Em 1958, Cleonice Berardinelli apresentou sua tese de livre-docência Poesia e Poética de Fernando Pessoa, que permanece inédita. Trata-se da primeira tese escrita sobre Fernando Pessoa no Brasil, e a segunda no mundo. Em 1958, a obra de Fernando Pessoa conhecida limitava-se aos textos que o poeta tinha publicado em vida e aos volumes ed…[Read more]

Da obra genial de Fernando Pessoa, centenas de páginas permanecem desconhecidas. Ao investigar o espólio pessoano, Carlos Pittella e Jerónimo Pizarro resgatam da obscuridade textos (poemas, cartas, anotações, listas, artigos de imprensa) e desenhos (esquemas, caricaturas, cartas astrológicas) que dão testemunho de como a literatura pode mudar…[Read more]

Quem é Fausto? O que é o Fausto de Fernando Pessoa? Porque é que o Fausto de Pessoa existe, se já havia outros, como as obras‑primas de Christopher Marlowe e de Johann Wolfgang von Goethe? Por‑que merece a versão pessoana ser lida ou relida? E como deve ser lida: como peça em cinco actos, ou como constelação de centenas de fragmentos? Se entendid…[Read more]

“Fernando Pessoa is not easy to get to know. Even during his lifetime, his friends remarked on a certain quicksilver quality about him that made it appear as though he was always slipping through their hands […]. We join him in his search for self-identity. Perhaps because we feel it is a search for our own self-identity. Or it may be a game. Or…[Read more]

O presente trabalho apresenta o ensaio fotográfico Pessoas com Relações com Pessoa, através de 12 dos 42 retratos de recitadores de sonetos pessoanos que constituem o corpo de uma futura exposição. As fotos são organizadas em quatro trípticos fotográficos, cada um deles sendo precedido do soneto respectivo em edição crítica.…[Read more]

En la más reciente edición y estudio de la Carajicomedia, su editor llama la atención sobre un aspecto determinado de esta obra, y por extensión, a todas las sátiras a mitad de camino entre lo burlesco y lo erótico: se establece la necesidad de explorar «more fully the political complexity of the period; the reasons that its authors may have h…[Read more]

If Fernando Pessoa was undeniably influenced by Goethe to recreate the legend of Faust, here we argue that a series of other poets and prose writers did also impact, positively and negatively, to a greater or lesser degree, the development of Pessoa’s ‘Faust’. This article intends, thus, to reconstruct these influences, based on evidence found i…[Read more]

A review of: PORTELA, Manuel; SILVA, António Rito [orgs.] (2017). LdoD Archive / Arquivo LdoD / Archivo LdoD [a collaborative digital archive of the Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa]. Centre for Portuguese Literature at the University of Coimbra.

We present here thirteen previously unpublished letters from the Hubert Jennings Papers, including twelve letters signed by members of Fernando Pessoa’s extended family, plus one letter drafted by Hubert Jennings himself. This correspondence covers a period of time of almost three years, dating from 10 February 1967 to 15 January 1970. C…[Read more]

This dossier groups, for the first time, ten poems of Fernando Pessoa attributed to the project “Juliano em Antochia”: two of them being previously unpublished, two others not included in the critical edition, and four presenting new readings in the fixation of the text. Found in three different archives, the texts reveal that, between 1916 and…[Read more]

A series of sketches written in 1924 during an ocean crossing from New York to Tilbury, “Passage to England” was published only in 1998 by the Thomas Wolfe Society and is hardly Wolfe’s most popular or most accomplished work. Nonetheless I always felt that Passage to England had something unique and idiosyncratic and that despite a certain a…[Read more]

In the wake of modernism studies’ global turn, this article considers the role of translation in fostering Iranian modernism. Focusing on the poetic translations of Bijan Elahi (1945-2010), one of Iran’s most significant poet-translators, we demonstrate how untranslatability becomes a point of departure for his experimental poetics. Elahi used pre…[Read more]

A disillusioning experience with Donald Keene coincided with an invitation from a haiku journal to write a feature article clarifying essential features of haiku that are not beyond the capacity of non-Japanese to create in Japanese and other languages.

This is an outline of how the Leys d’amors, a fourteenth-century troubadour treatise of huge influence on post-troubadour poetry, catalogued rhymes according to merit. It is used in my classes of 35399 Medieval Catalan Literature II, degree in Catalan Philology, at the Universitat de València (http://go.uv.es/ozQkp3H).

Selections from the author’s first volume of poetry, composed from 1970-1973 in Boston and the South Shore of Massachusetts; Nova Scotia and Western Ontario, Canada; Mountain View and Santa Clara, California; the Lama Foundation above Taos, New Mexico; and finally Lanikai, Kailua on Oahu island, Hawaii, where it was self-published in 1973. While…[Read more]

The author’s second volume of poetry, composed in Honolulu from 1973-1977, starting with a short story written in Boston in 1970, typeset by hand, “The Parable of the Lion and the Fish.” Mystical selections from the 1977 self-published book have titles like “A Prosem on the Meaning of Religion,” “Wake up God,” “Look Directly at Life,” “We Are the…[Read more]

Through an analysis of Tony Kushner’s 2001 play “Homebody/Kabul” and the Old English “Ruin” poem, this essay explores the tension, anxiety, and isolation inherent in the aesthetic and philosophical enterprises of measuring the distance that separates myth from real being (a project that takes place, I would argue, against Levinas, not just o…[Read more]

Walt Whitman, a world poet and the father of American free verse, has been received by diverse audiences from around the world. Literary and cultural scholars have studied Whitman’s interaction with social, political and literary movements of different countries. Despite his continuing presence in Iran, Whitman’s reception in this country has rem…[Read more]

Bijan Elahi, “Five Scenes from Icarus,” The Kenyon Review issue XLI (2019): 75-77.

This essay offers an autobiographical account of reading across literatures and languages. I compare the selves that I have developed in each of three languages—Russian, Persian, and Georgian—over the course of many years of reading. Refusing to make literary traditions coterminous with national identities, I reflect here on love through lan…[Read more]