Nick Burns, The Politics of Fernando Pessoa, NLR 129, May–June 2021
‘In how many of the garrets and non-garrets of this world / Are there self-styled geniuses dreaming this very moment?’ By his death in 1935, the genius of Fernando Pessoa was in danger of emerging from anonymity. For decades, remaining unknown outside a small circle of literary friends had been a source of inspiration and a rampart from which to engage in period polemics. Pessoa drifted between cafés, rented rooms and tobacconists, quays and commercial offices in Portugal’s backwater metropolis, imagining one day his fame would surpass that of Camões. He had doubts: ‘At this moment / A hundred thousand brains dream themselves geniuses like me!’footnote 1 But in his last years there were promising signs. He had acquired readers: a younger generation of modernist poets, clustered around the magazine Presença, would succeed in conveying his work to a broader national audience after the Second World War.
Internationally, talk of Pessoa spread in the 1960s, with a sweeping critical treatment from Octavio Paz at the start of the decade and another, narrowly formal, from linguist Roman Jakobson at its close.footnote 2 In the New York Review of Books the critic Michael Wood soon seconded Jakobson’s assessment of Pessoa as a great undiscovered figure of the generation of Joyce and Picasso.footnote 3 But the breakthrough came after the publication in Portugal of his incomparable collocation of prose fragments, O Livro do Desassossego, in 1982. Four different English translations of it as The Book of Disquiet appeared in 1991 alone, and three years later Harold Bloom saw fit to include Pessoa in the elite group of writers of his Western Canon (1994), on the merits of his visionary reading of Whitman. Today a cottage industry of Pessoa scholarship rivals the Joyce machine. Every several years since the 1970s has seen the publication of fresh poems and prose from the massive trunk the author left behind at his death, a treasure trove still unexhausted.
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