Pessoa in Sweden: the Northern trajectory of a lonely canonical

ABSTRACT

By looking simultaneously at the succession of translations of Pessoa into Swedish and the critical reception of Pessoa in Sweden, this article investigates when and how Pessoa became a point of reference in the Swedish literary field. The hypothesis is that there currently are two overlapping versions of Pessoa in circulation in Sweden. One is Pessoa as a metonym for Lisbon, the other is Pessoa as a distinct author figure defined by his four main heteronyms but often disconnected from any specific corpus of poetry. In the 1980s, this author figure was enlisted (by the winning side) in a struggle between competing aesthetic paradigms in Sweden. Among the handful of critics and translators that have shaped the Swedish reception, this article looks especially at the pioneering contributions of Arne Lundgren and Bengt Holmqvist. Particular attention is then paid to Orons bok (Livro do desassossego). First published in 1991, Orons bok has since appeared in two more editions and is the translation that has reached the largest number of readers. In this regard, the Swedish reception follows an international tendency to construct Pessoa as the author of Livro.

KEYWORDS:

• ‘lonely canonical’
• poststructuralism
• swedish literary field
• translation
• Horace Engdahl
• Bengt Holmqvist
• Arne Lundgren
• Fernando Pessoa

The reception of Fernando Pessoa in Swedish is a contained affair. Counting from 1966 and until today, there have been five notable critical appraisals of his work by Bengt Holmqvist, Arne Lundgren, Tobias Berggren, Anders Cullhed and Alexandra Coelho Ahndoril. As for translators, three names stand out: Lundgren (again) plus Lars Axelsson and Margareta Marin – the latter two often in collaboration. In addition, Tobias Berggren has translated a handful of poems. A search on Libris, the Swedish national catalogue, provides 15 Swedish-language results for the author name ‘Fernando Pessoa.’ These do not include mentions in newspapers and consist mostly of editions by minor publishers that present selections of Pessoa’s poetry, often focusing on one of the main heteronyms. Examples include: Dikter av Alberto Caeiro (‘Poems by Alberto Caeiro’, Pessoa 2002), Ode till havet och andra dikter av Álvaro de Campos (Maritime Ode and Other Poems by Álvaro de Campos’, Pessoa 2009), Dikter av Ricardo Reis (‘Poems by Ricardo Reis’, Pessoa 2013).¹ Among these low-key, stand-alone editions, many of which are out of print, there is one high-profile exception: Orons bok, the Swedish translation of Livro do desassossego that first appeared in 1991 and has been reprinted twice, most recently in 2007. One should also note that these are books and essays that have all been published in Sweden. In Finland, with its separate (but small) circuit of Swedish-language publishing, there has apparently been no independent reception of Pessoa in Swedish.²

These limited results are broadly comparable with the other Nordic languages. Icelandic translations are slightly fewer, Norwegian (counting both Bokmål and Nynorsk) about the same as in Swedish, Finnish translations a bit more numerous. The outlier seems to be Danish, where the contributions of one translator, Peter Poulsen, were consistent and thorough around the turn of the millennium. The volume of Danish Pessoa translations today outweighs the output in any of the other languages. Even so, translations into Swedish preceded all the others. Lundgren’s 1973 book predated other Nordic translations by a decade or more, and Livro do desassossego appeared in Swedish long before the Norwegian and Danish versions, whose first editions date from 2000 and 2019, respectively. This apparently supports a general hypothesis by Yvonne Lindqvist (2016) concerning the consecrating function of the Swedish translation field in the Nordic regional context. Then again, the later Danish translations need not have any relationship to the Swedish editions. Whatever the case, in this article I will leave regional comparatism to one side and limit my discussion of the Swedish case to the national context. From that angle, it is clear that the reception of Pessoa has been determined by a small number of individuals with links to Portugal or the Iberian literatures. These individuals have however had varying levels of symbolic capital in the Swedish literary field, a fact which has resulted in a somewhat uneven reception history. Gideon Toury’s well-known statement that ‘translations are facts of target cultures’ (Toury 1995, 29) is relevant here and will guide my argument. In addition to this, we need to consider that ‘target cultures’, however we choose to delimit them, are themselves uneven and differentiated, and formed by orientations not always of their own making.

Differentiation within target cultures means that a published translation is not synonymous with a broader breakthrough. The quantitative approach to translation needs therefore to be supplemented with more qualitative considerations. Given the minor status of most publishers concerned here, it is also necessary to look at the reception of Pessoa in Sweden more broadly. Interesting patterns emerge when we match the trajectory of Fernando Pessoa in the Swedish daily press with the trail of book publications. Besides the continuing output of new Pessoa volumes in Portugal which served as a motivating factor, there was a brief moment in the 1980s when the Swedish reception of poststructuralist theory and of Pessoa mutually reinforced one another. Accordingly, the mentions of Pessoa in the press peaked in the late 1980s and 1990s, and we can trace a gradually more nuanced and elaborate understanding of the poet, focused around two books that appeared at this time (Lundgren’s second volume of translations in 1988 plus Orons bok in 1991). This is also when the image of Pessoa begins to settle. After a flurry of interest around 1990, the author’s name is increasingly detached from actual books or texts and becomes a sporadically invoked point of reference in the broader literary discourse in Sweden. It is my hypothesis that ‘Pessoa’ serves two different purposes in Sweden today. He is on the one hand an author figure, linked to the heteronyms and, above all, to Livro do desassossego. In line with what is perhaps the dominant international reception tendency ever since the 1940s, the heteronyms are seen as a memorable metaliterary conceit that affirms the freedom of literary creativity, yet are oddly separate from his poetry. The other purpose is the repeated use of Pessoa as a metonym for Lisbon – a place-marker in a semi-touristic, often nostalgic discourse about the Portuguese capital. Here we confront the commodification of Pessoa, which is of course actively supported from various quarters in Portugal. One could even speak of a symbiosis between the Portuguese merchants of Pessoa paraphernalia, institutional and municipal initiatives in Lisbon (Casa Fernando Pessoa, the inscription of Pessoa quotations around the city, etc.) and the travel industry in Sweden and elsewhere. Interestingly, these uses of Pessoa in Sweden point in two very different directions. If the latter ties him to a chronotopic imaginary of ‘Lisbon’, the former affirms instead a broadly modernist conception of literary autonomy and positions him as a ‘lonely canonical’, to use Mads Rosendahl Thomsen’s term (Rosendahl Thomsen 2008, 48). As a descriptor for writers who achieve world fame without the backing of an internationally canonised group of compatriots – the Russian cluster of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgeniev and Chekov serves as an illustrative contrast – the term ‘lonely canonical’ demonstrates how world literary canonisation can defy the influence of otherwise dominant national literary cultures. In this context, Pessoa is one of the loneliest of all – which makes him all the more effective as an ally for those who wish to defend the supreme autonomy of literature. Indeed, as already implied, the symbolic capital of Pessoa’s belated world literary status played a small yet significant role in the dramatic shift in aesthetic paradigm that occurred in Sweden in the 1980s. To demonstrate these points, my discussion will be organised mainly around the contributions of Lundgren and Holmqvist, and to some extent Cullhed. When read together with commentary in the daily press, these moments of reception and translation will tell us something of how Pessoa is positioned in the local Swedish construction of world literature.

The translator – Arne Lundgren

The translations of Pessoa into Swedish begin with a bang. In 1973, in Fernando Pessoa: Ett diktaröde i tolkning av Arne Lundgren (‘Fernando Pessoa: A Poetic Destiny Interpreted by Arne Lundgren’), we are presented with a 30-page essay and a further 100 pages of poetry and prose fragments by Campos, Reis, Caeiro and Pessoa. Although prolific as a Swedish-language poet and prose-writer in a regionalist vein, the editor and translator Arne Lundgren (1925–2011) is mainly remembered for his tireless dedication to introducing Iberian and Latin American literature in Sweden. By the time he published Fernando Pessoa, he already had two decades’ experience as a translator and introduktör, the Swedish term for a critic who presents foreign authors to the reading public. As editor and one of three translators, in 1960 he published Portugisiska berättare (‘Portuguese Storytellers’, Lundgren 1960), a selection of prose from Portugal. A companion volume, Latinamerikanska berättare (‘Latin American Storytellers’, Lundgren 1963), appeared in 1963 with Lundgren as editor but not as translator. In 1961 he was the sole translator behind Fem brasilianska poeter (‘Five Brazilian Poets’, Bandeira 1961) and in 1966 he translated the selection Natten och rosen/Carlos Drummond de Andrade (‘The Night and the Rose/Carlos Drummond de Andrade’, Göransson, n.d.; Andrade 1966).

Lundgren’s position in the Swedish literary field was slightly anomalous, however. Firmly rooted in his native western Sweden, he never participated in the central literary circles in Stockholm – or, for that matter, in the university towns of Lund or Uppsala. On the other hand, all his publications in the 1950s and 1960s, including his own poetry and prose, appeared with Norstedt. This signals a certain centrality: in the publishing ecology of Sweden, Stockholm-based Norstedt ranked and still ranks as one of the major Swedish publishers with considerable economic and symbolic capital, second only to Bonnier. But when the turn came, in 1973, to publish Fernando Pessoa, Lundgren’s first new translation after the Andrade volume, something had happened: this pioneering introduction to Pessoa was published by the extremely minor Futura förlag. Further research would be required to establish the reason for this shift, but a structural circumstance offers a partial explanation. In 1970, fixed book prices (still in place in many parts of Europe) were scrapped in Sweden. This forced publishers to reorganise their priorities and meant that small publishers would gradually assume a growing responsibility for published translations.

In the case of Fernando Pessoa and Lundgren’s other edition of Pessoa translations, Stilla, mitt hjärta (1988, ‘Be Still, My Heart’), the shift to marginal publishers – in the latter case Lundgren’s own imprint, Fabians förlag – resulted in a loss of editorial professionalism and, consequently, uncertain circulation. Enthusiasm and specific expertise compensated to some extent for this lack of market professionalism: at least in its 1970s incarnation, Futura was dedicated to the Portuguese language and to Lusophone literature. Alexander Fernandes, a Portuguese exile in Sweden, contributed to its Swedish-Portuguese dictionary (in 1971) and a broad introduction to Portuguese and Brazilian writing (in 1972). Small as it may have been, in other words, Futura was a logical refuge for Lundgren’s project. Later, with Fabians förlag, he created his own platform – though with varying success.

The 1973 essay is well-researched and builds on foundational contributions to Pessoa-criticism by João Gaspar Simões, Adolfo Casais Monteiro and Jacinto do Prado Coelho. Lundgren mentions also Jorge Nemésio’s A Obra poética de Fernando Pessoa and the Brazilian critic Maria Aleite Dores Galhoz’s Fernando Pessoa: Obra poética as sources, all of which shows not only that the book is the outcome of a long relationship with Pessoa’s work, but also that it is remarkably in sync with the Lusophone reception of Pessoa. In 1973, three decades after the Obras completas had been inaugurated in 1942, Pessoa’s oeuvre was still to an exceptional degree in the process of being collectively constructed; the first edition of Livro do desassossego would not appear until 1982.

Hence, Lundgren is well-informed. The first half of his very readable essay provides an account of Pessoa’s biography; the second discusses the divergent poetics of the heteronyms Campos, Reis and Caeiro plus the orthonym Pessoa. There is also a section on Pessoa as dramatist. However, it is the focus on the three main heteronyms (to be joined many years later by Bernardo Soares) that sets a pattern for the Swedish reception. Álvaro de Campos has pride of place in the essay, described by Lundgren as ‘[t]he most interesting result of FP’s exposure of his personality’ (‘Det mest intressanta resultatet av FP:s personlighetsexponering,’ Lundgren 1973, 20). This judgment is repeated in the press, where Campos tends to be the most appreciated heteronym at the time. I believe there are two reasons behind this. The first is the strong modernist streak in Swedish poetry which led to an absolute dominance of free verse in the twentieth century and promoted a rebellious or avantgardist author role. The classicising style of Ricardo Reis or the orthonym’s neatly ordered verse were further removed from the sensibility of 1970s Sweden, and also more challenging to translate.

The biographical section of the essay places Pessoa squarely in a Portuguese literary context. His ‘English education’ (‘engelska uppfostran’, Lundgren 1973, 6) in Durban merits a brief mention, whereas both the literary and political scenes of the fledgling republic of Portugal are given a thorough presentation, along with a substantial account of Pessoa’s contributions to intellectual debates. Lundgren is mostly descriptive but notes that ‘Mensagem was not a satisfying debut’ (‘Mensagem blev ingen fullödig debut’, Lundgren 1973,  17). When presenting the heteronyms, Lundgren pieces together composite ‘portraits’, based on the poetry and on Pessoa’s correspondence. Already here we see the establishment of the heteronyms themselves – rather than their poems – as a main point of interest in the Swedish reception. Lundgren can hardly be blamed for this slippage, since the selection of poetry in this volume is so generous, but the pattern becomes clear in subsequent decades: barring a handful of actual engagements with the work itself, Pessoa becomes equated with his heteronymic project – more as an idea than a practice. Even the most recent essays by Coelho Ahndoril (2009) and B. Gustavsson (2014) perpetuate this approach.

Lundgren’s second major contribution to the Swedish reception, Stilla, mitt hjärta (‘Be Still My Heart’, Pessoa 1988) appeared in 1988, on the centenary of Pessoa’s birth. This recycles some of the material in Fernando Pessoa, but adds many new translations, including fifteen fragments from Livro do desassossego (referred to as ‘Rolöshetens bok’). Lundgren also revises several of his earlier translations. His excerpts from ‘Ode marítima,’ called ‘Maritimt ode’ in 1973, have now not only become ‘Ode till havet’ (‘Ode to the Sea’) but are considerably rephrased – shifts that would merit a separate study. The presentation of Pessoa is more concentrated, but repeats the pattern from the 1973 book with sections both on Pessoa’s biography and on the main heteronyms – this time including Bernardo Soares. As we soon shall see, the reception of the new volume differed considerably from the first, and it is clear from its sheer size (220 pages) that Lundgren’s confidence was buoyed by the rising international profile of Pessoa at the time. In hindsight, it is therefore unfortunate that he self-published the volume. Despite elegant typesetting and the inclusion of several of Almada Negreiros’s iconic images, the book does not quite meet professional publishing standards: Arne Lundgren’s own name, for example, does not appear anywhere in the book. It is as though Stilla, mitt hjärta had issued directly from ‘Fernando Pessoa’ himself.

The critic – Bengt Holmqvist

We now need to recalibrate our chronology. Lundgren’s introduction in 1973 is in fact not the first trace of Pessoa in Swedish. The poet is mentioned in a short column by the translator C.G. Bjurström in the Bonnier-owned Stockholm daily Dagens Nyheter in 1960. Bjurström, who resided in Paris, reported to his Swedish readers that three French translations of Pessoa had been published and were being much discussed in France; one of them appeared in what he calls the ‘exquisite little series “Poètes d’aujord’hui”’ (‘i den ypperliga lilla serien “Poètes d’aujord’hui”’, Bjurström 1960). In the course of the 1960s, there are about ten further mentions of Pessoa in the national press. Most importantly, however, Pessoa is presented in a 1966 book, Den moderna litteraturen (‘The Modern Literature’, Holmqvist 1966), the critic Bo Holmqvist’s magisterial introduction to twentieth-century literature in the romance languages.

If Lundgren kept a low profile – lowered yet further by the move from Norstedt to Futura – Bengt Holmqvist (1924–2002) was centrally placed and carried tremendous authority in the Swedish literary field at the time. He wrote in the above-mentioned Dagens Nyheter, which alongside Svenska Dagbladet was and is one of two flagship national broadsheets (nowadays in tabloid format after the turn-of-the-millennium daily press crisis), and had made a name for himself already in the 1950s as a stringent reader with New Critical leanings and a modernist sensibility. At any given moment, a small country such as Sweden will only have a handful of critics that can credibly lay claim to what their time defines as a cosmopolitan outlook. Holmqvist belonged in that company, as Den moderna litteraturen (published by Bonnier) amply demonstrates. By devoting six knowledgeable pages to Pessoa in 1966, he was perhaps not ahead of the reception in French or Germany, but still remarkably early. Holmqvist does not, however, attempt to translate Pessoa into Swedish. Instead, he paraphrases some poems, quotes from others in Portuguese (with few typos) and presents a full poem by Reis (‘Anjos ou deuses’) accompanied by Georg Rudolf Lind’s German translation – which says a great deal about Holmqvist’s expected readership (Homqvist 1966).

It is striking that so little changes in Holmqvist’s appreciation of Pessoa after 1966. As befits a critic of his stature, he is a sharper reader of poetry than Lundgren and also a better essayist. His account of Pessoa’s life is to the point and integrates the English side of Pessoa in the portrait. Holmqvist points out that the publication of Antinous, 35 Sonnets and English Poems made him as much an English as a Portuguese poet during his lifetime, and that his nine years in Durban gave him ‘a life-long protection against Lusitanian provincialism’ (‘ett livslångt skydd mot lusitansk provinsialism’, Holmqvist 1966, 494). His account of the heteronyms will be repeated with a few variations and additions in later years, but it is in Den moderna litteraturen that Holmqvist engages most thoroughly with the poetry. He reads the heteronyms through their poetry, is not quite convinced by the naivety of Caeiro, appreciates Reis (whom he compares to Hölderlin) and is full of enthusiasm for Campos – thereby setting the pattern for subsequent Swedish assessments (pre-Bernardo Soares) of the heteronyms.

The riddle, however, is why Lundgren in 1973 makes no mention at all of Holmqvist’s cogent introduction, published seven years earlier. Lundgren draws directly, as already mentioned, on numerous Lusophone sources, but by not mentioning Holmqvist he gives the impression that there is no prior Swedish context of reception. I can only read this, yet again, as a certain lack of professionalism. Lundgren’s knowledge of and devotion to Lusophone literature is beyond reproach – and he was awarded the Swedish Academy’s translation prize in 1983 – but when he ventured beyond translation to become both critic and publisher, there was a certain disconnect between his output and the more successful or prestigious pockets of the publishing field in Sweden. His role might seem to align with Bourdieu’s claim that translations become the responsibility of smaller publishers who are ‘condemned to literary virtue’ (Bourdieu 2008, 135) – but the problem here is that by failing to acknowledge an authoritative publication in the Swedish literary field (by Holmqvist) Lundgren’s own capital in that field is reduced.

Graciously enough, Holmqvist never lets on. Given Lundgren’s slip in combination with the aesthetic preferences in Sweden in the early 1970s (which favoured realism, documentarism or a Brechtian political poetics), Fernando Pessoa could have been completely ignored in the national press. Instead, Holmqvist’s generous reviews both of this volume and of Lundgren’s edition in 1988 are what eventually secures the Swedish reception of Pessoa. Published in April 1974, almost six months after the book had appeared and, remarkably, a mere two weeks before the revolution in Portugal, Holmqvist’s long piece on Lundgren’s Fernando Pessoa placed Pessoa on the literary map – not as a curiosity, nor as a concern only for specialists, but as ‘a central figure within world poetry’ (‘en centralfigur inom världspoesin’, Holmqvist 1974).

Beginning with Pessoa’s epiphanic Caeiro-moment in March 1914, Holmqvist first presents the heteronyms, but then offers precise and qualitative commentary on Lundgren’s translations. He is not quite taken by Lundgren’s rendition of Reis, nor is he enthusiastic about the orthonym (‘who gives a rather shadowlike impression’; ‘gör ofta ett något skugglikt intryck’, Holmqvist 1974), but the Caeiro translations meet with his approval and Campos – once again – stirs his enthusiasm. He praises the ‘visionary peaks’ (‘de visionära höjdpunkterna’, Holmqvist 1974) in ‘Ode marítima’, which he describes as a ‘modern national poem of an entirely different order than the chauvinstic tirades in Mensagem’ (‘ett modernt nationalpoem av helt annan dignitet än de chauvinistiska tiraderna i “Mensagem”’, Holmqvist 1974).

Fourteen years later, Holmqvist would repeat the gesture with Lundgren’s extended selection. By 1988, however, the conditions for the reception of Pessoa had changed. This book, published on the centenary of Pessoa’s birth, was reviewed appreciatively in all the major newspapers. Holmqvist’s article in Dagens Nyheter – once again taking up more than half of a broadsheet page – rehearsed points from 1974, but also placed Pessoa more confidently in a contemporary Swedish context. One could argue that Holmqvist’s long engagement with Pessoa’s work was finally in step with the intellectual mood of the times. What had happened?

The short answer is that there was a brief struggle between two generations of critics in Sweden in the early 1980s (Broady and Palme 1998). The young rebels (at the time), fuelled by French theory, raised the stakes of literary and intellectual autonomy in reaction against a generalised Marxist tendency in the 1970s. This reactivated an archive of continental philosophy – including Husserl and Heidegger – which had been muted in Sweden ever since the Second World War. It also meant, idiosyncratically, that poststructuralism in Sweden became the tool of an elitist group of writers and philosophers who rejected the egalitarian, socialist and thirdworldist ethos of the 1970s. As with any successful revolution, the rebels rapidly transitioned into the establishment and have, for example, dominated the Swedish Academy for more than two decades.³

The most prominent among these critics is Horace Engdahl, a high-profile member of the Academy since 1997. It was Engdahl’s contributions to the culture pages of Dagens Nyheter in the 1980s that became the most public manifestation of the shift in critical approach. His review in May 1982 of Självdeklarationer (‘Self Declarations’, Engdahl 1982), a slim book of essays in which 24 authors reflected on their writerly practice, is the locus classicus of this generational challenge and has retrospectively been read as the opening salvo in the Swedish ‘poststructuralism debate’ (Broady and Palme 1998, 195–201). Invoking Roland Barthes’s definition of intertextuality, Engdahl – who was 34 at the time – accuses the authors of unreflectingly perpetuating the ‘myth of Literature’ (‘myten om Litteraturen’, Engdahl 1982). Writing, Engdahl explains, is neither the expression of an authentic subjectivity nor an instrument of moral betterment, but simply parody: ‘imitation, diversion, superimposition of form and allusions’ (‘härmning, avvikelse, överlagring av formspråk och assocationer’, Engdahl 1982). To clinch his argument, Engdahl ends the review by quoting (in his own translation, not Lundgren’s) the initial lines from Pessoa’s ‘Autopsicografia’: ‘Diktaren är en låtsare./Han låtsas så fullständigt/att han till och med låtsas ha ont/av de smärtor han verkligen känner.’ (Engdahl 1982. In George Monteiro’s English translation: ‘The poet is a forger who/Forges so completely that/He forges even the feeling/He feels truly as pain’, Monteiro n.d.)

Although barely read in Sweden at the time, in other words, Pessoa is wielded here by the purported Swedish standard-bearer of postmodernist poetics (a descriptor Engdahl himself did not approve of). Holmqvist belonged to an older generation and was therefore untouched by Engdahl’s attack, but six years later his 1988 review does register the shift in critical mood. ‘Today,’ he says, ‘it is no longer a curiosity to include him, as the great linguist Roman Jakobson does, among the pivotal generation of the 1880s along with Joyce, Stravinsky, Picasso, Le Corbusier’ (‘Numera ligger det inget originellt i att med den store lingvisten Roman Jakobson räkna honom till samma grupp kapitala 1880-talister som Joyce, Stravinsky, Picasso, Le Corbusier’, Holmqvist 1988). But why, he asks, is it that Pessoa today has become ‘perhaps the most intensely present of the century’s great poets?’ (‘den kanske mest närvande av seklets stora diktare’, Holmqvist 1988):

It is not just the pleasure of a still ongoing discovery, the fascination of delayed news. It has to do, rather, with his subjectivity: with a deconstruction of his own personality that it is almost too easy, to draw on the jargon of our moment, to call pre-postmodernist.

(Det är inte bara den alltjämt pågående upptäcktens behag, den försenade nyhetens fascination. Det är något som har med hans jagupplevelse att skaffa: med en dekonstruktion av den egna personligheten som det är nästan alltför tacksamt att i anknytning till nu gängse jargong kalla prepostmodernistisk.) (Holmqvist 1988)

As the eminence grise among Swedish critics, Holmqvist could afford to distance himself from ongoing generational quibbles by speaking of ‘jargon.’ But his deployment, in one and the same clause, of the very jargon of ‘deconstruction’ and ‘postmodernism’ served both to signal that he kept up with the times and that the times, finally, had caught up with him, 22 years after he first introduced Pessoa to a Swedish readership.

Orons bok and afterwards

In so far as my account can be claimed to cover the ‘rise’ of Pessoa in Sweden, it is here, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, that we reach a peak of sorts. Holmqvist’s role as Pessoa’s main reader in the Swedish literary field culminates and ends with his introductory essay to Orons bok in 1991. This is also when there is a changing of the guard among the translators, from Arne Lundgren to Lars Axelsson and Margareta Marin, who co-translated Orons bok. Surprisingly, this book, too, appeared with a minor publisher, Pontes, specialised in translations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and, not coincidentally, based in the same tiny west coast town of Lysekil as Lundgren’s Fabians förlag. Having secured Holmqvist’s support, and given the general recognition of Pessoa in literary Sweden at this time, Pontes could however credibly expect their edition of Livro do desassossego to receive attention.

Holmqvist’s eight-page introduction to Orons bok is arguably the most neatly concentrated essay on Pessoa in the Swedish language. With stylistic economy, he distils here the essence of his long engagement with Pessoa’s work, restating many earlier points. But compared to Lundgren’s essay from 1973, or his own review of Lundgren in 1974, Holmqvist no longer needs to perform a sense of puzzlement at Pessoa’s multi-authorial project. Instead, he deftly presents its logic, offers concise accounts of Caeiro, Campos, and Reis and expands on Soares, Livro’s semi-heteronym. The (first) Portuguese book publication of Livro do desassessego was still a novelty and a lingering sensation at the time, but the appearance of Orons bok as early as 1991 also meant that the Ática edition of 1982 is presented here as the normative version. As anyone with a passing acquaintance with the Livro do dessassego these days knows, there is no single version of the book in Portuguese, but rather successive attempts at ordering the material left behind by Pessoa. There is indeed a critical edition called Livro do desasocego – in Pessoa’s own orthography – from 2010 that can be regarded as definitive from an academic viewpoint, but any trade publication needs to choose among numerous alternative renderings of the book (Pessoa 2010). Orons bok – including also the reprints from 1999 and 2007 – presents instead the ordering as a fait accompli, with the caveat that the translators ‘found it impossible – and not meaningful – to transpose the most incomplete and least legible fragments to Swedish. The original edition consists of 520 fragments; the Swedish translation contains 420’ (Holmqvist 1991, 14). If they rely only on publications in the Swedish language, Swedish readers even today remain blissfully ignorant of the dramatic publication history of Livro. Notwithstanding, Lars Axelsson and Margareta Marin’s translation of Livro has, with its three editions, become the most widely distributed Pessoa text in Sweden. The latest reprint was in 2007, however, and it seems neither likely nor advisable that this version will make it into print a fourth time, considering all that has happened with Livro do desassossego in recent years. After all, since the first edition of Livro do desasssossego appeared in Portugal in 1982, there have been three further renderings of the book (including the 2010 critical edition) with significantly different orderings of the fragments. One can only hope for a new translation, based on updated editorial knowledge about the text.

Two years after Orons bok, the up-and-coming literary researcher Anders Cullhed published a collection of essays, Solens flykt. Från barocken till Octavio Paz (‘The Flight of the Sun: from the Baroque to Octavio Paz’, Cullhed 1993). Cullhed is of the same generation as Horace Engdahl and moved in the same circles; they both wrote in Dagens Nyheter and both earned their doctorates at Stockholm University, where Cullhed later would become Professor of Literature. Cullhed had less of a polemical urge than Engdahl, however, and was at the time focused particularly on Hispanic literature. This explains also his one venture into Portuguese, an essay on Pessoa in Solens flykt. In contrast to most of the other Pessoa essays in Swedish, which tend to introduce Pessoa broadly, Cullhed’s consists of a stringent close reading of four poems. Already the title ‘Fernando Pessoa: fyra röster om ett enda ögonblick’ (‘Fernando Pessoa: Four Voices about One Single Instant’, Cullhed 1993) indicates that the essay is structured around the four main heteronyms. Contrary to Holmqvist, however, his interest lies less in pronouncing on the relative literary value of their output and more in the differences between how they ‘perceive or describe the single instant, o momento or o instante, the now that is central in so many of their poems and notes’ (‘hur Caeiro, Reis, Campos och Soares uppfattar eller beskriver det enskilda ögonblicket, o momento eller o instante, det nu som står i centrum för flera av deras dikter och anteckningar’, Cullhed 1993, 94). He motivates this focus by claiming that it keenly brings out the differences among the heteronyms and also that temporality was a central concern of Pessoa.

Cullhed’s essay is doubtlessly the most trenchant contribution to the Swedish reception of Pessoa. He demonstrates a thorough command of the state of the art (at the time) in international Pessoa criticism and quotes all the excerpts in the original. Cullhed is also clearly aware of previous publications in Swedish and quotes, when possible, translations by Lundgren, Axelsson and Marin. In this context, one can note that Cullhed offers an independent evaluation of the heteronyms: ‘With all due respect for the widely appreciated engineer Campos I still wonder whether Ricardo Reis isn’t the most intriguing of Pessoa’s heteronyms. True, he is no pioneering modernist, but rather a reconstruction of an antique ideal consisting in equal measure of the stoic philosopher […] and the epicurean poet of a Horatian kind’ (‘Med all respekt för den vitt och brett lovordade ingenjör Campos undrar jag om inte Ricardo Reis är den mest förbryllande av Pessoas heteronymer. Han är ingen modernistisk pionjär, det är sant, utan snarare en återskapelse av ett antikt ideal, till lika delar sammansatt av den stoiska filosofen […] och den epikuréiske poeten av horatianskt snitt’, Cullhed 1993, 101).

Tobias Berggren’s two essays from 1989 and 1992 (Berggren 1989 and Berggren 1992) are, by contrast, better described as one writer’s encounter with another writer. If the first essay – yet again – offers a broad life-and-letters introduction to Pessoa, Berggren’s energetic discussion in the second piece circles around Caeiro and the orthonym’s poem ‘Chuva oblíqua’, which is also printed in the journal Artes in Berggren’s own translation. Berggren is well read, but tends to cram an over-abundance of ideas and evocative impressions into a limited space.

After the 1991 publication of Orons bok, Lars Axelsson and Margareta Marin have, with Pontes as their base and with support from both Gulbenkian Foundation and the Camões Institute, continued to provide the Swedish book market with numerous Pessoa translations. These include Den anarkistiske bankiren och En mycket originell middag (‘The Anarchist Banker and A Very Original Dinner’, Pessoa 1995), Dikter av Alberto Caeiro (‘Poems by Alberto Caeiro’ – with an afterword by Richard Zenith, Pessoa 2001), Djävulens timma och En stoikers fostran (‘The Devil’s Hour and The Education of Stoic’, Pessoa 2006), Ode till havet och andra dikter av Álvaro de Campos (‘Maritime Ode and Other Poems by Álvaro de Campos’, Pessoa 2009) and Dikter av Ricardo Reis (‘Poems by Ricardo Reis’, Pessoa 2013). Yet despite this translation activity, and despite Coelho Ahndoril’s later essay (Coelho Ahndoril 2009), with its Lacanian take on the heteronyms, all the indications are that Pessoa is less in focus in the literary field in Sweden today. It would require a separate article to confirm whether this really is the case and, above all, to find out why. If my observation is correct, however, I will hazard a speculative explanation: besides a dwindling number of readers and a general weakening of literature as a social value in the last two decades in Sweden, conditions for critics writing in the press have also deteriorated dramatically. A smaller number of publications are reviewed and the public space for cultivating idiosyncratic, international literary tastes has been reduced (and only partly moved online). Besides small and specialised publications such as Dixikon (online) or Karavan, the focus of critics’ attention has become more Swedish, to some extent Scandinavian, and above all Anglophone. It is this that tends to reduce Pessoa to an author figure rather than an oeuvre with which one engages. No notable critical engagements have appeared since Coelho Ahndoril's essay. The introductions to the Pontes editions are very short, and it is symptomatic that Richard Zenith was asked to write an afterword to the Caeiro volume in 2001. This arguably offers the most densely specialised account of Pessoa available in Swedish, albeit in translation. Bo Gustavsson’s short essay from 2014, finally, deserves a mention. The tell-tale omission of ‘Fernando’ in Gustavsson’s subtitle – ‘Om Pessoas Alberto Caeiro’ (‘On Pessoa’s Alberto Caeiro’, B. Gustavsson 2014) – confirms that Pessoa’s level of name recognition in Sweden is high by now, but besides highlighting the English heteronym Alexander Search, Gustavsson adds nothing new to the Swedish reception.

Finally, as already mentioned, ever since the early 1990s in the Swedish press it has become more likely to come across Pessoa’s name in articles about Lisbon than in critical essays (Eklund 1994; Andreadakis and Berger 2000). Also, in a programme broadcast on national television in 2016, it was none other than Horace Engdahl who travelled to Lisbon, combining a presentation of Pessoa with appealing visuals from the Portuguese capital. This linking of Pessoa and Lisbon strikingly contradicts the emphasis in the 1980s on Pessoa as the autonomous poet and hero of postructuralist poetics. It also supports my assumption above about the weakening status of literature: if previously it was enough to insist on Pessoa’s stature within ‘world poetry’, today he is mediated through a touristic consumption of places.

Closing remarks

This short article does not allow me to draw many hard and fast conclusions; it identifies, rather, questions that merit further investigation. On the one hand – and this is to some extent what the present special issue aims to do – the material discussed here should be placed in a comparative context so as to understand the dynamic and temporality of Pessoa’s reception across different languages. How do the volume and timing of Pessoa translations in Swedish and other languages compare? To what extent is the reception of Pessoa tied to transnational academic and literary trends? Does his status as a ‘lonely canonical,’ whose reception overall has been belated, make Pessoa’s oeuvre more amenable to domesticating appropriations? On the other hand, and this is perhaps a matter of more interest to Swedish scholars, how does the reception of Pessoa in Sweden compare with Hispanophone modernists such as Lorca or Borges? My sense is that Lusophone literature, generally, is more marginal in the Swedish translation field than Hispanophone literature – although Lusophone writing from Africa is a special case (see Helgesson 2016). Had it not been for the specific value of Pessoa’s de-subjectified poetics in the internal field struggles among literary critics in Sweden in the 1980s, it is quite possible that his work’s reception would have been yet more restricted. What can be said unequivocally is this: having been early in the sequence of international reception in the 1960s and 1970s, the most current accounts of Pessoa produced by Swedish critics, as well as the available translation of Livro do desassossego, fail to provide the reader with up-to-date knowledge on the poet.

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Notes on contributors

Stefan Helgesson

Stefan Helgesson is professor of English at Stockholm University and a senior research associate at Rhodes University. His most recent book (co-authored with Mads Rosendahl Thomsen) is Literature and the World (2020).

Notes

1. All translations from the Swedish are my own, unless otherwise stated.

2. My general statements about publications in the Nordic languages are based on searches in the national catalogues of each of the five countries.

3. A journalistic yet trustworthy account of this circle can be found in Matilda Gustavsson’s Klubben  (M. Gustavsson 2019), her exposé of the scandal that threatened to undermine the Swedish Academy in 2018.