Jeff Carreira: Hello John, and thank you so much for speaking with me for this issue. I’m very excited to include Fernando Pessoa in our exploration of the transformative power of poetry because Pessoa has had an enormously transformative effect on my own life.

You and I worked together on the publication of Fernando Pessoa’s Poetry – Minimal Anthology, and I’m very happy that we’ll be speaking about it today.

My first introduction to Pessoa came through The Book of Disquiet, which I would describe as a collection of fragments that are, in many ways, prose poems. I first encountered it many years ago, but I returned to it more deeply perhaps ten or fifteen years ago. There was something about the spirit behind those writings—a deeply inward, reflective power—that completely captured me. I feel that same quality throughout much of Pessoa’s poetry.

The transformative effect Pessoa’s writing had on me was the realization that writing itself can become a profound tool for introspection and self-discovery. Reading him inspired me to write more, to explore different forms of writing, and to discover what deeper dimensions of consciousness might reveal themselves through the act of writing itself.

How were you first introduced to Pessoa, and what impact has his work had on your life?

John Pedro Schwartz: Well, where do I begin? Probably back in 2012. I was presenting a paper at a conference in Porto, and during lunch with the other presenters and professors, I happened to find myself sitting across from Jerónimo Pizarro. I know you know him. He’s a professor of Portuguese literature at the University of the Andes in Colombia, the Pessoa Collection Director at Tinta-da-China in Lisbon, and the editor of several books I’ve published with that press, and of course the editor of our own Poetry – Minimal Anthology. Of course, he’s also arguably the world’s foremost Pessoa scholar.

We fell into conversation very naturally. I was born in Mexico and raised in the United States, so I’m of Mexican heritage, and he is Colombian. We also shared an interest in modernism, especially Pessoa. I mentioned that I read Portuguese, and although Pessoa had long been on my horizon as an important modernist writer, I had not actually read him yet.

So it felt very fortuitous that my introduction to Pessoa would happen through meeting one of the world’s great Pessoa scholars. We bonded quickly and became fast friends. A day or two later, he took me to some used book stalls in Porto and helped me select several Pessoa volumes to bring back with me to Beirut, where I was then teaching at the American University of Beirut.

Jeff Carreira:Can you tell us how you came to translate Fernando Pessoa’s Poetry – Minimal Anthology.

John Pedro Schwartz: One night in December of 2018, Jerónimo had invited a number of us scholars to Porto to do archival work. There were about half a dozen of us staying together in an apartment after long days spent scanning Pessoa manuscripts from a private archive in Santo Tirso, just outside Porto.

One night, we were all sitting around in the apartment after work, and Jerónimo mentioned that he had just published a poetry anthology and a prose anthology of Pessoa’s work. I can’t quite remember whether I casually said that I would love to translate someday, or whether he was the one who first suggested it, but I believe it was he who said, “Why don’t you translate?”

I looked at him and said, “Translate?”

And he said, “Yes.”

I replied, “But I don’t translate.”

And he simply said, “Try.”

I was flabbergasted—not to mention flattered. But I said, “All right, I’ll try. Though I think I’d rather begin with the prose anthology than the poetry anthology, because what do I know about translating poetry?”

And he said, “Well, actually, I don’t have the prose anthology with me, but I do have the poetry anthology.” Then he handed it to me.

So that night, there I was sitting at the kitchen table in this apartment in Porto, surrounded by Pessoa scholars and friends cleaning up the day’s scans, with pizza boxes and beer everywhere, and I began trying to translate Pessoa.

And almost immediately, I was hooked.

At the time, in my complete naivete, I assumed that if a poem was written in rhyme and meter, then naturally it had to be translated in rhyme and meter. I didn’t yet realize that most translators abandon those formal structures altogether. But I simply thought, “Of course you preserve the rhyme and meter.”

So I sat there working through a quatrain—I think it had an ABAB rhyme scheme in iambic pentameter—and I enjoyed the process immensely. When I finished, I thought, “Well, I wonder if this is any good.”

I showed it to Jerónimo, and he looked at me and said, “What have you been doing all your life? You’ve got a knack for this.”
And that was it. Off to the races. I never looked back.

It’s been about eight years now and five books later. I’m currently working on my sixth.

So far I’ve translated Poetry – Minimal Anthology, Message, which is a book of poems, Prose–Minimal Anthology, Love Letters—which just came out this week in Portugal—and also the short fiction The Anarchist Banker, which should appear later this year.

And right now I’m working on Faust, Pessoa’s unfinished verse drama of metaphysical vertigo—his own take on the Faust legend.

Jeff Carreira: As you just mentioned, rhyme and meter are most often abandoned in translated poetry, so the poems tend to become something closer to free verse in translation. I would imagine that trying to preserve a poem’s original rhyme scheme and meter while translating it into an entirely different language would be enormously challenging.

Can you speak a little about that challenge, and about what is gained by trying to preserve the formal structure of a poem in translation?

John Pedro Schwartz: Before I answer, though, let me challenge something you said at the outset—the idea that it is somehow easier to translate rhymed and metered poetry into free verse. I used to believe that myself. For the longest time, I took a certain pride in doing what I imagined was the more difficult task: translating rhymed and metered poetry into rhymed and metered poetry in English.

I assumed that translators who abandoned rhyme and meter simply found the formal challenge too difficult.

But then I had a conversation with a Portuguese colleague who, three or four years ago, published his own translations of poems by the great nineteenth-century Portuguese Symbolist poet Camilo Pessanha. These were also rhymed and metered poems, yet he translated them without preserving the rhyme and meter. He had a different philosophy of translation altogether. He spoke about capturing what he called the “music of ideas” rather than the specific musical structures of rhyme and meter.

At first, I understood his point intellectually, but I still privately believed my own approach was the more “faithful” one.

Then, a couple of years later, I finally sat down and carefully read his translations, and I was astonished by how beautiful they were. He had done an extraordinary job rendering these poems into what we would essentially call free verse. And reading them forced me to admit something I already knew deep down: there is no single right way to translate poetry.

The same is true, of course, for translating rhymed and metered poetry specifically. You might describe it as a calculus of gains and losses, and every translator performs that calculus differently.

Or perhaps another way to say it is this: every translator begins with an interpretation of the work being translated. And if that interpretation leads someone toward a free verse strategy, then wonderful. If, as in my case, it leads toward preserving rhyme and meter, then that too is perfectly valid.

Because ultimately we are not creating an equivalent. Translation can never produce a perfect duplicate of the original. What we are really doing is creating a new poetic event in another language—one shaped by our reading, our sensibility, and our understanding of what matters most in the original work.

The concept of equivalence derives from what the theorist Lawrence Venuti calls the instrumental model of translation, which is the view that the translator can reproduce the form, effect, and meaning of the source text in another language. At least within literary studies, that’s generally considered a rather naive understanding of translation. The alternative is what’s often called the hermeneutic model of translation, which holds that every translation inevitably varies the source text in form, effect, and meaning.

So I see my own translations—and really all translations—not as replicas of an original work, but as recreations of it. Recreations that are always based, implicitly or explicitly, on interpretation.

In my case, I simply found tremendous meaning embedded in the formal rhythmic structures of Pessoa’s poetry. As I translated his rhymed and metered poems, I increasingly felt that the rhyme and meter themselves were doing important load-bearing work within the poems. They were not ornamental. They were actively carrying meaning.

And in fact, in my translator’s preface to Poetry – Minimal Anthology, I try to spell out some of the ways these rhythmic and formal elements themselves generate and convey meaning within Pessoa’s poetry.

Jeff Carreira: Pessoa is often described as Portugal’s greatest modernist poet, or at least that is how I have most often heard him characterized. And modernism itself, in poetry and in the arts more broadly, was a revolutionary and transformative movement. It took inherited classical forms and structures and reshaped them into something radically new.

I would love for you to speak a little about Pessoa as a transformative modernist poet. What was it that made his work so innovative, and in what ways do you feel his poetry transformed both literature and the inner experience of the reader?

John Pedro Schwartz: Certainly. Yes, Pessoa is indeed the major modernist figure in Portugal. In fact, he stands among the great modernists of the twentieth century altogether, in the same league as figures like Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, and T.S. Eliot. He is one of the great literary monuments of the twentieth century, and he is widely recognized as such both by scholars and by readers more generally.

You mentioned transformation, and I think that’s exactly the right word. Pessoa very deliberately, systematically, and explicitly set out to synthesize the best elements of the literary movements that preceded him. We see this not only in the poetry itself, but also in his essays, manifestos, critical writings, and theoretical reflections.

The dominant literary currents in Portugal at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth were Symbolism and Decadentism, which itself emerged partly out of late Romanticism. Pessoa inherited all of these traditions, and at the same time he absorbed Horace’s classical odes, Whitman’s long lines of free verse, and the latest developments of the European avant-garde, such as Futurism and Vorticism. So when he began writing in the early twentieth century, he was not simply rejecting the past in the way that some strains of modernism did. Rather, he was absorbing multiple traditions and transforming them into something radically new.

Jeff Carreira: I’d love to talk a little about Pessoa’s heteronyms, because I think they are one of the most fascinating and transformative aspects of his work.

A pseudonym is simply a writer publishing under another name. But a heteronym, in Pessoa’s case, was something much more radical—an entirely distinct personality with its own voice, worldview, temperament, literary style, and even biography writing through the author.

More than one hundred heteronyms emerged through Pessoa, and at least three of them—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos—along with Pessoa himself, are considered world-class poets in profoundly different styles.

Alberto Caeiro, for example, writes with an extraordinary spontaneity and immediacy, seemingly untouched by the self-consciousness and existential uncertainty that so often permeate Pessoa’s own writing.

I would love to hear you speak about Pessoa’s heteronyms, and about what you feel they reveal not only about poetry, but about consciousness, identity, and the creative imagination itself.

John Pedro Schwartz: First, I should mention that Poetry – Minimal Anthology includes poems written by Pessoa in his own person, for which he had a term: orthonym. The anthology also contains poems by his three major heteronyms, as you mentioned—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos. In addition, there is a final section that includes poems written under various lesser-known heteronyms, such as Dr. Pancrácio, Charles Robert Anon, Alexander Search, Joaquim Moura-Costa, Vicente Guedes, and Dinis da Silva. This is the first anthology to bring together not only Pessoa’s orthonymic poetry and the work of the three major heteronyms, but also poems by some of these lesser-known figures.

Now, in an essay called “The Stages of Lyric Poetry,” Pessoa outlines five progressively depersonalized stages of lyric poetry. At the first stage, the poet simply expresses his own feelings and thoughts directly. But at the far end of the spectrum, poetry becomes radically impersonal.

At the fifth stage, Pessoa writes:
“Let us suppose, however, that the poet, while yet avoiding dramatic poetry formally considered, advances a step further on the scale of depersonalization. Certain spiritual states thought and not felt, felt imaginatively and therefore lived out, will tend to shape for him a fictional person who feels those states sincerely.”

I think that is one of the clearest definitions of a heteronym: a fictional person who sincerely experiences emotional and spiritual states that Pessoa himself first imagined and inwardly lived through.

This theory of depersonalization is one of Pessoa’s unique contributions to modernist literary theory, and it emerges directly from his own psychological and imaginative life.

In a famous letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, Pessoa explains what he calls “the psychiatric side” of the genesis of the heteronyms. In that letter he writes:
“Ever since I was a child, I have tended to create around me a fictional world, to surround myself with friends and acquaintances who never existed.”

Later in the same letter he adds:
“Ever since I’ve known myself as me, I can remember envisioning the figure, movements, character, and history of various unreal personages.”

And further on he recalls what he considered his first heteronym—or, as he puts it, his first “nonexistent acquaintance”—a certain Chevalier de Pas, whom he invented at the age of six and in whose name he wrote letters to himself.

So the entire heteronymic enterprise begins in childhood. It emerges from Pessoa’s extraordinary capacity to imaginatively generate fully realized inner personalities.

Now, Pessoa was certainly not the only modernist interested in impersonal poetics. T.S. Eliot famously develops a theory of impersonality in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Ezra Pound explored similar ideas, as did W.B. Yeats and Borges. So Pessoa was very much in conversation with a broader modernist movement.

But I think Pessoa differs from these other writers in the intensity with which he both theorized and practiced depersonalization. For him, it was not simply a literary theory. It became an entire mode of being and writing.

Jeff Carreira: Can you give us a succinct definition of impersonal poetry or the theory of impersonal poetry?

John Pedro Schwartz: All right. Let me begin with Eliot and “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” because Eliot argues for a fascinating paradox: the poet is never more personal than when he is impersonal, and never more original than when he operates from within tradition.

Of course, one of Eliot’s implicit adversaries here would be someone like the Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti, who famously called for burning museums and libraries. In other words, Marinetti represented a radical rejection of tradition, whereas Eliot very consciously embraced literary tradition. Yet Eliot paradoxically reconciles this embrace of tradition with individual originality. For him, the individual poet becomes most fully himself precisely through entering into relationship with tradition. Likewise, the poet becomes most profoundly personal precisely through impersonality.

Now, Pessoa develops a somewhat related but distinct vision of impersonal poetics. Perhaps the most succinct statement of his theory appears in the short essay I mentioned earlier, “The Stages of Lyric Poetry.” It’s only about a page and a half long, and I translated it in Prose–Minimal Anthology.

Pessoa’s idea is that at the earliest stage of lyric poetry, the poet is confined to expressing his own personal feelings and thoughts. But as the poet progressively depersonalizes himself, he gains access to thoughts, feelings, and what Pessoa calls “spiritual states” that are no longer merely autobiographical or limited to his individual personality.

And this is where Pessoa becomes truly radical. For him, depersonalization is not a loss of depth. It is an expansion of consciousness and imaginative possibility. The poet becomes capable of inhabiting modes of being beyond the confines of the personal self.

Because of this, if their imagination is powerful enough, the poet can, in a sense, become everyone. You are no longer simply writing from another person’s point of view. Rather, you are actually experiencing an alternate mindset, an alternate spiritual state. It is, for all intents and purposes, lived out within yourself through the force of imagination.

And Pessoa believed that if the poet gives himself over completely enough to these alternate spiritual states, they will naturally begin to shape themselves into fictional persons. In other words, the heteronym emerges organically from the deeply imagined and deeply inhabited inner experience of the poet himself. And this, I think, is precisely where Pessoa differs from Eliot.

Eliot certainly embraced impersonal poetry. He theorized it extensively and practiced it brilliantly, most famously in The Waste Land, that monumental modernist poem from 1922. The same could be said, in different ways, of Pound, Yeats, and Borges. But Pessoa takes impersonality further. Much further.

Using the framework from “The Stages of Lyric Poetry,” we might say that these other poets remain somewhere around the third or fourth stage of depersonalization. Pessoa pushes beyond that into what he explicitly calls the fifth stage.

At that point, the poet becomes so radically depersonalized that he can fully inhabit another personality and in that adopted consciousness he coheres into an entirely distinct poetic being. That is the true mystery and originality of the heteronyms. They are not masks in the ordinary literary sense. They are fully realized modes of consciousness.

Jeff Carreira: I have another question I’d love to explore because my understanding is that Sensationism is the literary movement most closely associated with Pessoa, and that the great teacher of Sensationism was his heteronym Alberto Caeiro.

What fascinates me is that Caeiro was not simply another literary persona. Within Pessoa’s inner universe, he became the mentor and teacher not only of Fernando Pessoa himself, but also of Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos. In a sense, one heteronym became the spiritual and poetic guide for the others.

I’m wondering if you could speak a little about Sensationism, about Alberto Caeiro himself, and about his role as the teacher or master of Pessoa’s other heteronyms.

John Pedro Schwartz: Certainly. As I mentioned earlier, Pessoa wrote a number of prose pieces, and you may also call them manifestos, explaining the fundamentals of sensationism, one of five “isms” that he himself created. He was really a one-man generator of a number of one-man movements. In fact, one of his prose pieces or manifestos is entitled The Fundamentals of Sensationism. And, well, I can, I can read a brief passage.

“Sensationism differs from all literary attitudes in being open and not restricted. Whereas all literary schools begin with a certain number of principles, rest on determinate bases, Sensationism rests on no base whatsoever. Every literary or artistic school contends that art should be a determinate thing; Sensationism contends that art should not be a determinate thing.”

And he speaks of his basic rules of art. One, all art is creation. Two, all art is the expression of a given psychic phenomenon. And three, for the artist, art has no social end. It’s difficult to summarize Sensationism because he’s laid out the fundamentals in so many manifestos. It’s really a bit of a grab bag. But I think from the passage I just read, Sensationism most fundamentally reflects the view that art should not be restricted but open.

As for Alberto Caeiro, he is indeed the mentor figure for the other major heteronyms and even for Pessoa himself. Pessoa proper depersonalizes himself into this fictional personage named Alberto Caeiro, who writes in an entirely different style and from a radically different philosophical orientation. But then, paradoxically, Caeiro exerts such a profound influence on Pessoa himself that Pessoa’s own writing begins to change as a result of contact with this imagined figure. The same is true for Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos. In a sense, they all become disciples of Caeiro.

Caeiro is most closely associated with what Pessoa called objectivity. He is an objective poet, which means that sensations–which he takes, anti-metaphysically, to be the basic unit of reality–should be expressed free of symbolic or literary abstractions.

His great work, The Keeper of Flocks, is in many ways an anti-symbolist poem. It seeks to eliminate the subjective dimension of poetry altogether. The poems are not expressions of personal thoughts or feelings about nature. Rather, they attempt to communicate the pure sensation of nature itself—as though nature were being encountered for the very first time.

Caeiro wants to experience the world virginally, stripped of philosophy, mythology, religion, literary tradition, symbolism, and historical interpretation. Much of The Keeper of Flocks consists of his reflecting poetically on this attempt to perceive nature objectively and immediately, without the mediation of inherited concepts or preconceived meanings.

In that sense, Caeiro represents a radical purification of perception. He seeks what we might call naked contact with reality.

Jeff Carreira: Do you have a favorite poem from Poetry – Minimal Anthology?

John Pedro Schwartz: Yes, it is Un Soir à Lima. And this gives me a chance to mention my father because one reason why it’s my favorite poem, Un Soir à Lima, is because my father, Robert N. Schwartz, who died five years ago, is the co-translator of Poetry–Minimal Anthology. In an interview published shortly before he died he mentioned that one of his two favorite poems was Un Soir à Lima by Fernando Pessoa. I remember so vividly our co-translation of that poem. It was a real joy translating the book with him, but especially this poem.

Jeff Carreira: Would you read some of it?

John Pedro Schwartz: Yes, “Un Soir à ima,” the title of the poem, is taken from a song Pessoa hears on the radio that triggers memories of his childhood in South Africa. I translated the poem in rhyme and meter, but loosely as it is in Pessoa’s original poem.