17 - Great Pessoans: A Tribute

Summary

On 18 July 1902, the Lisbon newspaper O Imparcial published a poem by a young boy called Fernando Pessoa, under the heading ‘A 14-year-old Poet’. It was a naive but correct little poem, presented as the work of a charming and restless child of promising poetical talent. Chronologically speaking, the unknown commentator was the first Pessoan. And he was right about the promising talent of the young poet who, ninety-two years later, in 1994, was to be included by Harold Bloom among the twenty-six writers in The Western Canon.

Today, Pessoa's oeuvre can be read in thirty-seven languages. His name and his poetry are known, appreciated and discussed around the world. But who paved the way for the multitude of scholars who have been building up his figure as one of the greatest literary creators of the twentieth century, and who recognise his central contribution to modernity? I have prepared a short list of ten non-Portuguese translators and critics, from eight countries. These are, in my view, the Great Pessoans, the pioneering champions of Pessoa's cause.

It was in France, not in Portugal's neighbouring Spain, that Fernando Pessoa started to be internationally recognised. Pierre Hourcade, a French scholar who was the Principal of the Lycée Français in Lisbon, met Pessoa in 1930 and published an article in a Parisian literary magazine, in which he wrote:

Je le craignais petit, mélancolique et noiraud, rivé au nocif enchantement de la ‘saudade’ dont s'intoxique le meilleur de sa race, et je butai tout-à-coup contre le regard le plus vif, un sourire ferme et moqueur, un visage débordant d'une vie secrète.