Provérbios portugueses by Fernando Pessoa, and: Argumentos para filmes by Fernando Pessoa (review)

Provérbios portugueses and Argumentos para filmes are the first volumes in Obras de Fernando Pessoa, a new series of texts under the general editorship of the redoubtable Jerónimo Pizarro, a thorough and accomplished investigator of all things pertaining to Pessoa. If most of Fernando Pessoa's plans and projects for books—editions, translations, anthologies, collections of his own poems and those of others—remained unfulfilled, registered here and there in various stages of completion when he died in 1935 at the age of forty-seven, their existence offers, in many instances, challenges to the scholars who would bring together often widely scattered materials that survive in bits and pieces that, with intelligence, can be set together and thus given a meaningful order.

The existence of such plans for books and projects provides license for books like Argumentos para filmes. This constructed volume, in the words of its compilers, "reúne, pela primeira vez, todos os escritos pessoanos directamente relacionados com cinema. Dividida em quatro secções, a edição apresenta o conjunto de argumentos para filmes redigidos em três línguas diferentes (secção I), breves apontamentos/bibliográficos sobre cinema (secção II), projectos nos quais o cinema figura como um dos elementos integrantes (secção III) e correspondência na qual se faz menção ao cinema (secção IV)" (23). In addition to the book's main text, there are appendices containing documentation from the poet's library of his interest in film: (1) titles of books, articles, and reviews; (2) a table of the detailed announcements for films playing in Lisbon that the poet collected; and (3) a list of cinema references in Presença, the modernist journal which regularly published Pessoa's work beginning in 1927. Regarding Presença and its editors' interest in film, it is interesting to note that in 1929 Pessoa at first promised to contribute an "inquérito" on film but then reneged with a prevarication: "Não sei o que penso do cinema" (12). Argumentos para filmes concludes with Fernando Guerreiro's informative "postface," a substantial, thirty-four page essay in which Pessoa's interest in cinema is located within the larger context of the attention paid to cinema by Portuguese and French critics and theorists during the poet's lifetime.

Not among Pessoa's incomplete or sketchy projects, however, is Provérbios portugueses, his collection of 300 proverbs, selected and translated for the "National Proverbs" series published by Frank Palmer (later Frank Palmer and Cecil Palmer) of London and elsewhere. Although the final typescript was sent to the publisher on April 30, 1914, Pessoa's text seems never to have been set in type. The sad fact is that his book became a casualty of the war that broke out in Europe in mid-summer. On October 29, 1914, Frank Palmer wrote: "I am sorry to tell you that owing to the War it is impossible for us to publish the Portuguese Proverbs for this year. Other things being equal we shall hope to publish in the Autumn of 1915, but, of course, we cannot be certain about anything at this juncture" (139). Moreover, Palmer explained, he could not accede to Pessoa's request for payment of the five guineas that Pessoa was to receive for preparing the book, the loss of which, as he complained to others at the time, was personally a great calamity.

By an odd coincidence, only two days after Pessoa wrote to Palmer requesting a new delivery date for his selection of the sayings from the "vox populi" of Portugal, this work for pay was interrupted by the sudden appearance "within him" on a single, specific day, of major heteronyms and their distinctive, clearly voiced poems. It might be said that the birth of his heteronyms more than compensated for Pessoa...