This research was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (SFRH/BD/143789/2019).
1The aim of this paper is to present a study of the genesis of the poem “Hora Absurda,” by Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935).
2The interest in the poem’s compositional process lies in the intrinsic characteristics of the emendations, which can be observed in the autograph manuscript: some of the authorial corrections in the manuscript of “Hora Absurda,” in fact, show structural similarities, modifying a specific category of words through a similar procedure; in this sense, by representing the concretization of a specific modifying intention, those interventions seem to testify the authorial will to introduce a specific poetic expression along the text. Furthermore, the authorial corrections that will be analyzed in this paper appear to reflect a particular aspect of the author’s poetics, offering the possibility to establish a concrete interdependence between Fernando Pessoa’s writing practice and the main aspects of his artistic personality.
3Considering the distinctive features of the emendations found in the poem’s manuscript, it is possible to infer that the poet had a specific expressive aim that guided him during the revision of his composition. In other words, this article will attempt to demonstrate that there is a correlation between the corrections made by Fernando Pessoa during the genetic process of his poem “Hora Absurda” and the most characteristic elements of the author’s poetics in the period in which the poem was written and published.
4Therefore, this research, which falls within the area of genetic criticism, will focus on the more structured and thoughtful aspects of poetic composition. However, it is important to note that this does not imply a devaluation of the significance of poetic inspiration in Fernando Pessoa’s writing process, which is in fact a fundamental element of every creative act. Rather, this study seeks to highlight the fact that it is possible to support the hypothesis that, after a moment of inspired writing, Pessoa devoted himself to a moment of careful and calculated revision of his poem. This hypothesis appears to be confirmed by one of the most discussed aspects of Fernando Pessoa’s poetic production: the strong imbalance between the poems written by the poet and those that were actually published during his lifetime.
5In this context, the analysis of the genetic process of “Hora Absurda” would substantiate the image of Fernando Pessoa as a hyper-rational author, who, in the vast majority of cases, did not publish his works until they had been subjected to a lengthy and meticulous revision process.
6Before analyzing the genetic process of “Hora Absurda”, it is deemed appropriate to provide a brief overview of the most relevant features of Fernando Pessoa’s work and poetics, particularly during the 1910s decade, when the author wrote and published his poem “Hora Absurda”.
- 1 The first generation of modernist artists in Portugal is commonly referred to as the “orpheu genera (...)
7Today, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa is considered one of the most representative authors of Portuguese literature and Modernist literature in general; he actively participated in the modernist literary life in Portugal during the first decades of the twentieth century, also co-founding the literary magazine Orpheu, which hosted the most influential voices of Portuguese modernism, and whose name has marked an entire literary generation in Portugal.1
8Scarcely acclaimed while the author was still alive, Fernando Pessoa’s work later became highly celebrated inside and outside Portuguese national borders, especially for the poet’s capacity to embody the spirit of his own literary era, which reacted to the nostalgic atmosphere of Romantism by promoting the creation of a new literary path.
9Pessoa’s work strongly reflected the crisis of conscience which affected the artistic scene during the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Western Europe; as a result of the rejection of the Romantic era’s ideals, which were characterized by a strong individualism and the overevaluation of the author’s role in art, modernist literature often moved away from the idea of a unitary existence in order to represent the heterogeneity of the human nature.
- 2 For an overview on Pessoa’s heteronyms, see Zenith 2021 and Pessoa 2013
10Fernando Pessoa sought to convey the multiplicity of human experience through the literary invention of the heteronymy; through this literary device, which soon became one of the most emblematic aspects of his literary activity, the Portuguese poet created multiple fictitious personalities, each one with its own artistic individuality, whose literary production appeared alongside the works which Pessoa signed with his own civil name (and which is referred to as the “orthonymic production”, as opposed to the “heteronymic production”).2
11Heteronyms must not be mistaken with pseudonyms: while a pseudonym is merely a different name adopted by authors to sign their own work, a heteronym work is, according to the definition given by Pessoa himself in his Tábua Bibliographica, “[a obra] do auctor fora da sua pessoa” [the work by the author outside his own person] (Pessoa 1928). Pessoa’s heteronyms are fictitious characters that have arisen from the creative mind of the poet; they are invented, made-up, they do not exist in the tangible world, but they are, in fact, full-fledged artistic personalities, each one with its own idiosyncrasies and with its own literary expression.
- 3 A valuable document for exploring the birth of heteronymy is the famous letter written by Fernando (...)
12Pessoa’s tendency to create fictitious personalities dates back to his infancy, when he invented an imaginary pen pal named Chevalier de Pas, who could be considered Pessoa’s first heteronym;3 however, the public appearance of Pessoa’s heteronymic work did not occur until 1915, when the heteronym Álvaro de Campos published in the journal Orpheu the poem “Ode Triunfal”. Since then, Pessoa’s heteronyms carry on their own literary activities alongside with Pessoa himself.
13Heteronymy is, doubtlessly, the most emblematic representation of modernist literature in Pessoa’s work; however, even before the first heteronymic poem was published, Pessoa had already dedicated a great deal of his literary activity to the theorization of another distinctive feature of his production, which was also an emblematic expression of Portuguese’s modernism: the “literary isms”.
14Pessoa’s isms are various literary tendencies which the poet idealized and theorized with the aim of renewing Portuguese poetry. The first concrete formulation of these literary isms dates back to 1912 when Pessoa published in the journal A Águia a series of three articles, in which he argued for the necessity of rejuvenating Portuguese literature, providing details on what the main features of the new Portuguese poetry should have been.
- 4 A comprehensive edition of all the documents related to Pessoa’s literary isms was compiled by Jero (...)
15A large number of documents written between 1913 and 1917, currently kept in Fernando Pessoa’s archive at Portugal’s National Library in Lisbon, testify to the theorization of those literary tendencies, which Pessoa invented with the aim of reviving Portuguese’s literary context, following that urgency of establishing new forms of art which distinguished the Modernist era. These documents, which were published posthumously,4 provide detailed insight into the founding features of Pessoa’s isms, whose nature was not only literary, but also social, philosophical, or even religious.
16In 1914, Pessoa published the poem “Pauis”, which marked the public debut of his literary isms project. The poem “Pauis” was conceived and published by Pessoa as the manifesto of his first literary ism, whose name, Paulismo, directly derives from the poem’s title. The text of “Pauis” is the poetic embodiment of the three tenets which Pessoa had outlined in his 1912 article as the fundamental principles of the new Portuguese poetry (“vagueness, subtlety and complexity”):
Perscrutemos qual a estética da nova poesia portuguesa. A primeira constatação analítica que o raciocínio faz ante a nossa poesia de hoje é que o seu arcaboiço espiritual é composto de três elementos — vago, subtileza e complexidade. São vagas, subtis e complexas as expressões características do seu verso, e a sua ideação é, portanto, do mesmo triplo carácter.
[Let us explore the aesthetic of the new Portuguese poetry. The first analytical observation that reason makes of our poetry today is that its spiritual framework is composed of three elements — vagueness, subtlety and complexity. The characteristic expressions of its verse are vague, subtle and complex, and its ideation is therefore of the same threefold character.]
(Pessoa 1912, 90)
17From to Pessoa’s perspective, Paulismo represented an evolution of symbolism, inheriting its nature of a “subjective poetry” and its poetics of vagueness and subtlety, and implementing a third element of complexity (Pessoa 1912, 91). This element of complexity will be one of the distinctive traits of Pessoa’s poems bounded to the poetics of literary isms, and its poetic expression is characterized by the presence of rhetorical 6ures, such as metaphor, synaesthesia, or oxymoron, which violate the utterance’s logical sequence and the syntax’s norms, thus creating an effect of oddness (Morna 1982, 22).
18The three fundamental principles described by Pessoa as the three tenets of the new Portuguese poetry, and associated with Paulismo’s aesthetic, will be adopted for the theorization of subsequent literary isms and will become a distinctive feature of Pessoa’s poetry throughout his literary activity. As a matter of fact, whereas at the beginning of his literary project Pessoa referred to his literary isms as three distinct literary movements, over time the distinction between the various literary isms became blurred, and the fundamental basis of Paulismo will be integrated into the following literary tendencies. Consequently, the second literary ism conceived by Pessoa, Interseccionismo, can be seen as an evolution of Paulismo, purged from its strongest symbolist reminiscence and closer to the modernist European movements.
19Interseccionismo was a literary aesthetic that drew influence from European avant-garde movements, such as Cubism and Futurism. As its name suggests, Interseccionismo’s poetics was based on the idea of intersection between a “estado de alma” [state of the soul] and a “paisagem” [landscape], that is, the intersection between an object and the sensation it evokes. This principle of intersection is similar to the creative principle of avant-garde experiences, which was based on overlapping distinct planes of the reality. Various documents kept in Pessoa’s archive testify to the poet’s desire to publish a manifesto of Interseccionismo, though it was never completed nor published. In one of these documents, Pessoa announces the founding principle of Interseccionismo and its connection to the avant-garde movements:
Ora a Arte busca a Sensação em absoluto. Mas a sensação, como vimos, compõe-se do Objecto sentido e da Sensação propriamente tal.
Intersecção do Objecto comsigo proprio: cubismo. (Isto é, intersecção dos varios aspectos do mesmo Objecto uns com os outros).
Interseccção do Objecto com as idéas objectivas que suggere: Futurismo.
Intersecção do Objecto com a nossa sensação d’elle: Interseccionismo, propriamente dito; o nosso.
[Now, Art seeks the Sensation in absolute terms. But sensation, as we have seen, is composed of the sensed Object and the Sensation itself.
Intersection of the Object with itself: cubism (i.e., intersection of the various aspects of the same Object with each other).
Intersection of the Object with the objective ideas it suggests: Futurism.
Intersection of the Object with our sensation of it: Intersectionism, the actual one; ours.]
(Pessoa 2009, 122)
Therefore, as Maria Aliete Galhoz pointed out, the theorization of Interseccionismo represented the desire to introduce the Portuguese literature in the context of European avant-garde (Galhoz 1980, XLI).
- 5 The special relevance of Sensacionismo, when compared to the other isms conceived by Pessoa, is wid (...)
20Subsequently, both Paulismo and Interseccionismo were incorporated into the last literary ism idealized by Pessoa, Sensacionismo, which represented a progression and a synthesis of all the literary isms previously theorised.5 This is evidenced by the fact that in some documents preserved in Pessoa’s archive, which are related to the theorisation of this last literary movement, the author refers to the earlier isms as “species” of Sensacionismo, rather than autonomous full-fledged literary tendencies (Pessoa 2009, 149).
21Furthermore, in the documents related to the conception of Sensacionismo, it is possible to discern the emergence of the first ideas related to self-plurality; thus, from a certain perspective, some of the precepts of Sensacionismo appear to be closely linked to the poetics of heteronymy (Pessoa 2015, 9).
- 6 In a famous, yet unpublished, text, titled A arte da quarta dimensão [The art of the fourth dimensi (...)
22The founding principle of Sensationism is the identity between reality and sensation, as Pessoa expressed in an unpublished fragment: “todo o objecto é uma sensação nossa” [every object is a sensation of our own] (Pessoa 2009, 145). This means that sensation is not merely a result of the observation of the external world but is an integral part of the exterior reality.6
23From this fundamental principle, Pessoa develops two consequent tenets, which anticipate the idea of self-multiplicity bounded to Sensationism:
Quoted passage from Pessoa 2009, 149
Quoted text by Pessoa (see title). Translation by the author.
Here, the utterance “ser tudo e todos” [to be everything and everyone] foreshadows the universe of fictitious personas that will form Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymic project; this demonstrates that Pessoa’s isms are a fundamental starting point for the development of the author’s poetics. In the following paragraphs, I will explore how Pessoa’s isms guide and influence his poetic production, especially through the analysis of the genetic process of the poem “Hora Absurda”.
24The poem “Hora Absurda”, published in 1916 in the Portuguese journal Exílio, is described by Fernando Pessoa as a “poema interseccionista” (Pessoa 2009, 116). The manuscript of the poem was composed in 1913, when the author’s literary activity was strictly bound to the project of literary isms.
25The poem’s structure is composed of a succession of metaphoric images through which the sensations of the speaking I (or those of the interlocutor) establish a correlation with the exterior reality, as exemplified by the first two stanzas of the poem:
O teu silêncio é uma nau com todas as velas pandas...
Brandas, as brisas brincam nas flâmulas, teu sorriso...
E o teu sorriso no teu silêncio é as escadas e as andas
Com que me finjo mais alto e ao pé de qualquer paraíso...
Meu coração é uma ânfora que cai e que se parte...
O teu silêncio recolhe-o e guarda-o, partido, a um canto...
Minha ideia de ti é um cadáver que o mar traz à praia..., e entanto
Tu és a tela irreal em que erro em cor a minha arte...
[Your silence is a ship, each sail taut in the wind...
Softly the breezes play in the pennants, your smile...
And your smile in your silence is the stairway and stilts
I use to pretend to be up higher, at the foot of some Paradise...
My heart’s an amphora that falls and breaks...
Your silence gathers and guards the shards in a corner...
My idea of you is a corpse the sea hauls ashore..., which makes you
The unreal canvas where I wander through color my art...]
(Pessoa 1986, 134)
The poem is made up of 25 stanzas, and almost each line follows the same semantic structure: the first part of the line expresses an emotion, or a feeling, which may or may not be expressed metaphorically, while the second part of the line presents an element of the exterior reality associated with the previously expressed sensation. As Caio Gagliardi pointed out, this “intersectionist syntax” (Gagliardi 2005, 97) is used to poetically express the intersection of a “state of the soul” and the “landscape” that Pessoa had established as the cornerstone of intersectionist aesthetic.
- 7 As Clara Rocha has noted, the intersectionist aesthetic is characterized by the presence of an “int (...)
26It is also worth noting that, in most cases, the part of the verse dedicated to expressing subjective sensations is composed of a synecdoche; this means that, when expressing the feelings of the speaking I or those of the interlocutor, the poet never refers to them as whole, entire, unities, but rather only to a part of them (v. 3 “your smile”; v. 5 “my heart”). Thus, the frequent use of synecdoches serves as a means of expression through which Fernando Pessoa conveys the idea of the fragmentation of the self, of a “soul broken into pieces” (Pessoa 2009, 152), which was, in fact, part of the intersectionist program.7
Figure 1 : First page of Fernando Pessoa’s “Hora Absurda” manuscript
Fernando Pessoa’s Archive. National Library of Portugal. BNP/E3 117–1r.
Image reproduced with permission from the copyright holder.
27In many cases, this unique way of expressing the idea of a self divided into its own sensations appears in the manuscript as a first attempt at writing. Upon examining the first page of the manuscript, it is possible to notice that the number of corrections introduced by the author is scarce (see Fig. 1).
- 8 In the published version, these lines respectively read: “E a minha alma é aquella luz que não mais (...)
Figure 2 : Fernando Pessoa’s “Hora Absurda” manuscript; lines 39 and 75. 8
Included images reproduced with permission of the copyright holder.
- 9 Almuth Grésillon designed this typology of variants “Variantes de lecture” (Grésillon 1988, 112).
28The number of authorial interventions, however, increases in the following sheets. The ink’s typology and the calligraphy’s graphic traits remain unaltered throughout the manuscript, suggesting that the text was composed in a limited period of time. The emendations’ position within the manuscript indicates that most of the corrections were introduced by the author after the first redaction of the text,9 during a phase of labor limae, in which the Portuguese poet corrected portions of the text which he found unsatisfying from an expressive point of view, without distorting the poem’s textual content. The corrections made by the author appear to have been intended to adapt the poetic expression of some portions of the text to the overall tone of the composition.
29Furthermore, there is a certain consistency in terms of the textual content and the modality of alteration with regards to a particular group of variants, which seem to be closely related to the poetics of sensationism and self-fragmentation. These alterations display analogous traits resulting from the same correction modality: the reference to an entity as an entire unity is erased and replaced by a synecdoche, which introduces a reference to the same entity by referring to just a part of it.
30For instance, in lines 39 and 75 of the manuscript, Pessoa replaced the possessive pronoun “mine” with two different synecdoches. In line 39, “And mine is the light that will never be again in the candelabrums” is changed to “my soul is the light that will never be again in the candelabrums”; in line 75, “mine is the cathedral of elected silence” becomes “my love for you is the cathedral of elected silence” (see Fig. 2).
31In these examples, Pessoa adopted a process of revision at the beginning of the line, in order to maintain the same kind of structure we saw in the first two stanzas of the poem: that is achieved by replacing a word which specifically represents a whole speaking I (such as the possessive pronoun “mine”) with a phrasing referring just to a specific part of the same speaking I. It is also worth mentioning that the words that Pessoa introduced to build these synecdoches (“my soul”, “My love for you”) belong to the field of sensitiveness, referring to a feeling (such as in the case of “love”) or to the site where feelings reside (such as in the case of “soul”). Sometimes, the fragmentation process implemented during the reviewing phase is made by introducing a reference to a physical part of the speaking I: for example, in line 50, Pessoa replaces the word “me” with “my feet” (see Fig. 3).
32This process of fragmentation modifies not only the expression of the speaking I, but also of other entities, as in line 45 and 79 (see Fig. 4). There, references to whole entities are replaced by synecdoches: thus the “peacocks” in line 45 become “tales of peacocks”, and the pronoun “you”, in line 79, is replaced by a phrasing which, once again, is bounded to the expression of a feeling (“your boredom”).
33In every correction that we could observe so far, the emendation process is the same: the author erases a word that refers to a living being as a whole and replaces it with a reference to the same entity by means of a synecdoche, by referring just to a part of it, hence contributing to convey the idea of fragmentation. This type of variants can be included in a category proposed by the Italian critic Gianfranco Contini as “correzioni che rinviano a luoghi esorbitanti dell’opera dell’autore” (Contini 1974, 72), i.e., corrections that refer to a distinctive feature of an author’s work.
34It is also worth mentioning that the analysis of the genetic process of other poems written by Fernando Pessoa in the same period as “Hora Absurda”, reveals a similar modus operandi; a case in point is represented by the poem “Ella canta, pobre ceifeira”, written in 1914. In the poem’s manuscript (document no. 117–42a), line 18, the expression “ouvi-te quase a chorar” [I heard you almost crying] is replaced by “o que em mim ouve está chorando” [in me what hears is crying]; in line 27, the pronoun “me” in the utterance “make me your weightless shadow” is replaced by the synecdoche “my soul”: “make my soul your weightless shadow” (see Fig. 5).
- 10 In the published version, this line reads: “As relvas de todos os prados foram frescas sob meus pés (...)
Figure 3 : Fernando Pessoa’s “Hora Absurda” manuscript; line 50.10
Included image reproduced with permission of the copyright holder.
- 11 In the published version, these lines respectively read: “Já não ha caudas de pavões todas olhos no (...)
Figure 4 : Fernando Pessoa’s “Hora Absurda” manuscript; lines 45 and 79.11
Included images reproduced with permission from the copyright holder.
- 12 This translation is retrieved from an edition of Pessoa’s selected poems compiled and translated by (...)
Figure 5 : Fernando Pessoa’s “Ella canta, pobre ceifeira” manuscript; lines 18 and 27.12
Included images reproduced with permission from the copyright holder.
35Despite the fact that similar corrections as those observed in the manuscript of “Hora Absurda” can be found in other manuscripts composed by Pessoa in the same period, the frequency and modality of this correction phenomenon is not the same as in the reviewing process of the 1913’s poem.
36The particular care taken during the composition of “Hora Absurda” is also revealed by the comparison between the manuscript and the published version of the poem: it is possible to notice that, before the publication, Pessoa corrected certain formal aspects of the text and introduced expressive elements closely linked to the aestetics of literary isms (such as the addition of the initial capital letter in words charged with symbolic meaning, the exaggerated and unusual use of suspension dots, and punctuation in general).
37The reason behind the special attention given by Pessoa to the reviewing process of “Hora Absurda” could be related to the fact that this poem was considered by the author himself as a representative text of his poetic ideals in the period around 1914; this is corroborated by the references to the poem made by Pessoa in the documents related to the theorizations of the literary isms.
- 13 In a letter dated 19th January 1915, Pessoa declared that he was experiencing a profound crisis and (...)
38Furthermore, it is important to note that between the publication of the article regarding the new Portuguese poetry (Pessoa 1912) and 1915, when the first heteronymic work appears publicly and Pessoa begins to move away from the literary isms’ project,13 the number of poems published by the Portuguese poet was extremely scarce, and a large part of the poems composed in this period were published by Fernando Pessoa after 1916.
39The lack of correspondence between the number of written and published works in Pessoa’s lifetime, is a distinctive feature of his creative approach in general; the scarcity of published works and the meticulous labor limae process that we were able to observe by analysing the manuscript of “Hora Absurda” suggest that the Portuguese poet was an extremely perfectionist writer, who felt the need to carefully and repeatedly revise and refine his work before publishing it.
40The meticulous revision process conducted by Pessoa during the genesis of “Hora Absurda” resulted in a coherent and well-structured text, which effectively expresses Pessoa’s poetic ideals. The poem’s expressive homogeneity is maintained throughout its 25 stanzas, which led George Rufold Lind to see the text of “Hora Absurda” as the result of a “pre-established compositional program” (Lind 1970, 23). However, the inspirational factor necessary for any creative act prevents a poetic text from being considered the mere fulfillment of a pre-established program; the observation of the manuscript of “Hora Absurda” reveals how the poem’s composition is a product of combination between inspiration and revision.
41In summary, the textualization of the poetic expressions related to the self-fragmentation and Sensationism in “Hora Absurda” occurs in two stages: in an initial phase, largely guided by inspiration, where this type of expression appears instinctively in the manuscript as a first attempt at writing; and in a second phase, in which Pessoa revises his text in order to refine those lines that, as they were initially written, inadequately expressed the idea of a self fragmented into its sensations.
42The interpretation of the genetic data provided by the manuscript of “Hora Absurda” does not negate the importance of the inspirational process in poetry writing, but also reveals how a careful revision process contributes to the final form of a poem, and how a critical interpretation of a work from a genetic perspective can shed light on aspects of the creative process that would otherwise remain uncharted.