Pessoa in 1914, the year he wrote "Triumphal Ode"
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Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1888 and spent most of his childhood in Durban, South Africa. In 1905 he returned to Lisbon to enroll in college but eventually dropped out, preferring to study on his own. He made a modest living translating the foreign corespondence of various commercial firms, and wrote obsessively -- in English, Portuguese, and French. He self-published several chapbooks of his English poems in 1918 and 1921, and regularly contributed his Portuguese poems and prose texts to literary reviews and newspapers. Mensagem, a collection of poems on patriotic themes, won a prize in a national competition in 1934. Pessoa wrote much of his greatest poetry in the guise of his three main "heteronyms" -- Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis -- whose fully fleshed biographies he invented, giving them different writing styles and points of view. He created dozens of other writerly personas, including the assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares, fictional author of The Book of Disquiet. Although Pessoa was acknowledged as an intellectual and a poet, his literary genius went largely unrecognized until after his death in 1935.
Read two Álvaro de Campos poems here.
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The Triumph of Álvaro de Campos
by Richard Zenith
Of all the writerly alter egos spawned by Fernando Pessoa, the naval engineer named Álvaro de Campos was the largest, loudest, most irrepressible and most irreverent. While it is true that Pessoa's use of heteronyms -- "other names" whose points of view and literary styles differed from their creator's -- was not just a literary trick but had a psychological origin, Pessoa having dialogued with imaginary writers already as a young child, the compulsion to other himself was always an eminently playful one, and no heteronym was more frolicsome and mischievous than Álvaro de Campos, who even meddled in Pessoa's real-world life. When his progenitor published a magazine article on "the aesthetic ideal in Portugal," Campos staunchly rebutted his views in the magazine's next issue; Campos wrote a letter to Ophelia Queiroz, Pessoa's one sweetheart, exhorting her to flush her "mental image" of the beloved "down the toilet"; and he occasionally turned up in lieu of Pessoa at appointments, to the chagrin and ire of those friends who were not amused by such antics.
From a letter written by Pessoa the year he died, in 1935, we learn that Álvaro de Campos was born in Portugal's Algarve region on October 15th, 1890 (two years after Pessoa himself), that he was of Jewish extraction but was probably brought up as a Roman Catholic, since "an uncle who was a priest" taught him Latin, that he used an in-those-days stylish monocle and parted his hair on one side, that he went to Scotland to study engineering, first mechanical then naval, that he made a voyage to the Orient, and that he eventually ended up back in Lisbon. From other references, and from Campos's considerable output of poetry and prose, we know that the "naval engineer and Sensationist poet" was a flamboyant, footloose, sharp-tongued decadent during the 1910s and early 1920s, living between London, Glasgow and Lisbon, when he wasn't on the high sea. A sometime partaker of absinthe and opium, attracted to young men as well as to young women, Campos calmed down over the years, with his long-winded Whitmanian zest for life metamorphosing into a nagging existential anguish that found expression in vastly shorter poems. "How long it's been since I could write / A long poem!" begins a not-long poem from 1934 in which Campos wistfully recalls his "Triumphal Ode" and "Maritime Ode" (the latter with over nine hundred verses), composed some twenty years earlier.
The "Triumphal Ode," written in the first half of 1914 and published in 1915, marks the spiritual conception of Álvaro de Campos in Pessoa, or rather, his organic separation from heteronym Alberto Caeiro, who was originally conceived as an incredibly versatile vanguardist, responsible -- according to an early, undated note -- not only for the Zennish nature poems of The Keeper of Sheep but for a group of Cubist-inspired "Intersectionist poems" and "Five Futurist Odes." After the split, Caeiro retreated with his sheep to the countryside, the Intersectionist poems came to be signed by Pessoa himself, and Campos dedicated himself to writing the Futurist, Whitman-influenced "odes" that would celebrate the modern age of machines, urban bustle, and heightened sensations. (Heteronym Ricardo Reis, who wrote classical odes reminiscent of Horace, also came into existence in 1914.)
Futurism never gained much of a footing in Portugal, where its literary significance is all but summed up -- ingeniously so -- in the poet-engineer who never existed. In addition to his Futurist odes, Campos was credited with a ranting and socially radical "Ultimatum," published in the magazine Portugal Futurista, whose one and only issue saw print in 1917. After virulently indicting Europe and the "present age's inadaptability and creative incapacity," Campos's manifesto proclaims the need for "artificial adaptation," "sociological surgery," the "abolition of the dogma of personality," the "abolition of the notion of absolute truth" and various other measures that will pave the way for the "coming of a perfect, mathematical Humanity," the "necessary advent of a Humanity of Engineers!" A humanity, in other words, made up of unreal figures like Álvaro de Campos. Because "the greatest artist," according to the manifesto, "will be the one who least defines himself, and who writes in the most genres with the most contradictions and discrepancies." Campos, Caeiro and Reis are Pessoa's best-known heteronyms, but he wrote under more than seventy other names, in countless genres, and with every contradiction he could ferret out of his soul.
Pessoa’s mathematics and engineering were, clearly, sheer literature. The triumph he heralded for the world of the future was the triumph that he himself lived--in his endlessly proliferating imagination.
Originally published in Literary Imagination 2.2,
USA, Spring 2000
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Some Pessoa resources
Casa Fernando Pessoa, Lisbon
Câmara Municipal de Lisboa
Rua Coelho da Rocha, 16
Campo de Ourique
1250-088 - Lisboa, Portugal
+ 351 21 391 32 75
http://casafernandopessoa.cm-lisboa.pt
http://mundopessoa.blogs.sapo.pt
The most complete Portuguese editions of Pessoa are currently published by Assírio & Alvim, Lisbon.
Some books in English (all translations by Richard Zenith):
Pessoa & Co., WWNorton & Co., 1998 (Amazon)
A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, Penguin Classics, 2006 (Amazon)
The Book of Disquiet, Penguin Classics, 2006 (Amazon)
Some Pessoa manuscript facsimiles at the Portuguese National Library
Wikipedia's entry on Pessoa
Visit also Disquiet.com, Marc Weidenbaum's website
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