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About Pessoa

12 juin 1998
03m 41s
Ref. 00258

Information

Summary :

Essay writer and philosopher Edouardo Lourenco, author of a biography of Fernando Pessoa, explains how this writer, who is now considered to be one of the most important ones of the century, disrupted Portuguese imaginations through his accounts of the city of Lisbon and daily life. His work also discusses modern man's loss of identity through his multiplicity. Finally, Pivot comments on one of his greatest works, Book of Disquiet.

Media type :
Vidéo
Broadcast date :
12 juin 1998
Source :
France 2 (Collection: Bouillon de culture )
Personnalité(s) :
Eduardo Lourenco / Henri Michaux / Emile Michel Cioran / Bernard Pivot / Fernando Pessoa
Themes :
Places :

Context

Never perhaps has the term 'elusive' applied more to an author than to Portuguese Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), whose name means 'person'. Writing in his mother tongue as well as in English, that he learned in South Africa where his mother remarried with the Portuguese Consul in Durban, he practically never left Lisbon, his birth town, after his return in 1905, living from translation work and publishing (in particular he founded the poetic reviews, Orpheu in 1915, that only had two editions, and Athena, as well as the publishing house Olisipo).

An unrecognized poet who had just published one book, Message (1934), left after his death over 27,000 handwritten poems in a trunk, signed by dozens of authors, all aliases or more precisely heteronyms, as he called them, of the elusive poet.

Published since then as collections, his work was immediately recognized as one of the most important contributions to Portuguese and European literature, which earned him a peaceful rest, after a national homage in 1985 on the fiftieth anniversary of his death alongside Vasco de Gama and Luis de Camoens, in the Hieronymites monastery in Lisbon.

Aurélia Caton

Transcription

Bernard Pivot
So Pessoa, is whom you think is one of the greatest writers of today, of this century?
Eduardo Lourenco
Personally, yes.
Bernard Pivot
I think that is...
Eduardo Lourenco
Now it is not very interesting to say it, because it has become a sort of cliché.
Bernard Pivot
Yes, here?
Eduardo Lourenco
No, I am saying, not only here, this idea that Fernando Pessoa is one of the greatest authors of the century is starting to spread. It is good to finally recognize this, it was even better to think and live it forty or so years ago.
Bernard Pivot
Ah of course!
Eduardo Lourenco
It is very egotistical for me to tell you that, but I want to say that he fell on my generation, like that, like a star that falls from another sky and it shook the landscape, not only that of Portuguese poetry, but of the Portuguese imaginary. And even, in some way, it is as if we had never looked in that way at Portuguese culture, the city, this city here called Lisbon, and in a more general sense, at things. That is, the things that we see every day, daily things, and that he sees as though he is an alien, he sees the inverted side of things.
Bernard Pivot
But if, if there are French people who say: Pessoa, I may never have heard of him, or I heard of him but have never read anything by him. So, what could you say to each other, say to the French: read Pessoa, why read Pessoa? What is so singular about Pessoa that makes him one of the great writers? I will admit confess something to you: I had read very little of his works, and so to prepare for this show I began reading Pessoa. And I have to say: I was completely subjugated, notably for example, I had never read the book entitled "The Book of Disquiet", and it is indeed a masterpiece of 20th Century literature. And so I would say for the French that it is somewhere in between Michaud and Cioran, it is a fairly despairing book, even if there are some rather funny passages, but really, and then the quality of his poetry... So, what would you say? Why do people need to read it?
Eduardo Lourenco
People need to read it because they must read all poets anyway.
Bernard Pivot
Oh no, no no! No, no, no, one must not read all of the poets... No, no, no I do not agree...
Eduardo Lourenco
People need to read him in particular because he is in all ways, in fact, of the term, a case, he is someone who had, who incarnated this specifically modern sickness, or condition that is the loss of identity. This feeling that had carried man throughout the ages, that we are subjects, we are the force of the world And he belongs to this category of someone who discovers a little that... No, not that he is someone, but that he is a multiplicity that cannot be truly united. He evidently gave this a dramatic form, he knows he created poets, who are doubles or triples of himself, but the important thing is that he shows by this that it is not his case. It is truly the case of modernity, and of the modern man, that is multiple.