Conceptual Pessoa - no need to read him; just read about him

Everyone who writes about Fernando Pessoa spends too much time describing the heteronyms, his stable of invented poets who wrote real poems.  Critics and translators have trouble moving from the concept of Pessoa’s poetry to the poems themselves.  The English-language collections I have been reading include substantial supplementary prose, often by Pessoa (or Reis, or Campos), explaining or mystifying the different characters.   I include myself – see today, see yesterday, see, I would guess, tomorrow.  When, last spring, I spent several days writing about the poems of Alberto Caeiro while pretending that I did not know that he was an invention of Pessoa’s, I was in part trying to move away from the heteronyms and spend some time with the poems as poetry.

Alternately, writers spend, if anything, too little time on the nature of Campos and Reis and the dozens of other Pessoa names.  Readers skeptical of conceptual innovations might ask if there is any need to read any of the actual poems.  The concept of the poet-turned-dramatist, who creates a little universe of poets who know and write about each other, and who writes poems in their voices or from their aesthetic stance – is this idea not entirely graspable from its description?  Does it matter at all, for the concept to be useful, if the poems are any good, or if they exist at all?

By which I mean: a budding conceptual poet (or painter, or composer) could very well read about what Pessoa did and extend the idea into his own work without knowing a thing about what Pessoa wrote.  Why not attribute paintings in different styles to different imaginary painters, each with their own biography and aesthetic stance, why not invent critics to misunderstand the paintings?

Creating the artworks, the real poems by imaginary poets, is actually a different idea than simply positing their existence.  If nothing else, it makes the joke funnier.  I am thinking of a conceptual artist like Tom Friedman – imagining a self-portrait carved out of a single aspirin is funny, but creating such an object is even funnier (search for “bust”).

Although the writing of the poems was important for Pessoa, it is not at all clear how much their publication mattered.  It is unfortunately even less clear for me as I read the English collections of his work, since the translators are often vague about the wheres and whens of publication.  Am I reading something that Pessoa published in one of the literary magazines he helped found himself, or in someone else’s magazine, or is this one of the texts from the huge volume of unpublished manuscripts Pessoa left behind?

The Book of Disquiet, I remind myself, was not published until 45 years after Pessoa’s death.  Pessoa did publish a substantial amount of magazine writing, criticism and essays and poems, but he only finished  four books, all of them more like chapbooks:  two little collections of English poems – Pessoa had written poetry in English since he was a child - Antinous and 35 Sonnets, both appearing in 1917, another English-language collection in 1920, and a peculiar nationalistic mini-epic, Message, from 1934, which was “awarded a prize by the Ministry of national Propaganda, under very special circumstances” (Honig & Brown quoting Pessoa, p. 222).  Pessoa planned to publish a larger collection of his poems, but died in 1935, age 47.  His bibliography now resembles that of his contemporary Franz Kafka, a mix of the published and unpublished, the complete and incomplete, the public and private.

At some point I should try to get to the poems, and ignore or at least suppress the cloud of text that surrounds them.