Pessoa: Translating Emotion

by Margaret Jull Costa

After the death of Pessoa's father in 1893, his mother remarried and the family moved from Lisbon to Durban, South Africa. Pessoa was educated in English and wrote entirely in English until he was seventeen, when he chose to return to Portugal in order to follow a university course. He soon abandoned his studies - a student strike disrupted classes - and, instead, set up a publishing company that rapidly slid into bankruptcy. Whilst in South Africa, he had followed a course in business English and bookkeeping and, since he was also fluent in French, he got a job as a bookkeeper and translator of foreign correspondence in a company in Lisbon and earned a modest living from this until his death at 47 from cirrhosis of the liver. In his spare time he wrote mainly poetry, but also essays and articles, and was involved in various short-lived literary magazines.

The only other works published in his lifetime were a collection of thirty-five sonnets in English (published privately) and a book of poems, Mensagem (Message) in 1934. His genius was only recognised after his death and he is now considered to be Portugal's greatest modern poet. He left behind a large trunk stuffed with quantities of typed and handwritten papers which are still being collated and published.

 The extract we will be looking at is taken from a prose work Livro do desassossego (The Book of Disquiet) written by one of Pessoa's 'heteronyms', Bernardo Soares. The heteronyms were imaginary authors to whom Pessoa gave complete biographies and who wrote in styles and expressed philosophies and attitudes different from his own. Of Bernardo Soares, Pessoa wrote that he was only 'a semi-heteronym because, although his personality is not mine, it is not different from but rather a simple mutilation of my personality. He is me minus reason and affectivity.

The Book of Disquiet is a collection of fragments - thoughts, dreams, moods, descriptions, aphorisms - and, perhaps appropriately, there is no one version, because each edition of the book represents a selection of the papers found in the trunk and put together in a different order or according to different criteria by different people. In English alone, there are four different versions; it as if Pessoa continued to fragment into further heteronyms beyond death and we, the translators, were those heteronyms.

I have chosen a short extract which will give you a taste of some of the problems one faces in translating generally and in translating Pessoa in particular.

For those of you with a knowledge of Portuguese I give the Portuguese original and, for those with little or no knowledge of Portuguese, a literal translation.

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