Surfaciality: Some Poems by Fernando Pessoa, one by Wallace Stevens, and the brief Sketch of a Poetic Ontology

Abstract

This paper gives a close reading of a number of poems by Fernando Pessoa, in particular by his ‘heteronym’ Alberto Caeiro. On that basis, a poetic ontology focused on the concept of ‘surfaciality’ is sketched which is then made more concrete through a discussion of the concepts of understanding and interpretation in Heidegger’s Being and Time. As an elaboration of this ontology, the paper concludes with a close reading of important long poem by Wallace Stevens, ‘Description Without Place’.

Notes

1. On the question of how to understand Pessoa's heteronyms, I have learnt a great deal from discussions and correspondence wiih Judith Balso and Julia Weber. I would also like to thank Filipe Ferreira for emboldening me to write on Pessoa. This paper is deeply indebted to Thamy Pogrebinschi.

2. The poems by Caeiro that I cite are co-translated with Thamy Pogrebinschi. They are indebted and to the versions published by Richard Zenith in Fernando Pessoa & Co. Selected Poems, although I have striven for much greater literality than Zenith. For the original text, see Fernando Pessoa, Obra Poética. Poems are referred to by the numbers given in the Obra Poética.

3. I have been emboldened to begin a partial reading of the poem by Judith Balso, who perceptively noticed its absence in my little book on Stevens, Things Merely Are, and criticized my approach to Stevens as being too Kantian, too romantic, too traditional and not engaging adequately with the ontological dimension of Steven's verse. I now think she is right and I am beginning to revise my views, although what we each mean by ontology is rather different. I want to argue for a phenomenological ontology, where it is poetry rather than philosophy that describes the way things are, that transfigures the everyday world but returns us to it, that ennobles the plainness of the obvious without giving us anything back but the obvious seen through the lucid estrangements of the poet – an enigmatic obviousness. All references to Stevens are to The Palm at the End of the Mind.