Foreword

Summary

Fernando Pessoa's youthful ambition was to become an English-language poet and, with the exception of a small book of poems, Mensagem [Message] (1934), the books he published during his lifetime were all in English. Most of his vast output in Portuguese was scattered among literary magazines or remained unpublished at his death. In English, Pessoa is an old-fashioned, albeit interesting poet; in Portuguese, he is one of the world's greatest modern poets. Fortunately, we can now read his work in good English translations and there are many perceptive English-language studies of Pessoa. The present collection of essays is an important addition to Pessoan scholarship in English.

Having studied in a good colonial school in Durban, South Africa, Pessoa's literary education covered English literature up to the late nineteenth century. When he began his English schooling at the age of seven, however, the deep linguistic structures that were to emerge in his Portuguese writings had already been formed. The most specific and creatively striking feature of the English language is the use of nouns as verbs. This makes it possible to transform subjective qualities or conceptual abstractions into objective actions or situations. In contrast, the most specific feature of Portuguese is the use of verbs as nouns that can be conjugated as verbs, making it possible to represent concrete actions or situations as subjective qualities or conceptual abstractions.