Volume 19, Number 4 · September 21, 1972
Mod and Great
By Michael Wood
Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems
edited and translated by Peter Rickard
University of Texas Press, 189 pp., $2.25 (paper)
Selected Poems by Fernando Pessoa
translated by Edwin Honig
Swallow Press, 170 pp., $8.00
A quiet life as a commercial correspondent, publishing poems occasionally in ephemeral literary magazines. A brief, late, abortive romance with a girl called Ophelia. He had astral visions, dabbled in theosophy, got entangled with Aleister Crowley, invented a 'Synthetic Yearly Calendar By Name and Any Other Classification, Consult-able in Any Language.' He was courteous, withdrawn, given to heavy drinking, smoked eighty cigarettes a day. He was born in Lisbon in 1888 and died in Lisbon in 1935. He went to school in South Africa, wrote verse in English as well as in Portuguese. He was Fernando Pessoa, unmistakably one of this century's major poets, linked by Roman Jakobson in a recent article with Joyce, Braque, Picasso, Stravinsky, Le Corbusier—a forgotten member of a remarkable generation. Reading him for the first time is like discovering Svevo or Borges. Not knowing about him is like not knowing about Nerval or Apollinaire.
Review, 3986 words
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