An outline of Pessoa’s evolving political positions in the tumultuous years
surrounding the publication of “Ultimatum” will help to situate the manifesto’s
staunchly anti-democratic politics. A summary of the manifesto’s structure and
themes, a brief comparison with similar texts, and a sketch of Pessoa’s messianic
nationalism will further elu…[Read more]

Fernando Pessoa. Message. Edited by Jerónimo Pizarro. Translated by John Pedro Schwartz and Robert N. Schwartz. Lisbon: Tinta-da-China, 2022.

This edition carries the major distinction of being the only existing English translation of Fernando Pessoa’s Message to recreate both the rhyme and the metrical schemes of the original.

This edition carries the major distinction of being the only existing English translation of Fernando Pessoa’s Message to recreate both the rhyme and the metrical schemes of the original.

Review of SÁ-CARNEIRO, Mário de (2021). Seven Songs of Decline and Other Poems. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Ana Luísa Amaral. Edited by Ricardo Vasconcelos. London: Francis Boutle Publishers. [ISBN 978 1 8380928 49]

To use Fausto’s metaphors, the absence of any “forma” grounded in, or grounding, the intrinsic nature of things entails a situation in which all—mind, matter, self, world—is “informe” (Pessoa, 2018: 181). Pessoa’s struggle—and it is in this, I argue, that the drama of Fausto consists—is thus to find forms for the formlessness of the self and the…[Read more]

Brazilian concrete poetry can teach us to see, where the language is materialized, the concrete in Pessoa’s writings. To do this is to see Pessoa as a precursor of the Brazilian concrete poets. But precursor-ship is not the only link between them. In the case of the founding group of concrete poetry, the work of Pessoa traverses the whole of t…[Read more]

This volume carries the major distinction of being the only existing English translation of Fernando Pessoa’s poems to recreate both the rhyme and the metrical schemes of the original.

This paper focuses on five problems all translators of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry into English must grapple with. The first is whether or not to distinguish the poetry of Pessoa (orthonym), Álvaro de Campos, Alberto Caeiro and Ricardo Reis through the use of stylistic and lexical markers. The second is: to what degree should the translator im…[Read more]

Hubert Jennings’s Lisbon memoirs bring something new to the study of Fernando Pessoa. This article reads Pessoa through the eyes of Jennings and situates both in the context of British decolonization, Portuguese colonial warfare, Commonwealth immigration, and 1960s political upheavals – in order to better understand their differential i…[Read more]

Book review of George Monteiro, From Lisbon to the World: Pessoa’s Enduring Literary Presence, 2018