Fernando Pessoa, poet-translator, ‘overwriting’ Poe and Whitman

ABSTRACT

This study aims to contribute to the understanding of Pessoa’s incorporation of English language and literature in his own writing, looking specifically at his relationship with the American poets Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman. The focus will be on the Portuguese poet’s borrowings from models derived from both, namely a sort of translation of prosody and tropes – what I call ‘overwriting’ – that fuelled his ‘oceanic’ impetus. This impetus surfaces in a few related modernist concepts that Pessoa sought to poeticise – sensacionismo, vertiginismo, dynamismo, atlantismo – for which the wave stood as metaphor and prosodic unit. Starting from the observation that poets engage in translational operations in order to assert and/or project themselves, I follow Nikolaou’s assumption of ‘autobiographical arcs’ in ‘instances of literary ventriloquism’ (2006, 23) to explore Pessoa’s repeated return to compositions such as Poe’s ‘The Bells’ or Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’.*

KEYWORDS:

• Fernando Pessoa
• Walt Whitman
• Edgar Allan Poe
• modernist ode
• transatlanticism
• poet-translator

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See, for instance, Gray De Castro (2015); Barbosa López (2016); Wiesse-Rebagliati (2018). The latter has expounded on the fact that sometimes Pessoa ascribed his translations not to himself but to his ‘other selves’; thus the project of Espronceda’s El Estudiante de Salamanca was initially attributed to Alexander and Charles James Search.

2. Pound discussed his triad in the essay ‘How to Read’, first published in 1929, whereas Pessoa’s note is tentatively dated 1923, showing that Pessoa was building his philosophy of composition simultaneously with, or even previously to, other key literary figures of Anglo-Saxon modernism.

3. The idea of ‘inner images’ externalised through rhythm, both acoustic and visual, supports the confluence of Pessoa’s modernism with that of Pound and Eliot. Pound created ‘vorticism’ and Pessoa vertiginismo (Pessoa 2009, 150). Additionally, the way Pessoa thought about the transformation of a subjective sensation into an artistic one, through the conversion of a sensation into an object (see Pessoa 2009, 145) is close to T. S. Eliot’s famous exposition of the ‘objective correlative’ (Eliot 1967, 100). Maria Irene Ramalho has stressed how Pessoa condensed and related several international Modernist tenets, commenting: ‘The first half of the twentieth century in the West was witness to the development of an impersonal poetics of “objectivity”, notably in Pound and Eliot, which might best be described, albeit by a term that is etymologically a paradox, by Pessoan’ (2003, 257).

4. Pessoa’s own attempt at translating Camões’s ‘Alma minha gentil’ shows the priority he ascribed to keeping to the original’s verbal rhythm, by using (mostly) iambic pentameters and following Italian sonnet rhymes (see Pessoa’s translation of the sonnet as reproduced by Monteiro 1996, 145).

5. The italics are a quotation from Poe’s essay ‘The Poetic Principle’, defining ‘the poetry of words’ (Poe 1984, 78). The asterisk indicates a conjectural emendation.

6. It cannot be overstressed how fuzzy the exercise of source-hunting for Poe in Pessoa is; in fact, besides being mixed with his great French admirers, whom Pessoa also read, Poe was himself influenced by Byron and/or Milton, who in turn are both significant influences for Pessoa (for Byron, see Pizarro and Ferrari 2013: 228; for Milton, see footnote 7).

7. ‘Ode to the Sea’ has also been presented by Ferrari as proof of the influence of the Miltonic ‘system of diction’ (Ferrari 2012, 236) on Pessoa, since ‘some of its stanzas’ copy the scheme of ‘The Hymn’, part of Milton’s ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ (commonly ‘Ode to Nativity’) (2012, 242). Nonetheless, a contrastive reading with ‘The Bells’, as outlined both here and in my 2012 study, shows unmistakable borrowing from Poe, whereas the Miltonic resonance may be explained by the fact that ‘The Bells’ in turn was partly modelled on Milton’s ode (see Britton 1998).

8. The editions from which Poe and Whitman are quoted are those owned by Pessoa.

9. Studying the extant translation drafts of Pessoa’s later attempts to render the poem in Portuguese (c. 1924–25), we may surmise that he sought first to establish the predominant rhyme-ending of each part (Vale de Gato 2012, 96–97).

10. Note that all of the lines in ‘The Raven’ except the refrain result from this combination (reproduced in the final stanza lines of ‘Ode to the Sea’). Poe defines the design of such longer lines as ‘octametre acatalectic, alternating with heptameter catalectic’ (Poe 1902, 667). These are, however, the junction of the above mentioned tetrameters, commonly used in the popular English ballad – and it was based on this scansion that Pessoa would later translate Poe’s most famous poem (see Duarte 2006, 397–98).

11. The phrasing comes from a letter (probably unsent) to an English publisher whom Pessoa was trying to convince to divulge Portuguese ‘sensationist’ poetry, in (Pessoa 2009), 404; see also (Ramalho Santos 2003), 128–29.

12. In fact the book in question is a slightly abridged version of the ‘deathbed’ Leaves of Grass, published by Cassel and Company in 1909 and signed by Fernando Pessoa with the date of 1916.

13. ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’, it should be noted, is not included in Pessoa’s earliest edition of the Penny Poets, but only in the edition of Leaves of Grass dated 1916; however, because he directly alludes to it in a fragment of ‘Saudação a Walt Whitman’ dated June 1915 (Pessoa 2014, 106–07), he must have been acquainted with the poem early on.

14. As hinted at by this incomplete stanza-ending: ‘We feel in us the City to awake/And that smooth sense of beauty as to take/And into □ to immerse’ (in Pizarro and Barreto 2014, 121).

15. ‘Arco do Triunfo’ was an unfinished book project that encompassed Campos’ odes (‘Ode Marítima’, ‘Ode Triunfal’, ‘Ode Marcial’, ‘Saudação a Walt Whitman’ and ‘Passagem das Horas’), at least three sonnets and possibly some prose fragments of poetics (cf. Pessoa 2009, 432).

16. Alberto Caeiro’s rewritings of Whitman are outside the scope of this essay, in spite of the importance that Pessoa also gave to him in the construction of sensacionismo. Whereas Campos was the engineer of modernist frenzies, Caeiro prized immediacy with nature – a value that can be related to American Transcendentalist poetics and to Whitman as its self-appointed bard. Susan Brown has maintained that in Pessoa ‘the personification of two latently potential Whitmanian personae – Caeiro as the soul, Campos as the body – … reveals the splintering of Whitman’s unified Self’ (1985, 102–03, emphasis in the original). The thesis concurs with Lourenço’s hypothesis of 1983 of Whitman’s centrality in the development of Pessoan heteronymy.

17. Campos himself hints at Whitman’s influence in sensacionismo, recalling the bedazzlement caused by his ‘Ode Triunfal’ when in Portugal no one had the faintest idea of Whitman’s existence (Pessoa 2014, 502–503). Notwithstanding, Campos evidences a relation of distorted, or defiant, filiation as regards Whitman: Pessoa’s heteronym is often anti-democratic and much more focused on the perverse extremes of humanity. His skewed relation with Whitman is curiously implied in translational operations that seem driven by self-conscious irony: one line from ‘Saudação a Walt Whitman’ has Campos bragging, ‘Minha senha? Walt Whitman!’ (Pessoa 2014, 108), while omitting Whitman’s validation of his song as representative of all people’s voice: ‘I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy’ (Whitman 1895, 19). On the differences between the two poets, see Gouveia 1989 or Zenith 2013.

18. Ferrari has also explored examples of ‘phrasal verse’ parallelism between Whitman and Campos (Ferrari 2012, 198–99). Zenith, even though downplaying the importance of Whitmanian borrowings in Campos, concedes ‘[i]t makes a similar use of repeating syntactical structures, it also resorts to lists of objects or concepts, and its free verse style is reminiscent of Whitman’ (2013, 37).

19. I use the term ‘homophonic translation’ as defined by Hilson: ‘in which a source text is translated not for its sense (as in intralingual translation) but for its sound’ (2013, 95).

20. Zenith’s translation ‘the flywheel’s restless spinning’ fails to capture the stridency of the/i/sound, and also undermines the ‘living’ potential of the wheel – or the stress on organicity, concomitant, though apparently contradictory with, his promulgation of dynamism, to be mentioned shortly in the body of the essay.

21. It is based on this same text that Pizarro reduces to three movements the five steps that are set down in the extant plan for ‘Saudação a Walt Whitman’, corresponding to the three tempos of a wave, rising first, then ebbing and finally spreading (2017, 73). It is somewhat baffling that although rejecting Aristotelic poetics, Pessoa should ground modernist composition in the triadic division of the Greek ode.

22. Pessoa may or may not have been aware of the psychological notion of ‘oceanic feeling’, proposed by Romain Rolland and rejected by Freud as a childish religious feeling or a delusion wherein the boundaries of the self became limitless. Although Pessoa mentioned Freud a couple of times and he had his Leonardo da Vinci: a Childhood Memory in his library, there is no evidence that he read Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud addresses the ‘Oceanic’. In any case, the book was published in 1930, at an advanced stage in Pessoa’s career; if he ever came across the notion, he would most probably acknowledge and disbelieve it, as with so many of his own ideas (Freud,1927).

23. Mallarmé’s crisis of verse has been discussed in relation to Pessoa’s ‘alienating’ prosodic experiments both by Ferrari (2012, 195) and Bothe (2003, 25 and, 47).

24. In fact, in ‘Passage to India’, Whitman had already stretched a temporal and geographical arc from the Portuguese discoveries to an ocean-borne ‘America’: ‘Again Vasco de Gama sails forth,/Again the knowledge gain’d, the mariner’s compass,/Lands found and nations born, thou born America,/For purpose vast’ (Whitman 1909, 382).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa, funded by the Portuguese Foundation fo Science and Technology - FCT [UIDB/00114].

Notes on contributors

Margarida Vale de Gato

Margarida Vale de Gato  is an Assistant Professor in the areas of Translation and US Literature in ULisboa, School of Arts and Humanities, and a researcher of the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies. Her most recent academic publications include a chapter on “Translation and Multilingual / Creative Writing” for The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Education (2019) and the co-edited volume of essays Anthologizing Poe (with Emron Esplin, 2020). As a translator, her latest production comprises two of Louise Glück's poetry collections.