In Our Time - Fernando Pessoa

Episode Date: December 3, 2020

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Portuguese poet Pessoa (1888-1935) who was largely unknown in his lifetime but who, in 1994, Harold Bloom included in his list of the 26 most significant western writers since the Middle Ages. Pessoa wrote in his own name but mainly in the names of characters he created, each with a distinctive voice and biography, which he called heteronyms rather than pseudonyms, notably Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and one who was closer to Pessoa's own identity, Bernardo Soares. Most of Pessoa's works were unpublished at his death, discovered in a trunk; as more and more was printed and translated, his fame and status grew.WithCláudia Pazos-Alonso Professor of Portuguese and Gender Studies and Senior Research Fellow at Wadham College, University of OxfordJuliet Perkins Visiting Senior Research Fellow in Portuguese Studies at King’s College LondonAndPaulo de Medeiros Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of WarwickProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programs. Hello, Fernando Pazoa, 1888 to 1935, is one of the greatest Portuguese poets, and some say one of the greatest in the whole Western tradition. In his lifetime, he was seen as well shockingly new and deeply conservative.

Some poems scandalised, others were recited at schools. And since his death, he's been valued more and more for his explorations of the self, in works under his own name and in over 70 other personas, some of them with full biographies, whom he called his heteronyms. With me to discuss Fernando Pesoa are Claudia Pazas Alonzo, Professor of Portuguese and Gender Studies and Senior Research Fellow at Waterham College University of Oxford, Juliet Perkins, visiting senior research fellow in Portuguese studies at King's College London,

and Paolo de Madero's, Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Juliet Perkins, what should we know about Persaud's childhood? Well, Fernando Persaud was born on 13th of June, 1888, in central Lisbon, to well-to-do educated parents. His father, for example, was a son of a general, and their family hailed from the Algarve. in the father was a civil servant, but also music critic for the Lisbon daily paper, the Diario de Lisboor. Now, his mother came from a family with large estates on the Terseva Island and the Azores and had been sent to Lisbon for her education.

Now, the first tragedy was the death of Fernanda's father in tuberculosis, a month after Fernando's fifth birthday. And then in January, 1894, the baby brother died. Fernanda's mother remarried and she married by proxy, a naval officer, who had just been appointed Portuguese consul in Durban, the capital of Natal province in South Africa. So in January, in the following year, Fernandarne's mother in Bartford, Durban. And so they were in Durban, sorry, and in Durban, he was educated in English all the time until he was 17. Can you give us the main points of significance about that education in English in Durban? Yes. Remember, he arrived as a Portuguese boy. He wasn't a blank canvas on which English was imposed, but a highly intelligent little boy who absorbed, if you like, the wide horizons of English culture. And the education that Fernando received at the Durban High School was of a very traditional, classical English language literature-based education. He had excellent teachers. And he studied the

if you like, the Victorian classical authors, the Romantics, Latin maths, history. And he was deeply imbued by Romantic, Shakespeare, Milton, Dun, Addison and Steele, Tennis and Wordsworth, as well as Latin, Horace Pinder and Caesar. So South Africa and English meant that he became thoroughly bilingual, but it also expanded his own knowledge of his own Portuguese. Yes, and he wrote, it was besotted by Shakespeare

and imitated Shakespeare's sonnets and was thoroughly familiar with and admiring of English literature and at the age of 17, he went back to Portugal. Now, Claudia, Pazas Alonzo, there were great changes going on in Portugal politically at that time when he returned as a teenager.

What were they? Yes, when he returned to Lisbon in 1905, Portugal was still a monarchy like Britain. But three years, later, the monarch, King Carlos I, was assassinated, and he was succeeded by his young son, Manuel II. And then two years later, a revolution broke out in October 1910, and Portugal became a republic. How did this affect, how did this affect Pesor? Well, I think this instability around him meant that he just retreated.

He eventually settled in 1920 when his mother returned from South Africa. She was widowed by then. And they lived together until her death. And he stayed in the same apartment until he two died in 1935. But then in 1926, there was a military coup that installed the dictatorship. And this sort of rise to power of Olivera Salazar. So he's in Lisbon, there's been a political disturbance. He's living with his mother.

How did he respond to Portugal, to Lisbon? We've got to remember that it is an imperial city and one of the great ports of Europe. And it's got this amazing river, the Tagos. And Persaud liked it so much that he wrote about it in several guises. And also, he even produced the tourist. guide for visitors to the city, and this was a tourist guide that was never published, but it was written in English. So he was clearly very proud of being Portuguese. Did he have a clique, a

group? He was an introvert, but he gradually participated in the cultural life of the city via the sort of cafe literary interactions. And indeed, he made friends with Sacrneiro, who then went on to live in Paris, and they were great friends and together with Almada Negreiros, a visual artist, they initiated what would become known as the revolution of the Orfeo Ophel's generation. Thank you very much. And in 1915, Paolo de Madero's,

he was part of the effort to produce a literary magazine, Ophios. Yes, indeed, as Claudia was just saying, so was the main figure in what became known as the Orfeo movement, it's a journal that was absolutely radical for the time and for the place. Lisbon was a very provincial city and would remain so, in spite of the fact that it was an imperial city and it had a rich elite, it had a bourgeoisie that was extremely conventional and only focused on what was being produced outside of Portugal, culturally, primarily looking to France, for technical innovations, of course, both Britain as well as Germany.

And Pesoa was someone who was absolutely attuned to everything that was happening at the international level. Pesova was deeply conservative politically, and perhaps in his personal life that is very, very evident. But at the same time, he had the total abhorrence of totalitarianism, and he wrote immense amounts of critiques of the state after the dictator. to ship in 1928 and of Salazar, some of those published in obscure publications, others that he never published, but we have them now. Thank you very much. So he's making his way there. He's found like spirits, like souls. One of their fathers, somebody subsidizes magazine, which has two issues. He tries to get a third together. That doesn't work. One of them was considered to be a

scandalous magazine at the time. So there is a rather solitary young man, as I understand. and Julian Perkins. Pesua was one of the poets there. There were a great number of other poets who were created by Pesua. People with other names, other histories. In the end, there are about 70 of them.

Can you tell us what's going on there? Well, yes. As Claudia said, he was an introverted man, young man, introverted as a child. And in fact, he created other people in his life, even as a little boy. And he refers to this in a very important letter he wrote towards the end of his life to one of his great admirers and editors,

really setting the story right about the creation of what he called his heteronyms. There were a number of them over 70, as you say, some of greater importance than others. Some wrote on prose matters, some on existential matters, some on philosophical questions, others on politics. But I think the three main heteronyms for which his most renowned in which I think the strength of his poetry rests, as well as on his poetry in his own name, were Abate Caeréero, Ricardo Reyesh, and Alvrud Campush. Juliet, sorry, I just wanted to interrupt. I agree totally with your assessment,

but I would like to include Bernard Swad, the semi-hateronym, as equally important as the other three. Yes. Parlor is absolutely right. This is the most important of the prose writers, and Pesot refers to him as a semi-hetronym, because he was most like himself, Pesor, and also it has to be said like Arvrud Kamphush.

Lots of people write anonymously. That's happened again and again. This was something different. He created these characters. He gave them a full CB. He gave them a life. And when he wrote in their name, he wrote in a different way from himself.

And they were taken by many of the readers as completely independent people from Persoa. Is that right? Yes, that is right. Yes, that is. In that case, Claudia, can you tell us about, let's go through a few of these. Claudia, can you tell us about the heteronym Alberto Caro and give us an examples of his work?

Okay, so Alberto Cairo was his own master and he came to him in a moment of epiphany in March 1914, and he regarded that as the triumphal day of his life when he wrote supposedly the 49 poems of the keeper of sheep. And the reason that Keiru is, as it were, the master of all the other heteronyms and of Besu himself, is that unlike the others, he doesn't overthink. Keiru's goal is to unlearn the intellectual practices embedded in our culture. He's a poet of mindfulness. He's been called a Zen-like poet. He's one that sort of is talking about the power of now.

He says that we need to A Apprentizagin de-apprendir, a learning to unlearn. Can you give us an example of his work? Yes, of course, in poem 9, I'll just cite the end of it. He says, Sinto all my body deitado in reality. Say a verdad, and I feel my whole body lying down in reality. I know the truth, and I am happy. When people were reading this poem, the poems by this man and others that we're coming to,

they were not aware it was Persoa. They thought it was somebody else entirely. And I think this was a satisfaction. I think that Persoa took in it. Yes. When he first emerged in a literary magazine, there was no clue that it wasn't an altogether different person. Paolo, what of Alvaro de Campos, Persoa's modernist poet? Can you tell us about him and give us an example, please?

I think, at least for me, but for many of the people who read, so Albert Camps is the most exciting of the heteronyms, because he's the one who is most outrageously modernist. Just give an example, because some of his poems are extensive, but I see that one that many people will encounter is tabakaria, the tobacco shop. And I'm reading just the first four lines. not so nothing

never never sara nothing I can't say nothing apart of this have in me all the

dreams of the world very little translation I'm nothing I will never be anything

I cannot want to be anything but leaving that aside I have in me all of the dreams of the

world he is a poet who creates modern epics who writes great oaths, who has all of his feelings at the surface of his skin, is a poet to exalts all kinds of undertakings, who creates a new vision for what the Portuguese should do. Pesoa started this perhaps as a form of blag, something to have fun with, with his small group of close friends,

but it became something much bigger. They are not the only thing that makes Pesua great, although I don't think that any other writer, not Kirkegaard before him, nor others after him, employed this othering of the self to the extent that Psewa did. But if it was only the heteronyms, we would still be dealing with a minor phenomenon. What makes Pesu really great is that these heteronyms really become different consciousnesses. And for instance, Alvartre Kemp to was a naval officer educated in Glasgow. And Albert Campos actually wrote a letter to Pesua's fiancée, Ophelia, and implored her not to bother Fernand Pesua anymore

and that she would be in the way of his work. We actually have that letter. Thank you very much. Juna, why do you think he wanted 70 heteronyms? Why do you think he wanted to do that? I certainly think it was a psychological need. he had, we can only say a crisis in his identity for most of his life. He didn't, he regarded himself as fragmented, that there wasn't a unity of soul or of spirit. And in order to get some kind of

existence, he fragmented himself. He talks about being the splinters of the universe. And this also goes with his own underlying capacity to pretend, to feign and to fake, to create mystical and magical and also pretended worlds and people. So there was a psychological need to control his disparateness, if you like, his psychological unease in a sort of control. He calls his coterie of heteronyms, particularly the main ones, drama enchant, drama in people. But it was a drama that was not active drama on the stage.

It was the drama of their characters and their lives. Although they were separate in their lives, the biographies, they interacted through Pestoa's own machinations. And he has them talk to each other and engage. And even Alva of the Campush despairs because he is unable to reach the great heights that Alberto Kajero has. And that he had to create the heteronyms to express things that he would never, he himself was an Anna Pestoa, would never have been able to express himself. It was an adventure, but also a psychological necessity, and also the Utre character of Alvart Gampus,

saying and doing things, pornographic obscene, that Pesor himself would never have dreamt of doing. Can I come in at that point, Julius, because I completely agree with you. I mean, the outrageous Alvart Gampus, he's a bisexual poet. There's no way that Pesua himself would have put that to his name. and indeed defends an overtly gay poet, Antonuboto, who was censored in 1923. There was this big scandal.

How was you responding to the politics of the time? Portugal's empire had been great, the idea was that it would be great again. What was his response to that? Oh, well, again, he responded in prose in writing about the Fifth Empire. Posovo, like many of his Portuguese contemporaries, was acutely aware of the decadence, the backwardness of Portugal. Politically, it had lost status, the glory days of the discoveries had long since gone. And there was a very influential 90th century historian Oliver Martinsch, who saw Portugal as the sick man of Europe. And this attitude lingered on and on and on.

Now, Pesoa's response was to work on the ideas of Portugal not as a new political, or commercial force on empire, but as a spiritual and cultural force. And he saw that from 1912, he already saw that Portugal could have a renaissance. He himself, in these early days, wanted to promote Portuguese culture abroad through publishing translations and Portuguese works and foreign classics in Portuguese. And he wrote a very important series of essays on the new Portuguese poetry. He was aiming to create, if you like, the intellectual environment. for an updated Portugal, poetically modern,

and in which a poet who would be greater than Carmoins, the great lyric and epic poet, would appear, and the understanding among most of us and those who study so, is that he himself was this super or supra carmange. He uses these different names to explore different sides of himself. He talks to himself as a multiple, and presumably that everybody else be,

someone of multiple personalities, multiple characters. What does you explore, Claudia, what do you explore in the heteronym Ricardo Reyes? Yes, Ricardo Hayes is an interesting one. Juliet was talking about the need to control, and Ricardo Hayes is the most controlled of the heteronyms. His surname literally translates as kings, and this was the royalist heteronym. His biographies meant that he exiled himself to Brazil. and his literary voice is grounded in the nostalgia for the past. Formerly, he harks back to classical odes, and in particular to Horace, which takes him right back to South Africa and his Victorian schooling.

So Hage is always striving for formal perfection and for conciseness. The only thing he can control him is himself in a very sort of transient world. And he famously produced a very fatalistic line against which the Nobel Prize winner, Jose Seramago, would react in his novel, the 1980s, the year of the death of Ricardo Reisch. And the line reads, Sabio is what is contented with the spectacle of the world. So this idea of a philosophical stance that is stoical. in the face of fate. Paolo, can we hear more about Soudad, an apparently untranslatable Portuguese's word, and how Peserr responded to it?

I think that Soudad is one of those terms that invariably comes up when discussing Portuguese culture, perhaps together with Fadu. Even if it cannot be translated exactly, I suppose that the equivalent is a sort of painful longing. And I would say, at least that's my reading of Pseuah, was deeply suspicious and contemptuous of the use of the term Saudat,

because it implied to him a fatalistic approach to characterizing the Portuguese people, which he himself didn't share at all. It's not that he was not aware of the failings, he was not aware of the way in which the common people were subjugated he was. It's rather more that, for instance, in the book of this quiet, he has Bernard Suarez, his semi-hetrony, at one point composed this complex fragment in which Swarge remembers his childhood in the countryside. And it turns out that he is then almost drowned by Saudad.

And yet at the end we find out the Saudal that he feels is only a fake Saad for a past that he didn't have. It's a very open critique of traditional notions of Nostrad. which I believe goes together with it's not just Suarez, it's Pseu himself. Claudia and Julia are more than familiar with one of his very short, very dense poems called Autopsychography, in which she starts by saying, The Poetting, a Fingido, Fingstom Completely, that Chege her Fingierke, A Dore That Deveres Scent. In which she's basically saying that the poet is a complete faker, artificer.

Thank you. Judith Perkins, back to you, is there, he's a very complex man. You've got 70 others to help him out in a way. Is there any poetry by Bersoa where we can clearly say, this is him speaking? Is there something we can say about his unique quality, which is completely introverted, very dismissive of himself, things disappear, disintegrate?

Can you just tell me more about where I would look for the quintessential Pescential? Yes, if I could backtrack to his poem, Mensaging, written as Fernando Pesor, in which he created sort of mystic nationalism, patriotism, of seeing a new future for Portugal. And that is so varied in itself, you know, rhyming schemes, historical figures based on the epic poem, the Lusiads.

This is Pozo's own voice. But it's also, as he regarded as his least successful publishing debut as a book. It was the only book he published in his lifetime. But when we turned to the range of his poetry, he wrote more than the other heteronyms put together. And they range from songs and sonnets, poems and traditional Portuguese meters of the quatrain. But I think the most sort of slippery side of him is the faking, the idea that it was all a creation of the intellect. He said he didn't have feelings.

Feelings are for the reader, not for the poet. So there's a depersonalization, which is very consistent. Now, the other side of him, which makes him very complex, and I think is his own voice, is his longstanding interest in hermetic religions, the occult. And some of his early poems in 1915, around a time of fail, are what he called intersectionism. And he creates an entirely beautiful and nebulous landscape where the poet is speaking of interior and exterior landscapes

and where they intersect and join. But we have to realize that once we know that he has created the fictions of people, then we ourselves become unsettled. if we didn't know, we would take him at his face value. And there are some poems, I think, where towards the end of his life, he's becoming a little bit autobiographical, where it can really feel the autobiography. And one is a poem set in Africa, the only one I know of, where he's listening to his mother playing the piano,

and is standing out looking at the African landscape in the evening, stepfather in the chair, his step, brothers and sisters sitting around. And that one, I feel, is genuine. A lot of people listen to this program will be very interested in him and don't know much about him. It seems to me whenever I open his book of poems or book of collective poems and this massive 500-page book of disquired,

which is extraordinary. When I do that, there's a mournfulness, a sadness, a sort of Oscar Wilde thing about him, everything is turned on its head, everything is nothing, nothing is everything.

There is an underlying. sadness in Pesoa himself and all his heterisms apart from Cairo, in that they are, if like, unadapted to their worlds. And there is a melancholy arising from the uncertainty of who Pesua is. And that permeates, I think, his poetry endlessly. In his own voice, but we, we accompany him in this uncertainty. We absorb it. We understand it in some particular way. There were moments when he was humorous sardonic, and in his popular quadranes, he wrote hundreds of them towards the end of life.

He sort of takes the popular concerns of boyfriends and girlfriends and then has a little twist and has a little humorous comment. And these are entirely different in character to his esoteric poems where he sees life as a prison or his creating an apartment experience. We might want to consider the way in which his family always refer to him as someone who was very happy and someone who enjoyed jokes.

Yes. So I think that in order to try to pinpoint what would be the essence of Pseu, I would say that he was as modern as one can imagine. I would say that in a sense he's still our contemporary. His problems are our problems. The notion of the multiplicity of the self was something that at the time was beginning to be analyzed by psychoanalysis. And Pseo himself was very much interested in doing that. I do think that there is an element there of enormous control, as was already mentioned, and that he was very conscious of the fact that what moved him, what motivated him, would not be understood, neither by society nor by his family. If we look at his engagement, he was twice engaged to the same woman, and his inability to

commit to her in the end, leaving aside any questions of presumed homosexuality, would have to do with the fact that he felt that he did not have the means to be able to support her according to the expectations of his social class. So I think that Pesoa is someone whose mind and heart ahead of his time and he suffers immensely from the conflict that he has with his society. Thank you. Claudia, most of his heteronyms are made. well, all of them say one, what do you make of that? That's a good question. And I didn't mean to be flippant, but I'd like to start by saying that since he was a man,

this disproportion is probably not that surprising. But Portuguese literature, in fact, has a long tradition of male authors impersonating female voices, starting from medieval poetry. And we can also think more broadly in terms of the Lettre Portuguese, the 17th century letters of the Portuguese nun that were probably authored by a Frenchman. So there's nothing that new about a male channeling a female voice.

What is very revealing in this case, this lone female heteronym that person called Maria Jose, is that he tells us something about Persua's internalized view of women. So in terms of her biography, Maria Jose, her legs are paralyzed, And at the age of 19, she's dying of TB.

So we have a consumptive Maria Jose, who's disempowered. So when we look at what she writes, it takes the form of confessional prose. It's a letter rather than poetry. And her subject is, predictably, unrequited love for Antonio, a metal worker who passes every day below her window. But somehow, Sue pulls it off. She's a very haunting figure because she's very poignant. And so some critics have even argued that she could be the shadow face of Pesua

or that in Maria Jose was superimposed the discarded fiancé, Ophelia. Let's try to move for his great book, The Book of Disquiet, as I say nearly 500 pages. It's a series of statements, really. It wasn't published until the 1980s. What's remarkable about that, Paula? It's not under his own name. It's published under this Bernard Soros name originally, but nowadays they're publishing under Pesora's name.

Bernard Swars is the name that Pseu finally settled as author. Vicent Giedes had been the name that he had chosen before, another heteronym. And what makes the book astonishing, one of the great works of world literature, it has to do with the fact that the book pushes the literary envelope in many, many senses. I also think that, for one, its prose, and the early image reception of Pseu was that he was the great poet, and by now we know that he was as great as a prose writer,

as well as a poet. And I think that the fact that it is a completely fragmentary work, a work that not only does not have unity, I would say, but that defies the very possibility of unity and yet still claims for itself a notion of totality. There are many, many different editions of the book in Portuguese. Some of them, even by the same editors, with sometimes radically different criteria. There are many translations. It's a book of paragraphs. I mean, if I just, I've got in front of me, if I just open it absolutely anywhere.

I've opened it. It's page 201, that's it, number 2 to 8, that's right. Everything is interconnected. My readings of classical authors who never speak of sunsets have made many sunsets intelligible to me in all their colours. There's a relationship between syntactical competence by which we distinguish but from however, from nevertheless, and the capacity to perceive when the blue of the sky is actually green

and how much yellow is in the blue-green of the sky. Translated by Zenith, Richard Zenith. And those sort of statements go right through it and they give it its life, its singularity, but there's also a feeling of disputing with figures of the past who are positive, and he seems to find his strength in a creative negativity. It is not a book designed to be read from cover to cover.

In fact, one would do very well, as you have just done, to open pages at random and just take a little bite-sized piece. And then... That's what I tried to do. So often with Bussaudu, you have to stand back from him and keep your own feet on the ground and say, no, it's not always like this,

but this is how he sees it. And I think depression sets in, if you read two or three hundred pages of Swarish, no doubt, because it does become, I won't say monotonous, but repetitive, but it wasn't designed to be read in a fluid, discursive way. It was left as fragments, probably deliberately.

We don't know, Fernando Pozo was not a great finisher of works. And so much was fragmentary in his poems, are different versions. And so we have to, always with Pussaud, try and keep our own sanity by just, as Kairir would say, undertaking an apprenticeship of unlearning when we're looking at his poetry and at the Leveru de desercese Sosz, which is very beautiful, but I agree with you that it is melancholy in its overall turn. So where does his genius lie?

The word genius is applied to him by yourselves and by other people, Where is it? I think it's his originality of thought. His constant search for the truth about himself, pleasant or unpleasant as that may be, the inquiry which other poets do into the furthest corners, obviously, of the human mind. But it's the language of the Portuguese itself, which comes out better or worse, depending on the free verse or the rhymes sequences. But his language in Portuguese is rhythmic, beautiful, musical.

and sometimes he's a poet on a pedestal speaking to us dim pupils about life and other times he's our friend chatting into our ear he's not a comforting presence ever but he is a very necessary one in our modern world to understand about ourselves and he alters the way we think about the world and I think that's part of the genius

genius of course is a very large word with the tradition and I think that Pseau himself was fascinated by the very concept of genius and wrote himself on that. I would not quite agree with Juliet when she says that the book is not comforting. I for one find great solace in seeing the richness of Pseuah's mind to see the depths of his feelings. Yes, the book of this quiet is completely suffused throughout with emotion, even though he intellectualizes the emotions, but the emotions are very crucial. I think that indeed opening it up at random is one method for reading.

I would not want to read it from beginning to end because we would get a wrong idea of what the structure of the book is. But I would say if you take a longer fragment, not just a paragraph, such as the sentimental education one, that's the title that it has, and it is clearly engaging directly with Flobert's very well-known novel of the same title. And we see there that there's a whole plan that borders on the esoteric for how one can form the self and steal oneself and still be able to deal with the whole range of emotions

and to try to create a reality which is based on dream images very much like those. of Walter Benjamin, and in that sense superior to the more mundane reality that he thought was an assault on everyone's senses. And God knows, sometimes we all might feel that our reality in the present assaults our senses in so many ways. Thank you. Claudia, where has Perseur made the most impact in Portugal? Was it with the apparently nationalistic the message firms or his modernism? If we take the long view, the apparently nationalistic menseges was selectively appropriated by the dictatorship to further an imperialist agenda, especially during the colonial wars in Africa between 1961 and 1974. So it was very selective because if you read massaging carefully, the message is far more ambiguous.

us. But even during the dictatorship, there were plenty of critics and dissident public intellectuals, and I'm thinking of Georges de Sene, amongst many, who are far more interested in exploring the other facets of persons, drama in gents, drama divided into people. So if I can put it another way, the next generation of poets and cultural figures were not taken in by this appropriation of mensahsia's nationalistic. And they were far more interested in the crisis of the unified subject embodied in Pesoa's oeuvre as a whole. And I'd say that in terms of the national cultural imaginary, what that means is that the young poets engaged with Pesoa, dialogue with him, reacted to him, wrote against him. And,

I'm thinking of major poets like Sophia Dmael Breiner or Natalia Koya. So I think the modernist fragmentation in the end, and certainly in our own times, has become far more influential. Finally then, could each of you tell me what you think his legacy is? I would turn your question around and say, who has he not influenced? If we look at Portuguese literature, after Psoa, everyone has. to deal with the legacy of Psella as Claudi was hinting at. Thus, whether it's poetry or prose, theatre, I would say the same applies to other realms of Portuguese culture, whether we're talking about the famous painter Julio Pumar, who did series and series and series of versions

of Pesoa, or whether we are even talking about other arts like the cinema, John Boutelho's film of This Quiet is a masterpiece in which he tries to try to do with. to translate the language of this quiet into the language of film. But I would say if you look outside of the confines of Portugal or the Portuguese-speaking world, which is slightly larger, I would say that he has become quite an influential force for other poets. I've read quite a few American poets, for instance, who use forms of his. In England, I would say you can also find occasional examples of his. but it's mostly the experimental forms that Pseud tried to put forward that become important

and that indeed go beyond literature itself. And I think that if we look at painting and sculpture, we see many attempts to deal with the figure of Pseu himself and the etronyms. There are tons and tons of figures of Pesu divided into four. But also, I would say, in terms of music and contemporary music, I've seen at least a recent study looking at the heteronymy as something that can be used to understand some of the modern compositions. Thank you very much. What about you, Claudia? Who has he not influenced? And in Portugal, we can talk of the major novelists like Saramago or like Lydia Georges.

They react against him, more or less covertly. But to take an example from abroad, And the Mexican Nobel Prize winner, Octavio Paz, wrote an essay, a very perceptive essay on Pessoa, El Desconocido de Cimismo, arguing that Psoa was unknown to himself and presenting these heteronyms to a Spanish-speaking audience. So, you know, the dissemination across Latin America was really important. So we can't just think in terms of the English-speaking world. we have to think of South America and Central America as well. And that includes Brazil, of course. Some of the most important contemporary French philosophers write on Psella,

Alain Badiou, Jean-Rancier and others. Deleuze was very much interested in Pessoa himself. And in terms of the contemporary Portuguese novelists, I was thinking about Ana Luisa Maral, who is arguably one or the most important contemporary poet, Can I come finally to you, Juliet? He's passed into iconic status. It's not just the visual arts.

The heteronyms is four sides. The statue of him outside one of his favorite cafes, the well-known pictures of him with his mustache, his Homburg hat. He's instantly recognizable in a way that has almost nothing to do with his poetry or his writing at all. But, of course, Cloud is absolutely right. The second generation of modernist. carried on and tackled the psychological problems of mankind, the psychological inquiry, which of course became embedded in all Portugal's later literature, as against at the same time

the socialist realist literature which was being propounded in the 1920s and 30s. Now I think the book I would really rate, and that's just been mentioned, is the Year of the Death of Ricardo Rage by Jose Saramago. I think probably one of his finest novels. and this departs from the rage who's been in exile in Brazil as a monarchist, returns to Portugal on hearing of the death of Fernando Pussure. But the dialogue continues between them. This unreal heteronym comes back and dialogues with his maker.

But it's blended in with an important period of Portuguese history, very turbulent revolt on the sailors' mutiny. And so you get an absolute image of Portugal in the 1930s. which is very accessible to the English reader through a very, very fine translation. I think that's what I'd like to say. I agree entirely with Paolo's assessment of the spread among European literature and again in Portugal

and in Latin America. Thank you very much. It's difficult in one way for it because there's so much, it's so elusive, it's so strange in some ways, but it was wonderful to listen to the three of you. So thank you to Juliet Perkins, Claudia Rasa Alonza and Paolo Madero. Next week, it's John Wesley and Methodism,

and thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What were you urgent to say that you didn't get said? Could I just raise the point about... Paulo referred to Ophelia Keroz as his fiancé. I don't think of... This is a very intriguing relationship.

Can one talk a little? A little bit of about that. Where you go? Well, Fernando Pursour earned his living as a translator of business correspondence into English and French. And he worked in a number of offices in the downtown area. And there he met a young secretary when in 1919, Ophelia Caraj. And it's a very strange relationship built almost entirely on letters. There was a sort of flirtation, lots of hints and things.

And they got as far as kissing and having tram. rides together and walking out in a certain way. But it never developed in any kind of relationship beyond the literary. And it was a very mawish relationship when seen in the letters, a lot of baby talk. And it is quite true that Alford comes in, interfered in this relationship, the way person saw it. But it never got anywhere. And there are so many reasons why it didn't.

It may well have been socio-economic reasons. It may have been his mother came home from. Africa, but he also, in one of his final letters to Ophelia, said, you know, art is a greater master, or words to that effect. And I find it a very interesting relationship because despite the sort of, I suppose, formal courting that would have been the norm in Lisbon, no sex and all the rest of it, it seems to have been entirely a literary device in a way. And her letters, which were discovered much later and published much later, as she reflect, and she understood from under very well, but she actually participate in the same baby talk, you know, but she obviously wanted maternity, she obviously wanted marriage, and that was not Pesoa's aim or possible aim at all.

It wasn't, he seems to have not been very interested in his own sexuality after a certain adolescence period, but he obviously kept her at great arm's length. I don't know how Paul and Claudio, particularly Claudio, feels about this relationship, but I think it's something that has to be pondered upon, as one of the facets of Fernando Saw's personality. Claudia, would you like to take that up and take it on?

Of course, you know, critics have homed in on the name Ophelia, which takes you straight back to Shakespeare and Hamlet and pondered whether in fact that was one of the attractions that may well have been so the first time and apparently his love declaration took the form of a quotation from Hamlet. But we must remember that he was, rekindled that relationship 10 years later. So Ophelia hadn't married in the meantime. And really, she was no longer a naive young girl. So there is a sense in which they could.

If I might just come in. I think it's very important that you say the second time around. And to me, what's so striking is that it came because of her seeing a photo of him, of him, which was another thing that we didn't touch at all about, and the way in which he used that also to make fun of himself when he makes that play with the words of a crime, delicto, and a tense of a litter, this litre. But I would say you're quite right in pointing out to the fact that she is not a naive young woman at all when she responds to him,

him and I think that the relationship might not have been conventional, certainly was not what one would expect, but it is a powerful element of his life. Was he otherwise rather a forlorn figure or did he have friends who mean went out and had drinks with or whatever? Is he rather a forlorn solitary figure? His friends seem to have been literary. He was a very good friend to his literary coterie. He was a great helper and editor of other people's work. and poems. He was on very good terms with his family. That was his stepfather's family and with his stepbrothers and sister. And they remember him as being humorous, a nice, a funcular uncle, making jokes and all the rest of it. But the truth of the matter is, his closest friends, this he saw

most frequently, didn't know about the extent of his writing. So we have to assume that he was very solitary and that he would retire to his room or rooms and write. And the fact he wrote so much, there's over 27,000 documents found in this famous trunk after he died, his literary estate. The fact that his closest friends had no conception is, well, it speaks for itself, I think, of his introverted solitary nature. I mean, there is a possibility that he was on the autistic spectrum, I think, you know, of high functioning. because he seemed, he was so aware of his inability to really create close relationships. Can you tell us about the discovery of this trunk, the famous trunk, full of...

Oh, sorry, that's what, is that for Paulo? The Arca. I will just start briefly, and you can tell more. I think that it's one of those real problems of literary history that all of this was left, and his estate was managed by some of his close friends, and they decided to create an image of the poet. as they wanted him to appear. So, for instance, something like the book of This Quiet, they have absolutely no way of dealing with those fragments.

But Pseller left everything very well ordered and organized, and the friends basically disrupted that order, they changed it, they moved things, some of the things were kept within the family, others started being sold, and I think that the Portuguese government at the moment, of course, tries everything. time that it is known to put bids in and preserve some of those documents. But it does not catch them all. And it has taken, I would say, with a publication of the book of this quite in 82,

which initially was much smaller than what we have now, it's when people like George Tzine and others knew that they had to seriously look at the estate and do something about it. At one point, the Portuguese government had the commission of scholars, linguists and others in charge of coming up with a critical edition that did produce many volumes, even though it was riddled with problems. And so subsequently, of course, the manuscripts have come under control. We can say they are preserved in the National Library. But there are still fragments that have not been published, even in Portuguese.

Thank you very much indeed. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. This is how the pandemic ends, not with a bang, but with a shot, or rather billions of shots. I'm Tim Harford, the presenter of more or less and 50 things that made the modern economy. And in a new podcast series from the BBC, we'll be covering the defining story of the crisis. The search for a... a vaccine. We look at the cutting-edge biotechnology behind these vaccines and the underrated business of fridges and vials and porter cabins that will be essential in a huge public health campaign.

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