Vem hoje no New York Times um artigo sobre Pessoa. Parece que alguns dos seus manuscritos (em forma de correspondência) originais vão ser leiloados, correndo o risco de saír do país. Dos cerca de 30,000 manuscritos que Pessoa deixou à sua morte, cerca de 2,700 estão ainda com a família e os restantes na posse da biblioteca nacional. Mas o que me ficou mesmo do artigo foi a identificação de Pessoa com o espírito portugês, aquele de que falei há uns tempos e que volta e meia me vem à memória. Ficam algumas passagens.___________
Eduardo Lourenço is perhaps Portugal’s most distinguished literary critic. Pessoa is “an exception, being a great writer,” he said the other afternoon. “But he had a way of being that is distinctly Portuguese.” He paused to find the right words. “It has to do with everything and nothing — that we Portuguese can have everything, but still feel we have nothing.”
Portugal, he explained, had discovered half the world by the 16th century but still felt itself a failure for having not discovered the rest. The national mind-set, Mr. Lourenço said, is “a combination of megalomania and humility.”
“Also Pessoa was a loner,” he went on, “one of the great poets to express absolute loneliness — some of his poems are so sad they are difficult to read, which is very Portuguese. Listen to fado.” He was referring to the music that here connotes “saudade,” a nearly untranslatable word meaning homesickness but also something more, something, he suggested, like paradise lost.
Portugal, he explained, had discovered half the world by the 16th century but still felt itself a failure for having not discovered the rest. The national mind-set, Mr. Lourenço said, is “a combination of megalomania and humility.”
“Also Pessoa was a loner,” he went on, “one of the great poets to express absolute loneliness — some of his poems are so sad they are difficult to read, which is very Portuguese. Listen to fado.” He was referring to the music that here connotes “saudade,” a nearly untranslatable word meaning homesickness but also something more, something, he suggested, like paradise lost.
(...)
Pessoa also wrote as Alexander Search, a Scottish engineer; Alberto Caeiro (Pessoa often called this invented character “my master”); Ricardo Reis; and Álvaro de Campos, a retired, bisexual naval engineer and melancholic with an addiction to drugs.
(...)
As Campos, he also wrote: “Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist.”
(...)
Mr. Lourenço gathered his thoughts one more time. “He is the most tragic of the Portuguese poets,” he said. “The pleasure of unhappiness is particularly Portuguese.”
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