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  • The Hauntings of Fernando Pessoa
  • Jerome Boyd Maunsell (bio)

The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was inhabited by so many conflicting voices that his only solution was to turn himself into an entire school of different writers. One of the most individual of writers, he also contained a host of individuals within himself. Of his time and place—mostly Lisbon in the early decades of the 20th century, after a crucially formative education in Durban, South Africa—but also eerily beyond it, he was a one-man Modernist movement or series of movements, who aimed not merely to write individual books, but to "convert himself into a literature,"1 creating an ever-increasing constellation of personas that is said to number at least 75 different imaginary writers or "heteronyms." Pessoa also helped invent at least three movements—Paulismo, Sensationism, and Intersectionism—taken up by other writer friends in Lisbon, all of which, as his editor and translator Richard Zenith writes, became "the instruments by which Pessoa and his compeers brought Modernism to Portugal."2 Unusually, Pessoa's heteronyms also commented on each others' work, and engaged in promoting and criticising each other in ways reminiscent of other Modernist movements. But Pessoa also wanted to engage with the wider sphere of Modernism outside Portugal, and despite his relative isolation from the currents of Modernism elsewhere in Europe and America, his work resounds with extraordinarily close unconscious echoes and prefigurings of other contemporary writers. In sum, his oeuvre reconfigures the given narratives of international Modernism, as well as providing ghost or shadow Modernisms of its own.

Because he published little in his own lifetime, however, and because translations of his work have only emerged in English [End Page 115] relatively long after his death, Pessoa has not yet been fully integrated into the story of Modernism outside Portugal. The relatively sparse corpus of English-language criticism of his work continually notes this neglect. In a 2007 collection of English-language essays on Pessoa, Anna M. Klobucka and Mark Sabine remark on how Pessoa's body of work has been well covered by Portuguese and Brazilian scholars, and has an internationally acclaimed standing, "even as it remains relatively underrecognized in English-speaking countries, where the limited scope of Pessoa's work available in English translation could, until recently, be blamed for this lack of acknowledgment."3 Klobucka and Sabine refer to Pessoa's "ghost-like presence on the contemporary canonical scene of modern Western literature,"4 and the image of Pessoa as a phantom presence is indeed apt. The moments they refer to when Pessoa took "occasional centre-stage prominence on the Anglo-American scene"5—a New Yorker piece by George Steiner of 8 January 1996, and Harold Bloom's inclusion of Pessoa in The Western Canon (1994) and Genius (2002) —offer glimpses rather than full-bodied assessments of his work. In her much more sustained English-language monograph on Pessoa, from 2003, Irene Ramalho Santos traces Pessoa's international presence in English in more depth, beginning with a 1955 essay about him in Poetry, while noting that "substantial Pessoan scholarship and critical interpretation in English are not yet abundant."6 "This is surprising," Santos writes, because "the Anglo-American poetic tradition could actually claim Pessoa as one of its finest poets... Furthermore, the roots of his poetic theory and practice reach almost equally into Portuguese literature and the Anglo-American literary tradition."7 Santos argues that an understanding of Pessoa's work is essential for a wider understanding of Anglo-American Modernism in general, and that Pessoa's strongest links are with Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, and Emily Dickinson in particular. George Monteiro, meanwhile, has traced many of Pessoa's earlier influences up to the 20th century, persuasively situating him within an English poetic tradition leading from Shakespeare and the metaphysicals through to the Romantics and Robert Browning,8 all of whom Pessoa read in English and often studied in great depth. Darlene Sadlier has analyzed the heteronymic poetry in terms of Barthes's and Foucault's ideas of authorship.9 A recent study of Pessoa from 2010 by Patrícia Silva McNeill traces Pessoa's affinities with and differences...

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