Poetry – Minimal Anthology

Edited by Jerónimo Pizarro.
Translated by John Pedro Schwartz and Robert N. Schwartz

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This book is an invitation to savor the many spiritual states lived out by that most depersonalized of poets—the “Portuguese Shakespeare,” as Pessoa declared himself to be. Gathering the fictional selves he imaginatively shaped and the cosmopolitan strands he expertly wove, this Minimal Anthology proposes the discovery or rediscovery of Fernando Pessoa through some of the twentieth century’s most astonishing poems: from “Maritime Ode” to “Tobacco Shop,” moving through “Slanting Rain,” “The Sea Monster,” “The Keeper of Sheep,” “Opiary,” “Autopsychography,” and many lesser-known poems, all of them revealing a genius that continues to elicit shock, delight, and admiration.

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Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) is today Portugal’s principal literary link with the world. His work in verse and prose is the most multifarious imaginable, for it has multiple facets, materializes innumerable interests, and represents an authentic collective patrimony: of the author, of the diverse authorial figures invented by him, and of the readers. Some of those personae—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos—Pessoa called “heteronyms,” reserving the designation “orthonym” for himself. The director, of and a collaborator on, various literary magazines and the author of The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa was, in everyday life, a “foreign correspondent in commercial houses.” Pessoa left a universal oeuvre in three languages, one that has been edited and studied ever since he wrote, before dying in Lisbon, “I know not what tomorrow will bring.”

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The Translators

John Pedro Schwartz is Associate Professor of English at the American University of Malta. He sits on the Editorial Board of the journal Pessoa Plural – A Journal of Fernando Pessoa Studies. He has published scholarly articles on James Joyce, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Jorge Luis Borges, and Fernando Pessoa, as well as on the intersections of composition, media, and museum studies. He has co-edited two books, Archives, Museums and Collecting Practices in the Modern Arab World (Ashgate 2012) and TransLatin Joyce: Global Transmissions in Ibero-American Literature (Palgrave 2014). While teaching at the American University of Beirut, he freelanced for Foreign Policy, filing two comprehensive reports on the Syrian civil war in 2011 and 2012. In a further journalistic venture, he published a three-part investigative series in Warscapes in April 2015, on the vigilante uprising against the Knights Templar drug cartel in Michoacán, Mexico. With his late father, he translated four books of poetry and prose by Fernando Pessoa, poems by Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari, and an essay by Eduardo Lourenço.

Robert N. Schwartz studied philosophy at a Catholic seminary in Ohio, with the beginnings of his scholarly work on the Roman Empire at the American Academy in Rome through a Rockefeller Foreign Language Fellowship. An Arthur Patch McKinley grant from the American Classical League allowed him to complete the chapters. Before that, he studied sociology at Calumet College of St. Joseph, with doctoral studies in Latin American history at Indiana University and at the University of California (UCLA), taking the Ph.D. at the University of Houston. An ardent student of the past, Dr. Schwartz published on the Roman and Incan Empires for both the general public and students. He lived, studied, taught, and explored in both of these bygone empires and taught on these subjects at all levels. In addition, he dedicated many summers to the progress of the developing world through teaching adult literacy in Peru, where he contributed articles to the Peruvian Times that reflect Peru’s Incan past. He also did developmental work with Helping Hands Medical Missions in the Brazilian Amazon. Toward the end of his life, Dr. Schwartz published commentary on contemporary issues in the United States and abroad through popular media, both digitally and in print. His dedication to historical and contemporary Peru never ceased to draw his attention.

The Editor

Professor, translator, critic, and editor, Jerónimo Pizarro bears credit for the majority of the new editions and new series of texts by Fernando Pessoa published in Portugal since 2006. Professor at the University of the Andes, Chair of Portuguese Studies at the Camões Institute in Colombia, and Eduardo Lourenço laureate (2013), Pizarro reopened the Pessoan arks. There he rediscovered “The Private Library of Fernando Pessoa,” to use the title of one of the books in his bibliography. He supervised Portugal’s participation in the International Book Fair of Bogotá, and for the past several years he has coordinated the visit of Portuguese-language authors to Colombia. He is the co-editor of the journal Pessoa Plural and is an assiduous organizer of colloquia and exhibitions. With Carlos Pittella, he wrote the book Como Fernando Pessoa Pode Mudar a Sua Vida [How Fernando Pessoa Can Change your Life] (2017), also published in Brazil. Since 2013, he has directed the Pessoa Collection, in both Portugal and Brazil. The Collection includes new editions of the complete works of Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis, of The Book of Disquiet, of Faust, and of the dramatic works and political writings of Pessoa, in addition to various essays on the Pessoan literary universe. Ler Pessoa [How to Read Pessoa], a book-length synthesis of the poet, is Pizarro’s most recent title. He also edited the “Minimal Anthologies” of Fernando Pessoa’s poetry and prose.

Poetry – Minimal Anthology

Fernando Pessoa

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