The Book of Disquiet     by Fernando Pessoa, Translated by Margaret Jull Costa Original title: Livro do Desassossego Original language: Portuguese Original year: 1935 Country: Portugal   Published by Serpent's Tail Pub. Date: 1991 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback List Price: £9.99 Not available for ordering

Fernando Pessoa is a colossus of Portuguese culture, though an unlikely one: slight of build, a clerk’s neat clothes, almost asexual, bow–tie, homburg, face punctuated by a trim moustache, myopic eyes behind gold–rimmed spectacles, he sits still outside the Lisbon writers’ cafe A Brasileira, a bronze figure at a table with an empty bronze chair beside him, waiting for whom?

The two big names regularly and reverently breathed by those with the smallest knowledge of Portuguese literature are Pessoa and Camões. What a contrast Pessoa is to the rugged, randy, one–eyed sixteenth–century epic and lyric poet Luis Vaz de Cames who sailed the seas, was wrecked in the Mekong river, stranded in Goa and Mozambique and commemorated in Jerónimos monastery with an exuberant sarcophagus opposite that of Vasco de Gama. Pessoa has a bleak marble and metal pillar poised uneasily in the cloister, inscribed with verses by some of the poets that he was.

Pessoa (his real name) means ‘person’ or ‘individual’, but he assumed many names that he called ‘heteronyms’; or perhaps we should say that Pessoa’s pen was assumed by many of the multiple personalities of which he — and, he maintained, each person or pessoa — was made. His universe, his theatre was within him.

‘The idea of travelling nauseates me.

I’ve already seen what I’ve never seen.

I’ve already seen what I have yet to see.

The tedium of the forever new, the tedium of discovery (as if there were a difference between things and ideas), the unchanging identity of everything...Life makes me suffer a vague nausea, and any kind of movement aggravates it.

Tedium is absent only from landscapes that don’t exist, from books I’ll never read. Life, for me, is a somnolence that never reaches the brain. This I keep free, so that I can be sad there.’ (The Book of Disquietude tr Richard Zenith)

Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888. After his father died of TB, his mother married the Portuguese consul at Durban and they emigrated to South Africa in 1895. He returned to Lisbon in 1905 to live with his grandmother and great–aunts.

‘I went among them as a stranger, but not one of them saw what I was. I lived among them as a spy, but nobody — not even myself — suspected what I was. All of them imagined I was one of their kinsfolk, but not one knew that there had been a substitution at my birth. So I was like others without resembling them....’(The Book of Disquiet tr. Iain Watson)

Soon abandoning his Philosophy course at the university, he tried unsuccessfully to set up a printing press. For the rest of his life he worked for various businesses as a commercial translator and moved from lodgings to rented rooms to relatives again.

‘And if the office in the Rua dos Douradores represents Life for me, the second floor room I live in on that same street represents Art. Yes, Art, living on the same street as Life but in a different room; Art, which offers relief from life without actually relieving one of living, and which is monotonous as life itself but in a different way. Yes, for me Rua dos Douradores embraces the meaning of all things, the resolution of all mysteries, except the existence of mysteries themselves which is something beyond resolution. (The Book of Disquiet tr.M J Costa)

One night in 1914 Pessoa stood at his chest of drawers and wrote ‘about thirty poems straight off, in a kind of ecstasy whose nature I cannot define.’ It was, he said, an unrepeatable day of triumph. The poet who appeared in him was Alberto Caeiro, the Keeper of Sheep, whom he regarded as The Master for himself and for two other major heteronyms, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos. Pessoa had his own disciples, though, until his last year, he published only a scattering of poems, prose fragments, a handful of pamphlets and manifestos and three booklets of poems in English. In 1915 came the first, and only, two editions of the review Orpheu through which Pessoa and his friends had a dramatic influence on twentieth–century literature. José Sobral de Almada Negreiros regarded their work, including that of Mário de Sá–Carneiro, a friend who killed himself in Paris in 1916, as a glorious and catastrophic break with the past.

Of course, like all modernisms, it wasn’t. In 1915, Pessoa wrote to another friend, ‘The patriotic idea, always present in my intentions to some extent, is now growing in me, and I can’t think of creating anything without aiming to exalt the name of Portugal through whatever I am able to accomplish.’ He planned to set up as an astrologer (that and his later relationship with the magus Aleister Crowley, among other things, invite comparison with W.B. Yeats). After the First World War he began works which aimed at a re–vision of Portugal, that had once been great and should be again, now in spiritual rather than political terms; the finest of them would be the multi–faceted poem Mensagem (Message), published in 1934, the year before his death.

There’s little evidence of this positive, propagandising frame of mind in The Book of Disquiet. Up to now I’ve led you, misled you to believe that it is by Fernando Pessoa. It’s not. In the end he attributed it to one Bernardo Soares, an assistant accounts clerk, ‘a demi–heteronym, a literary personage...or rather a simple mutilation of my own personality.’

In 1919, at one office where he worked, Pessoa met the nineteen–year–old Ophelia Queiroz. It was a compulsive, tender, sometimes humorous affair which lasted thirteen months. During its course he moved in with his widowed mother on her return from Africa. She died in 1925 and his relationship with Ophelia revived painfully a few years later. He stayed in the house he’d shared with his mother for the rest of his life. At work:

‘I approach my desk as if it were a bulwark against life...I feel love for all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love or perhaps too, because even though nothing truly merits the love of any soul, if, out of sentiment, we must give it, I might just as well lavish it on the smallness of an inkwell as on the grand indifference of the stars. (The Book of Disquiet tr M J Costa)

The meditations on love in The Book of Disquiet are remarkable for their chill luminosity and hopeless tenderness. The pictures of Lisbon come (especially if you know the city) with the shock of the new. The folders and disorganized papers that make up Soares’s book sat in a big trunk with the rest of Pessoa’s life’s work — 27,000–plus documents — for years until, painstakingly but still not finally collated, it was published in 1982. Three English translations were published in 1991; Richard Zenith’s is the fullest, sharp and scholarly; Iain Watson’s good selection reads rather stiffly; Margaret Jull Costa’s prizewinning version is the one I return to because, for me, it breathes with Pessoa/Soares’s breath: to read it is to overhear a man, often seeming pathetic because so courageous, and for all the costume–changes, suffering life voluptously, nakedly.

Pessoa’s guidebook, Lisboa: What the Tourist Should See, first published in 1992, has quite a different voice. Perhaps he never quite rediscovered the city his five–year–old self lost: he gives us an enthusiast’s pedantic catalogue of monuments spiced with moments of ‘poetry’. It can hardly be compared with the Lisbon of his other writing. Alvaro de Campos’s town is a wharf wide open to the world, a station like an ever–beating heart. Bernardo Soares prizes the ‘village’ that is the city’s soul.

Pessoa wants us to know how great a city Lisbon is, and was, and will be: not merely the Cultural Capital of Europe (as in 1994), but spiritual capital of the world, and head of the Fifth Empire when King Sebastian, who fell in his ill–conceived Moroccan campaign of 1578, returns like King Arthur or Christ himself to restore Portugal to greatness. This mythic metaphor is what Pessoa explores in Mensagem’s poems: a great modernist’s book that sets Portugal’s prophetic heroes in an heraldic shieldscape. Like Camões’s epic Lusiads, it seeks out Portugal’s destiny. Despite the doubtful fog with which it ends, it won second prize from the Propaganda Ministry of the dictator Salazar whom Pessoa despised. It’s potent, some say dangerous, stuff.

‘At this moment I have so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say that I feel suddenly tired and decide not to write anymore, not to think anymore, but to let the fever of saying lull me to sleep whilst, with closed eyes, I gently stroke as I would a cat all the things I might have said.’ (The Book of Disquiet tr. M J Costa)

But then, Soares is a humbler creature than his progenitor. If we could melt the bronze Pessoa at his cafe table, he’d order another brandy, another coffee, light maybe his seventy–sixth cigarette of the day and, if he was comfortable, snap at the world with wit and dazzle us with his sharp mind. They say he was fun to be with. He died in hospital in 1935, aged forty– seven. The previous day he’d written his very last words, in English: ‘I know not what tomorrow will bring.’ Perhaps the empty bronze chair beside him waits for a dutiful tourist or for any pessoa willing to lift an eyebrow at destiny. Or for Ophelia. Or for King Sebastian.

Note:The poetry of Fernando Pessoa (including Mensagem mentioned above) has been widely if patchily translated.

‘Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently feeble voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self—expression of thousands of voices, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to useless dreaming and clueless hoping in this quotidian destiny. In these moments my heart beats louder because I’m conscious of it. I live more because I live more grandly. I feel a religious force in my person, a species of prayer, something like an outcry. But from my mind comes its rebuttal... I see myself on the high fourth floor of Douradores Street, where I feel sleepy; I look past the half-written page at unlovely vain life and at the cheap cigarette [...] on my worn blotting-paper. Here I am on this fourth floor, interrogating life!, saying what souls feel!, inventing prose...’ p11 (The Book of Disquietude tr. Richard Zenith)