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  • Voices in the Garden•
  • Juan Forn (bio)
    Translated by Jorge R. Sagastume

I was a Pessoa fan when the enigma of his life and work was less public and less complex than what it is today. I refer to the 70s, when the only known works by him translated into Spanish were those phenomenal poems that he had signed with his own name, or rather with three of his heteronyms: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. Around that time, nothing was known about Bernardo Soares, the other heteronym, the voice of Libro del Desasosiego (released to the world in 1982 and translated into Spanish in 1984), or about the numberless sub-heteronyms (serious and not-so-serious) that Pessoa had used during his life, or of the existence of that famous trunk that Pessoa carried around each time he moved throughout Lisbon and that lay by his side when he died in 1935.

From a certain distance, I followed the phenomena initiated by the release of Libro del Desasosiego, that unfolding that revealed not only a new heteronym, but also a new Pessoa: A Pessoa who wrote prose as impressively as he wrote poetry. The magnitude of Libro del Desasosiego (and the precision used to assemble the framework of his already known work, in the context and place of the heteronyms) overshadowed a bit the announcement that there were, still, at least four thousands pages more, written by Pessoa, most of them in prose, and as (or more) different from those already known as Soares differed from Caeiro/Reis/de Campos.

More than two decades of work (and two different editors) were necessary to "ensemble" Soares' Libro from the multitude of loose pages that constituted the work. Those who knew the remaining content of the trunk, trusted that they would still have two decades to work on what was still unpublished, while the literary world assimilated the new face that Pessoa's figure acquired with the emergence of Soares.

And, quite honestly, they needed that time, because if what remains unpublished, perhaps, does not reach the height and power of what its discovery meant (literarily speaking), it shows, in contrast, that we are, still, halfway from truly knowing Pessoa's pluralism, and that, if we learn patience, many more surprises await us.

I learned about all of this somehow by chance. During the first week of February, here in Gesell, one afternoon when I took the trash out and I bumped into one of the neighbors renting the house next door. He and his friends had come to Gesell for a week, and even though they didn't even enjoy one sunny day while they stayed, they did have a great time sitting around a little garden table –or on the porch, when it rained–, methodically emptying bottle after bottle of vinho verde, completely oblivious to the bad vibes coming from the other tourists who cursed every morning, evening, and night because of the weather. [End Page 148]

After a year living in Gesell, I had never seen, in any of the supermarkets in the area, even one bottle of that rare white wine invented in Portugal, and when I saw the empty case that my neighbor was placing by the trash, I asked him where he had got the wine, because I wanted to surprise my wife that night. He told me that they had brought the wine with them, but that I could, at any rate, still surprise my wife. He invited me in and gave me a bottle.

They were two women and four men, from Argentina and from other countries of our continent. They were of diverse ages, but all of them older than forty, and irremediably Pessoans. All of them were "single" and all of them, with the exception of one, taught or used to teach at the university level, but all of them considered themselves equally "aficionados" to that "laic", because Pessoa was not associated with work to them –not to the academicians nor to the other one–, but an excluding pastime that brought them together every year.

Not in Gesell; this was the first time here for five of them. But...

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