Reis [phonetic], another heteronym of Pessoa, was born a few months -- born in Pessoa's soul a few months later, also in 1914. According to his biography, he was born in 1887, not in Lisbon, like Caeiro, but in El Porto, the second city of Portugal in the north. Portugal became a republic in 1910, but Ricardo Reis was a royalist. His last name means "kings." And when a movement to restore the monarchy was crushed in 1919, Heish, according to this biography, fled to Brazil. Ricardo Reis wrote Horatian style odes in Portuguese. He kept a strict meter, but did not rhyme. Alberto Caeiro had a free-verse style, almost never rhymes, and did not keep a strict meter. Ricardo Reis, his poetry talks a lot as the poetry of Horace, about the vanity of life and acceptance of it as such. One of his odes goes like this, "Let the gods take from me by their high and secretly wrought will all glory, love, and wealth. All I ask is that they leave my lucid and solemn consciousness of beings and of things. Love and glory don't matter to me. Wealth is a metal. Glory, and echo, and love a shadow. But accurate attention given to the forms and properties of objects is a sure refuge. Its foundations are all the world. Its love is a placid universe. Its wealth is life. Its glory is the supreme certainty of solemnly and clearly possessing the forms of objects. Other things pass and fear death, but the clear and useless vision of the universe fears and suffers nothing. Self-sufficing, it desires nothing but the pride of always seeing clearly until it no longer sees." So in Ricardo Reis, there are some things that are similar to Alberto Caeiro, but he talks a lot about form, and talks about the forms of objects. Alvara de Campos, the third in this trio of heteronyms, according to his script he was born in 1890, 2 years after Pessoa in Tavira, in the Algarve in Southern Portugal. He was a naval engineer who studied in Glasgow, Scotland, traveled all around the world. And his motto was, "To feel everything in every way possible." He was a self-proclaimed futurist, initially, who celebrated machines in the modern age. His very first poem was called "The Triumphal Ode." It's a long rant actually, and I'm just going to read some of the opening. "By the painful light of the factory's huge electric lamps, I write in a fever. I write gnashing my teeth rapid for the beauty of all this. For this beauty completely unknown to the ancients. Oh, wheels, oh gears, eternal [makes sound] bridal convulsions of raging mechanisms, raging in me and outside me, through all my dissected nerves, through all the pely [phonetic] of everything I feel with. My lips are parched, oh great modern noises, from hearing you at too close a range. And my head burns with the desire to proclaim you in an explosive song telling my every sensation, and explosiveness contemporaneous with you, oh machines. If I could express my whole being like an engine, if I could be complex like a machine, if I could go triumphantly through life like the latest model car, if at least I could inject all this into my physical being, rip myself wide open and become pervious to all the perfumes from the oils and hot coals of the stupendous [phonetic], artificial, and insatiable black flora." And it goes on, and on, and on in this vein. So you can see that each of these main heteronyms is quite different, and you can see that Pessoa was very multiple. Pessoa also wrote a lot of poetry under his own name, and under his own name his poetry was varied. Pessoa talked about the sub-personalities of Fernando Pessoa himself. Sometimes Fernando Pessoa himself was a symbolist, kind of a movement from the late 19th Century. He was also an experimenter and so invented some of his own movements, his own isms, such as intersectionism, which is a kind of cubism applied to literature. Fernando Pessoa also wrote esoteric poems, political and patriotic poems. Pessoa himself tends to rhyme and maintains a consistent meter. Much of his poetry was also rather intimate, and apparently autobiographical. I'm going to read to you now a short poem, signed by Pessoa himself, and this was actually the first poem he published as an adult. I'm reading my translation. "Oh, church bell of my village, each of your plaintiff tolls, filling the calm evening rings inside my soul. And your ringing is so slow, so as if life made you sad that already your first clang seems like a repeated sound. However closely you touch me, when I pass by or was drifting. You are to me like a dream. In my soul your ringing is distant. With every clang you make, resounding across the sky, I feel the past further away. I feel nostalgia close by." Pessoa, with all of his heteronyms and all of the things he did under his own name, was imminently playful. But the heteronyms were not just a literary gimmick. In Pessoa's last year in 1935, he wrote a letter explaining that already as a small child he had invented his first heteronym, a French knight called "Chevalier de Pas," in whose name Pessoa wrote letters to himself. [Laughter] Pessoa's mother was born in the Azores, but came to the mainland as a small girl. She had a birthday book, which is this birthday book you see, the "Floral Birthday Book." Now, what was a birthday book, it was a common thing in Victorian England. The birthday book was to remember the birthdays of all your relatives and friends. So for each day of the year there would be a little poem, a flower, in this particular birthday book, and then a place to write the names of people who were born on that day. Now, this name you see here, this is where Pessoa himself, who was maybe 5, 6 years old, wrote the name, a bit misspelled, of the Chevalier de Pas. And here on another page of the birthday book he did the same thing. These are the earliest examples of Fernando Pessoa's handwriting, these 2 signatures. So you can see that already as a small child he wanted to attribute real existence to his invented characters. Pessoa -- so was endlessly multiple already when he was a child. Now, what made him -- going back to my title, Englishly Portuguese? Well, nearly all of Pessoa's formal education was in English. I told you that that last poem I read, "Oh Church Bell of my Village," was the first one he published as an adult. But he published several English poems as a teenager while living in South Africa. Fernando Pessoa's father died of tuberculosis when Pessoa was 5 years old. And his mother met and fell in love with a ship's captain, who she then married. Pessoa was 7 years old. And the ship's captain in all of this had been named the Portuguese consul general for Durban, the Port of Natal. Natal was an English colony at that time on the eastern seaboard of South Africa. So when Pessoa was 7-1/2 years old, he went with his mother on this ship, the Hawarden Castle, down to South Africa, and he spent 9 years in Durban. This is a postcard of Durban from that time that Pessoa saved. So it was in Durban that Pessoa had most of his formal education. In March of 1897, Pessoa, 7-1/2 years old, almost 8, enrolled in Saint Joseph's Convent School, which was run by French nuns. Pessoa knew no English when he arrived, but he quickly learned English, and he quickly became the best student in the class, even in English. And so he -- the school he did a 5-year course of study in just 3 years. He was a brilliant student. Now, Durban was an interesting place. It was about -- the city was about half white, mostly British colonists, but from some other European countries there were people as well. It was about 1/4 Zulu and 1/4 Indian. Many Indians had been brought to Natal [phonetic] as indentured servants. Others went on their own to work as merchants. Now, one of the Indians who was there in Durban when Pessoa arrived was Mohandas K. Gandhi. And it was actually Durban that Gandhi began all of his movement to gain rights initially just he was thinking about the Indians. And all of this had an effect on Pessoa. Gandhi was so much admired, which comes out in a text he left later in life. But I don't have too much time to get into that. What I will say, though, is that Pessoa had all of this international and multiracial contact. However, his experience in Durban was really a very English experience finally, because he was a bit isolated. He was shy, protected, and the white community there tended to stay to itself. And Pessoa kept his nose in his books. After the Saint Joseph's Convent School, he went to the Durban High School. And here is the teaching staff of Durban High School. The headmaster is there in the middle with his dog, Jack, that looks a little bit like the headmaster. [Laughter] All of these teachers had degrees from British universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge. And Pessoa, who was well-adapted to the teaching methods then in vogue, received an extraordinarily fine very English education. That sometimes happens, you know, in colonies they try to outdo the mother country. And so in a way Durban was probably more English even than England was. Here you see -- this is just a few years later. This is Pessoa with his new family, his mother, stepfather, and some step siblings. Then in May of 1901, shortly before turning 13, Pessoa wrote his oldest known poem, "Separated From Thee." This is the first half of the poem. Pessoa saved the manuscript. It's not really a very good poem, and I'm going to move on. Then a couple of months later the whole family went for a year-long trip to Portugal, so Pessoa's 13 years old at this time, traveled on this steamship, the Kurfurst. And this kind of saved Pessoa for Portuguese literature; because in that year that's where Pessoa -- in Portugal Pessoa had his first burst of real creative activity. He had a lot of time on his hands, no more classes, and so forth. And so one of the things he did he invented these newspapers. He would take paper and make -- this is one of them, called "Hedoy" [phonetic], which we could translate as "The Tattler." And this is just one issue of "The Tattler." He had -- there were many others. And as you can see, he has these columns, and then there's -- in these columns he would fill them with real news, made-up news, poems. You can see there are some -- look like poems. And some of these poems were attributed to other characters, such as Eduardo Lanca, supposedly was born in Brazil. And there was Pancracio, and many other names, so there was a whole team of journalists, maybe about 20 of these journalists that Pessoa made up at this time. And this was all in Portuguese. Then -- but in these poems the English influence is clearly visible. For instance, there's one poem that you can see Elizabeth Browning's most famous sonnet behind it, "How Do I Love Thee, Let Me Count The Ways." And Pessoa's Portuguese poem, the first -- which is also a sonnet, the first and the last verse are very similar to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's. And then he does other things in the middle of the poem so it's a bit different. And he gives a title which is, "Antigone," which has nothing to do with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but it does have to do with Shelley. Shelley in one of his letters in a biography that Pessoa read at that time wrote, "Some of us have in a prior existence been in love with an Antigone. And that makes us find no full content in any mortal ties," so the idea of having this in a prior life is, you know, fabulous, other worldly love. Then in this life there's no one who can really satisfy you in love. And already as a 14-year-old Pessoa, who had just reached puberty, passed his 14th birthday in Portugal June 13th, seemed to have decided he would not be finding full content in any earthly love relationship. Poetry was his passion already as a kid. In another poem that Pessoa wrote in this time, we can trace influences from several Portuguese poets, but also a definite influence from Thomas Gray's famous -- or at least he used to be famous, elegy written in a country churchyard. So Pessoa -- this was -- from the get-go Pessoa, he wasn't writing poems inspired by a little girl, a little boy that he liked and he saw, or his teacher, none of that. He was already making literature. And so he was writing poems based on other poems he read. He would steal this and that, make his own thing. So he's very much a strong poet as defined by Harold Bloom, freely appropriating what others have written and reworking it, and making it his own, and attempting to come up with something better. Well, in the fall of 1902, Pessoa, 14 years old, goes back to Durban on the S.S. Herzog. And in Durban he had, by the way, already -- when he went to Lisbon, he had already completed high school. He was 13 years old. And so then he went to the commercial school to learn things about business, and to -- accounting, that sort of thing. And he did -- later in life back in Lisbon he worked only as a freelance. He never held a real job. But as a freelance he would do a lot of translating and writing letters for firms that did business abroad. He also tried to open up some firms, none of which were successful. So while Pessoa was attending the commercial school, he continued to write and he wrote a lot. There's Pessoa at that time in Durban. Pessoa kept writing more and more poetry in English. And he conceived various English language heteronyms, or pre-heteronyms if you'd like, because maybe the official heteronyms, the ones that are really completely different from Pessoa are those first 3 I mentioned, Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Alvara de Campos. But Pessoa also sometimes would loosely refer to all his fictional authors as heteronyms. So at this time he was writing under the name of various fictional authors that had names such as "Charles Robert Anon." That was one of the main ones. Charles Robert Anon would write poetry, prose, and published a humorous poem in the Natal Mercury, one of the newspapers, the daily newspapers in Durban. That was in 1904. But that was not the first English poem published by Pessoa. One year earlier in 1903 he had published a poem by another heteronym, in the very same paper. The existence of the poem and the heteronym who supposedly wrote it were completely unknown for over 100 years; in fact, until 2010. And it would have remained unknown were it not for small lists of his early works that he left among thousands of papers in his archive. On that list, there was a small notation that reads "Miner: Verses in Natal Mercury." So "Miner," was that maybe the name of another heteronym, was that a title, what was it? And that's what I wondered. In the fall of 2010 I traveled to Durban, and after many hours of searching through old issues of the Natal Mercury, I found a poem titled "The Miner Song" in the July 11th, 1903 issue. And now this poem, "The Miner Song" was preceded by a cover letter signed by one W.W. Austin, which the newspaper also published. So at the top there you have the cover letter. So in that cover letter Mr. Austin explained that he had traveled to Australia, filled in with some miners, who would sometimes compose songs or poems at night, which he sometimes copied down. And for the newspaper's appreciation, he was sending the best of the lot, "The Miner Song," which he said was written by a young fellow named "Effield." Now, there you see just the first few verses of "The Miner Song." It goes on. It's actually a 36-line poem, rather long poem. Stylistically the poem is not obviously by Pessoa, who was still young and really did not have his own obvious style. But -- and so there was nothing there to really prove that that was Fernando Pessoa. And I had some doubt. You know, he had [inaudible]. But the rouse of a W.W. Austin sending a poem by another made up character, did seem like something young Fernando might have done. Once back in Portugal I found in one of Pessoa's notebooks, which is here, you see a page from that notebook, the opening stanzas of an earlier unfinished version of "The Miner Song." In that same notebook there's -- you see the name of Effield, Karl with a K, P. Effield, who was supposedly the author of a travel piece, it seems like, from Hong Kong to Kudat. Most of you probably don't know where Kudat is; it's in Malaysia. So probably found it on a map. I don't know, it's a small place. And notice that this Karl F. Effield is of Boston, USA. So here already -- and we have a young boy from Portugal living in South Africa, who invents a poet from Boston, USA, who travels to the Far East before or after falling in with some miners in Australia. [Laughter] It's all rather dizzying. And it is a piquant foretaste of how he would travel imaginatively, poetically, throughout the rest of his life. Now, if I lingered on this poem for a bit, there's more than one reason. In Durban I found only one library with issues of the Natal Mercury for the first years of the 20th Century. I believe copies might be found in 2 other libraries in South Africa. In the whole rest of the world it is possible that there are no other copies of the Natal Mercury for those years, except here in the Library of Congress. And in fact in the display, which I have not yet seen, I just got here a little bit late, but I know that they have a copy where you can see a digitized copy of -- which I consulted here as well, of this song -- of this poem, "The Miner Song." Pessoa had other juvenile alter egos, such as Horace James Faber, and Sidney Parkinson Stool. But the most important of the early heteronyms was Charles Robert Anon. Besides the poem of his published in 1904 that I mentioned, there were other poems signed by him and sent to the Natal Mercury, along with a cover letter -- this was in 1905. But the poems and the letter protested against British imperialism. And the newspaper did not -- the newspaper chose not to publish them. So Pessoa was always very patriotic, and so that could be a whole other lecture on Imperialism in South Africa. The World War was going on at that time, and Pessoa took the side of the Boars actually. Well, at least he did retrospectively later in life. Now, in the fall of 1905, Pessoa returned to Portugal, sailing yet again in the S.S. Herzog; went on his own. His family stayed behind. And he went to enter college to do a course in letters of liberal arts. He was 17 years old. He kept a diary for a few months in English, and here you see some of the days. And notice in the upper right-hand corner it's stamped with the name of C.R. Anon, Charles Robert Anon. So almost every page of this diary has this stamp. And then there are other poems with the stamp, or sometimes Charles Robert Anon's signature. So, you know, the content of the diary is all about Pessoa going to his classes and whom he sees, what he does with his family. But he attributes it all to Charles Robert Anon. Pessoa in 1906 invented a new and very prolific English poet, Alexander Search. And for his first 3 years back on Portuguese soil, Pessoa wrote poetry almost exclusively in English. He wrote -- here you have "The Circle," but wrote over 150 poems in the name of Alexander Search. Pessoa lived with various aunts, and his paternal grandmother, who suffered from insanity. There you see when Pessoa comes back to Lisbon, you can see the grandmother there in the middle. She's got a kind of mean look. And then those are various aunts, and there's one cousin in there from the mother's side of his family. And several of the aunts Pessoa began living with in 1907, may have wondered about their nephew's own mental stability. And in fact Pessoa worried about it on account of his paternal grandmother, who was institutionalized more than once. At the Rua de Bella Vista in Lisbon where they were living, Pessoa, 2 of his aunts and the old grandmother, Pessoa at that address sometimes received letters that were addressed to an Alexander Search. Here you have Alexander Search, Esquire, with the Bella Vista Lapa [phonetic], as well as to another invented author, Faustino Antunes. This was a heteronymic psychiatrist who was created by Pessoa to write letters to his former -- some former teachers and colleagues -- I'm sorry, former teachers and classmates in Durban. Pessoa -- or in the name of a doctor, Faustino Antunes, wrote these people in Durban, explaining that his client, or patient, Fernando Pessoa, was suffering from a mental disorder, a very serious mental disorder, and wanted information, what was Pessoa like, do you remember? Did he act funny, was he sociable, [laughter] how did he get along? What's your opinion about Fernando Pessoa? And several people wrote back answers to Dr. Faustino Antunes, [inaudible]. Pessoa also received correspondence -- all of this is the same year, 1907, in his own name, Fernando Antonio Nogueria, F.A.N., Pessoa at the Rua da Bella Vista a Lapa. Notice this is actually -- you can't really tell from the image, but that's a light brown envelope. It's actually a large envelope in which he evidently received a copy of "The Scientific America." So Pessoa was all over the place and corresponded hither and yon. Pessoa in 1908 made a small handmade booklet called "The Transformation Book," or "Book of Tasks," signed with his signature. And so there he tried to organize all of his writing under various names he had invented. So there you have Alexander Search. It says he was born on the same day as Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon June 13th, but apparently was English. Then there was Pantaleao, which would write in Portuguese, Jean Seoul, "seoul" means "alone" in French, and that is Pessoa's only -- his lone French heteronym, wrote in French, and Charles James Search was the brother of Alexander Search, and was a translator and translated also some things written by his brother, Alexander. So he invented a whole world, you know, a whole family of these heteronyms that would comment on each other, help each other out, criticize each other. Pessoa was always obsessed with the idea of publishing with newspaper. You know, he invented these newspapers. I showed you one example when he was young. And his dream was opening up a publishing house. His grandmother died in 1907, and Pessoa when he was 21 years old came into an inheritance. It was a rather decent inheritance from his grandmother. And he spent it all, and then some; opened up the Empreza Ibis, or Ibis, you know, that wading bird. And but it was -- it just operated for a few months, between late 1909 and 1910. But he never published any literature, he just a bit of printing. And it was a disaster; so fell completely into debt. In the fall of 1908, Pessoa had begun writing poetry in Portuguese. But he kept on in English, and in 1910 began furiously writing sonnets in English, Shakespearean sonnets. In 1918, Pessoa self-published a book of 35 sonnets; this book. And he sent copies of the book to various publications in England, and the rest of the British Isles. And some of them published notices, and there was actually a rather positive review in the Times Literary Supplement. Now, in the Times Literary Supplement in 1918, the reviewer remarked that what was remarkable was not so much Mr. Pessoa's command of English, but his command of Elizabethan English. And he commented on his ultra-Shakespearean shakespeareanisms. Another review mentioned the Tudor tricks of antithesis and repetition in Pessoa's sonnets. Pessoa was clearly competing with Shakespeare. [Laughter] This is from the book -- by the way, this -- what you're seeing as notations on the side and the markings are Pessoa's own in one of his copies that he saved for a second edition. He thought of some alterations he wanted to make. So here's an example. I'll just read you a few verses of this sonnet. "How many masks wear we, and undermasks, upon our countenance of soul and when if for self-sport the soul itself unmasks, knows it the last mask off and the face plain?" And then at the end the closing couplet, "And when a thought would unmask our soul's masking, itself goes not unmasked to the masking." So Pessoa's self-multiplication and heteronyms is both a result and an illustration of this conviction there is no essence, everything is masks. This doesn't mean that nothing is true, but the truth is a shifting quantity. Truth, in a way, is what we say it is. And so Pessoa was like no other writer before or after, a dramatic poet, forever performing. For him truth and life itself were in the doing, and the performing. His perhaps most famous poem begins, "[Speaks Foreign Language], "The poet is a feigner, or faker, or pretender." And the idea isn't so much lying to be false, but the idea is that there is no a priori truth, and so we're always inventing, always making. That isn't the only truth there can be. Now, there's a problem with Pessoa's poetry written in English. Pessoa's ambition, remember, was still to be a great English poet. He wanted to be in Shakespeare's league. The poetry he wrote in English was to -- or the English that's so used for his poetry in English was too poetical, too bookish. It came from his reading of Shakespeare milting, English romantic poets, such as Byron and Shelley, Keiths, Wordsworth. He read and loved them all. This English lacked the visceral immediacy of a mother tongue. But even Pessoa's Portuguese poetry was a little hampered by too much learning. And now at this time in Pessoa's life, 1914 to the beginning of 1914, enters Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman, who had the chutzpah, the boldness, to write a "Song of Myself," but it was a song about everything. Pessoa first read Whitman in around 1907. And this is the book that he had. And you see the signature at the top, A. Search, Alexander Search, and even the monograph of A.S., Alexander Search there to the right. Many of Pessoa -- Alexander Search has his own library of about 20 books. [Laughter] So Pessoa read, as I said, already in 1907 Walt Whitman and was quite impressed. But he doesn't really know what to do with it. He didn't -- and he had all of these readings, and everything that was going into this caldron. And then he read also Walt Whitman, who was like a doorman fuse that set it all off. But that only happened really in 1914 with that explosion of the heteronyms, those major heteronyms. And that's really where Pessoa just, you know, lets it all out and becomes a great poet. You know, before 1914 he was an interesting poet, but not a world-class poet. So I already read there at the beginning poems of Alberto Caeiro, so also began doing astrology at this time, and he left hundreds of astrological charts. And he made astrological charts also for his heteronyms. So here's one for Alberto Caeiro, another for Alvara de Campos, and for Ricardo Reis. Then in 1915 in March Pessoa and his friends published a magazine called "Orpheu." Now, what you're seeing here in this slide is a very famous painting -- many of you have seen it before, of Fernando Pessoa. It was painted 7 years after his death by one of his good friends who was also [inaudible], who was also a contributor to Orpheu Magazine. And that's a little bit before then Pessoa met [inaudible]. And so you can see there on the table the issue 2 of the magazine, Orpheu 2. Now, this magazine is really what brought modernism to Portugal. It broke with everything, and so literature before and after Orpheu was something different in Portugal. And at the time the kinds -- for instance, that ranting triumphal ode of Alvara de Campos, that came out in the first edition. And that was one of the poems, and then there were others by Pessoa and also by his friends that the critics in the newspapers said, you know, "This is madness. This is crazy. These guys belong in an insane asylum." And this became this business, the insane asylum, they kept repeating this in the newspapers over and over in the various newspapers. And so for the second issue Pessoa actually recruited a poet named "Angelou Delima," who had been living in an insane asylum for 13 years and an issue to their poems of Angelou Delima. And so Pessoa and his friends really embraced this idea of madness because madness -- I mean, mad people, the problem with mad people is usually they have too much truth, you know, if truth there is and what they lack is control. They just say it, you know. So for Pessoa there was a lot of truth in madness. And this embracing madness was a way of breaking also with all past conventions and going beyond what rational minds can conceive and express. So this was another kind of [speaks foreign language], or feigning, faking, pretending in Fernando Pessoa. Not by chance, Alvara de Campos was the most over-the-top of the heteronyms, was the one that participated in the first and the second issue of Orpheu. There were only 2 issues that actually came out in 1915. Later on Pessoa would write that Campos was, "The most hysterically hysterical part of me." [Laughter] English, meanwhile, became for Pessoa another kind of mask. He used English to write about sexual matters, and to explore or perhaps invent his own sexuality. "Antinous" is a long poem, homoerotic poem, that Pessoa wrote in 1915, and he self-published it in 1918, at the same time he self-published the 35 sonnets. And in 1913, he wrote -- 3 years before "Antinous," he wrote "Epithalamium" in English, which is from a heterosexual point of view, but the point of view of a bride before her wedding; the night before her wedding. And Pessoa published this actually in 1921. In 1921 Pessoa published other poems of his in English, and in 2 volumes, and he, again, sent them around to Great Britain, and but they didn't get much news, much response then. And Pessoa really at that point gave up trying to be a great English poet. Pessoa's most important English poetry he wrote in Portuguese. And I say that because we can see the influence of English in Pessoa's Portuguese, particularly in Alvara de Campos, Alberto Caeiro, in those 2 you see a lot of the influence actually of Walt Whitman as a part, but you also see in Pessoa's way of writing Portuguese, something of the English language itself. And so he really made something quite different in Portuguese poetry. Pessoa was still would the rest of his life write an occasional poem in English. And his personal notes were often in English, and he also wrote a lot of prose. Pessoa's endless multiplication had a spiritual dimension too. Pessoa was interested in all sorts of religious occurrence, Christianity, Judaism, Indian religions, mystical religions. He was very interested in esoteric traditions, such as the Cabala, Rosicrucianism, Gnosticism -- I already mentioned astrology. And Pessoa also dabbled in spiritist practices, such as automatic or mediumistic writing. Most of this was in -- well most of this was in English so automatic writing, which came into vogue in the late 19th Century. The idea was to -- in contact often with dead ancestors, could be other people, and you would ask questions and they would answer writing through your hands you would get the answers. And so Pessoa -- there's a few hundred sheets of this automatic writing in Pessoa's archives. And the astral spirits he was supposedly in contact had various names, such as "Warter" [phonetic], or "Henry Moore." Henry Moore was a real-life figure, a Cambridge Platonist from the 17th Century, who was a Rosicrucian, and a poet. So these astral spirits would sometimes struggle for control over the soul of Fernando Pessoa. Now, what you see here -- you probably can't read it too well, what the spirit was supposedly writing through Pessoa's hand is Henry Moore. And then towards the end Henry Moore writes, "He is not warter, because he's talking -- so it's evidently wondering who is interfering, who's messing with him? And Henry Moore says, "He is not warter, he is a man who made Joseph." Joseph was an evil spirit who also sometimes would crop up in all of this warfare, astral warfare. And then it says at the end, "He is interrupting." It's rather badly handwritten, but that's what it says in English, "He is interrupting." So the idea -- and then he signs it "Henry Moore." And then it says, "No more." So by the very handwriting, according to what's there, it's one spirit was interfering with Pessoa's hand so that -- and making it difficult for him to write, or for Henry Moore to write through him. Now, the main topic of conversation in all of this automatic handwriting was Pessoa's virginity. Pessoa was worried because he was still a virgin. We're talking about 1916, '17, so that Pessoa was about 28 years old. And so the spirits would encourage him and say, "Well, now you're going to meet, you know, some woman who's going to make a man of you," and things like that. And in 1919 Pessoa did meet -- one of the offices where he would sometimes write letters and doing things, he met Ophelia Kerarsh [phonetic], who was born in 1900, which is 19 years old. And it was a relationship I very much doubt that -- can't really be proven, it was never consummated, and but they would write love letters, ride the streetcar together, and there were 2 periods in 1920 and then they didn't see each other for 8 or 9 years, and then in 1929 Pessoa hooked up with her again, but soon realized it wasn't a good idea. He really wasn't interested. And I think Ophelia suffered quite a bit. She really loved him. Pessoa wanted to love her, but he really loved his writing too much, and he couldn't really just give himself over to her. Well, some of it is -- so his heteronyms, especially Alvara de Campos, became almost as large as life, because Alvara de Campos would also -- well actually Alvara de Campos meddled in his relationship with Ophelia, so would write letters to her, and sometimes there would be a parenthetical remark that was signed "Alvara de Campos." And Alvara de Campos once signed an entire letter to Ophelia, telling her that she would do better to flush her mental image of Pessoa down the toilet; and these kinds of things. And Pessoa would publish in a magazine, or a newspaper an article. He commented often on politics, for instance, and other things. And sometimes Alvara de Campos in the next issue of the same magazine, or newspaper, or in another one, would disagree with Pessoa and say, "Oh, Pessoa's all wrong." So they had this kind of thing going on. Well, as these heteronyms could be like Campos, larger than life, with real people kind of the opposite could happen. So some of the real people in Pessoa's life became symbols. They were in doubt with a literary status. Pessoa wooed Ophelia with words from Shakespeare, according to Ophelia, which she told later, with words from Shakespeare's "Hamlet." And she represented an experience of a love that he could imagine, but not truly feel, at least not with her. In 1921 Pessoa founded a short-lived publishing house, [inaudible], which brought out his English poems, I showed you some earlier, and 3 other works written by friends. In 1922 his press just published 5 or 6 titles total. But in 1922 it published a poetry collection by Antonio Boto, an openly homoerotic poet, greatly promoted by Pessoa, who also wrote essays and articles defending this poet's Greek esthetic ideal. Pessoa would even translate Antonio Boto's poetry into English. Now, apart from whatever real appreciation he had for Boto's poetry, Fernando seems to have been living something vicariously through him. He represented something more than just a good lyric poet. The [inaudible] Press folded in 1923. Then in 1924, 1925, Pessoa and a friend founded this magazine, "Athena," which published things by Pessoa himself, by other friends' translations, and it was in this magazine also that Pessoa first revealed the poetry of Ricardo Reis in 1924, and the next year of Alberto Caeiro. And here's from the magazine a selection of poems of Alberto Caeiro. Then Pessoa after all that brouhaha with Orpheu sort of became quite well-known, but then he began to be a bit forgotten. And but then in 1927 there was a new magazine in [inaudible] that I founded, "Presenca," by some very bright young poets and critics who rediscovered Pessoa. And it was in this magazine, "Presenca," that Pessoa published some of his great poems, such as "Tabacaria," "The Tobacco Shop," which begins, "I'm nothing," in my translation, "I'm nothing. I'll always be nothing. I can't want to be something. But I have in me all the dreams of the world." Heteronomy it's not really a negation of the eye. Pessoa did not sacrifice himself in favor of his heteronimic creations. On the contrary, the heteronyms were his way to be something, since there is no pre-given "I," or the I if it exists, is inaccessible. Only bits of it emerge through these others that express the I, but at not the I. All we can express are lies, unintentional lies, things that are not quite true, because nothing is definitively absolutely true. So whatever I present is me, is necessarily not me, a derivative of me. Pessoa is his own impossibility in writing. His only self is the self he writes. It is a false self, if you like, an invented self projected in words. But it's the only self there is, or at least the only one that can be apprehended. It is forever influx, changing each day like the weather. Pessoa was reserved, but social. He liked to frequent cafes, where he would sometimes meet with friends, and they would talk about literature and share their works, read things to each other. He also liked to drink. And this is one of his haunts where he would often go and get a bigasu [phonetic], kind of a hard kind of brandy, Portuguese brandy. And so Pessoa drank more and more as he got older. In 1934 he finally brought out his only published book in Portuguese, "Mesagin" [phonetic], which was a book of -- kind of a retelling of the Portuguese discoveries around the world, and going to -- Vasco de Gama going to India. It's about -- and other facets of Portugal's history, even it's first founding. And it was also a book looking to the future and what Portugal could be in the future. He won a prize for that book in 1934. In 1935 Pessoa -- this is supposedly the last photograph of Fernando Pessoa. He began feeling occasionally more ill. Pessoa all of his life sometimes had bouts of depression. At a certain point in late November of 1935, he had abdominal pains and was taken to the hospital. The next day on November 29th, 1935, he wrote his very last sentence in English. And this is the sentence, "I know not what tomorrow will bring." The next day he died. And Pessoa left as his legacy to the world thousands of paper sheets and scraps with unpublished work, many of which were kept in a trunk. Here you see the trunk. This is when it was still in the possession of the family. Pessoa's niece and nephew, these -- who -- the children of a half sister, who are still living actually. The niece is 89, and the nephew is 85 or 84 maybe. And one of the sheets contained in that trunk contains this single phrase, "[Speaks Foreign Language]," "Be plural like the universe." So and this was a recommendation for Pessoa, but also for us. Thank you. [ Applause ] Is there time for questions? >> Georgette Dorn: Yes; we do have time for questions, but I want to invite everybody to go upstairs above us to the far end of the Great Hall. You'll see a wonderful exhibit that was prepared by my colleague, Catalina Gomez, who's going to be fielding the questions. So please be sure to see the small exhibit on the most relevant works of Pessoa, including the newspaper from Durban. So -- >> Richard Zenith: Thank you. >> Georgette Dorn: -- questions. >> Richard Zenith: Questions, comments; about anything. >> The people who would actually interact with Pessoa, would they experience him as different at different times? >> Richard Zenith: Yes; that's a good question. Well, actually some of these people -- I mentioned that magazine "Presenca," which founded in 1927, it was from -- founded in [inaudible], which is up the road from Portugal, a few hours up the road. And when they came -- they were writing letters to Pessoa in Lisbon, and so it was sending on poems and prose pieces that he published in the magazine. And then when a couple of them came to Lisbon, so then they wanted to meet Pessoa. So they arranged to meet in a café. And they were very frustrated and they got a bit angry because they wrote later that who appeared was not Fernando Pessoa, but Alvara de Campos. [Laughter] Now, what exactly that means, you know, your guess is as good as mine. But I think maybe what it means is that he didn't say, "I'm Alvara de Campos," but he was probably rather evasive, acted strange, aloof. Pessoa was shy, and also Pessoa was always kind of -- he didn't want -- he hated to be conventional. He hated to do what anyone expected. So they had -- were arriving wanting to see the great master, and he -- so he wasn't going to satisfy them. He was going to be something different. So and there were reports of a few other people having that sort of an experience, so. Yes. >> Can you talk about the "Book of Disquiet." It seemed to be a very challenging effort. >> Richard Zenith: Yes. The "Book of Disquiet" well I said that there was that explosion of heteronyms in 1914. And actually 1913 Kasor [phonetic] began working on "Livro do Desassossego," or the "Book of Disquiet." And it was a book that he didn't quite know where it was going. He started with the title, and with this idea of disquiet, which can all seem, you know, like restlessness. And so he wrote prose pieces, and wonderful prose, kind of poetic prose sometimes, and with strange descriptions of sometimes Medieval kinds of scenes of princesses, and strange forests. And then there was diary-like writings that very soon crept into the "Book of Disquiet," where writing about -- the narrator writes about his own inner disquiet. And so Pessoa would write, and write, and write, but he didn't even have a notebook dedicated to the "Book of Disquiet" so there were all these passages here and there. Then there were a few -- he did this -- wrote quite a bit until 1920, and then for a few years more or less abandoned it, then came back to it in 1929 with a vengeance, and wrote a lot of passages. And then it was clearly a kind of fictional diary. And Pessoa wondered how he could pull it altogether. He had different ideas, but he never did pull it altogether. He did leave a few hundred passages in a large envelope. And but then many others were scattered around this more than 25,000 sheets that were left in that -- they didn't all fit in that one trunk, but in that trunk and elsewhere. And so it was only researchers compiling, finding the different pieces, and giving some kind of order because there's no -- Pessoa left no order for the book. And but the first Portuguese edition came out only in 1982 47 years after Pessoa's death. And then there have been various other editions in Portuguese that order the material a different way. And it's a bit of open season about what belongs to the book and what doesn't. But it's really a fascinating book, and it's certainly one of the great moments of poetry. And so also the "Book of Disquiet" -- I'm glad you brought up the question because I didn't mention it, it's also where you can really see I think Pessoa's English at work, and his Portuguese. So and even a bit in the structure, the syntactic structure, yes. >> Georgette Dorn: One more; one more. >> Richard Zenith: Okay. [Laughs] I don't know, your choice. >> Yes; first of all thank you for your wonderful presentation. >> Richard Zenith: You're welcome. >> Do you think that there is an element of dissociative identity disorder [laughter] [inaudible]? And also, what brought to Pessoa? >> Richard Zenith: Okay; well yes, I get every now and then an email of someone wondering about a dissociative disorder in Pessoa, or some other psychiatric psychological circumstance. I won't call it a problem. And Pessoa, as I mentioned, was worried himself that he might inherit some psychological troubles from his grandmother, his paternal grandmother. Well, and so Pessoa wrote also a lot of pages about the relationship of genius and madness. That was a subject that interested him greatly. And so I think he -- well he was interested in proving his genius because of the madness that was in his family line. But Pessoa also had this incredible self-control, you know. And I don't think there was any real dissociative disorder. I think with Pessoa some -- often people study Pessoa, Pessoa scholars, they like to downplay the psychological element and see the whole business of heteronomy just as a sort of literary artifice. I don't agree, because you have this all right from the beginning with writing Pessoa already has his invented others; they're always there. But I think what it is, is so it was kind of like a child who didn't grow up; because it's common that children can have make-believe playmates. And but then we lose that. You know, you know by the age of 6 Santa Claus isn't real, and yet you still have -- or that your doll isn't, you know, really going to go hungry if you don't feed him or her. But we can -- you know, a child can -- well yet one part of the child knows that, another part of the child still can believe it. And Pessoa seems to have not lost that capacity to be a child. And that had a lot to do with him also refusing any commitments when he grew up. He didn't want to grow up; he didn't want to assume responsibilities in that way. Okay; thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> Georgette Dorn: Thank you, Richard. This was a wonderful lecture, and there's a small reception right here. So please enjoy. That was very good; thank you. Oops, [inaudible] -- >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.