The poet is a faker \ Who’s so good at his act - a start on Pessoa

I have been reading Pessoa, and thinking, if that is not too strong a claim, about his poems and his project.  The examples I wrote about Monday and yesterday have certain Pessoan qualities to them.

Fernando Pessoa had been interested and had written in pseudonyms from an early age, but in 1914 he made or had a conceptual breakthrough, quickly writing a series of poems as if they were written by a fictional poet, a poet with his own biography and distinct philosophical and aesthetic ideas.  That poet was Alberto Caeiro, the naïve shepherd poet, the poems the bulk of The Keeper of Sheep.

At this point, Pessoa was not doing anything much different than writing in character, like Robert Browning writing dramatic monologues or a playwright creating a character.  The result was impressive – I think the poems that resulted are themselves extraordinary, certainly much more interesting than what I have read of Pessoa’s earlier poetry.

The next step, though, is the wild one.  Having summoned one poet, he quickly conjured a couple more, both of whom, in their fictional (but also real) writings claimed their Caeiro as life-changing, inspirational forebear.  The classicizing neo-pagan doctor Ricardo Reis was one poet; the ecstatic naval engineer Álvaro de Campos was another.  Pessoa wrote – and published – essays by each poet, discussing the influence of Caeiro on their work, and arguing with each other’s interpretation of their master.  At one point they even interview each other.  They both agree that Fernando Pessoa is a peculiar fellow who completely misunderstands Caeiro.

Autopsychography

The poet is a faker
Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.

And those who read his words
Will feel in what he wrote
Neither of the pains he has
But just the one they don’t.

And so around its track
This thing called the heart winds,
A little clockwork train
To entertain our minds.

This is a Fernando Pessoa poem written in 1931, after Pessoa had been working on his heteronyms for fifteen years.  I like this Richard Zenith translation, and its forthright emphasis of the poem’s central paradox, better than its competition.*

“Fernando Pessoa” has at this point become another heteronym, another mask.  Attaching the name of Pessoa to a text simply means that the actual Pessoa is working with that particular character.  The real Pessoa, for example, actually wrote the poems of Alberto Caeiro.  The character Pessoa did not, and in fact is a disciple of Caeiro, just like Reis and Campos.  All three had their (fictional) lives changed by a lucky encounter with (fictional) Caeiro and his (real) unpublished poems, inspiring their own new and superior (real) poems.

If the poems were no good, none of this would matter much.  The most amazing feature of the conceit is that it resulted in great poems, and allowed the real Pessoa to be a great poet.  The second most amazing thing, to me, is that Pessoa was able to successfully create two quite different fictional great poets (Campos and Caeiro), one promising but self-limiting minor poet (Reis), and another messy, irritating, but occasionally brilliant one (Pessoa).

My plan is to keep writing about Pessoa until he exhausts me.

* Zenith’s version is on p. 247 of Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems (1998); an alternative on p. 167 of Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown’s Poems of Fernando Pessoa (1986 & 1998).  These are the two books of poems I will use as I mess around with Pessoa.