Richard Zenith* TRANSLATING AND EDITING PESSOA: VARIATION AS NORM or Variation as Norm: Editing and Translating Pessoa or Editing

as Variation, Translation as the Norm**

Resumo
Para Pessoa, escreve Richard Zenith, a norma que no existem normas nenhumas. Esta comunicao explora as mltiplas identidades de Fernando Pessoa, "um dos mais estranhos escritores do sculo XX", e a sua escrita fragmentria, que oferece verses diferentes, adies e omisses aos originais, bem como s variaes ainda no publicadas. Zenith discute alguns dos problemas com que se debatem os compiladores e organizadores da sua obra quais os critrios a seguir e as verses a escolher, o pormenor dos comentrios a exarar nas notas da rodap, etc. A tarefa do tradutor, diz Zenith, muito mais simples, e fala da sua prpria traduo do Livro do Desassossego.

No h normas. Todos os homens so excepes a uma regra que no existe. 1

This aphorism comes from an unpublished text of Fernando Pessoa and may be translated as: There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesnt exist. There is an analogous passage

Tradutor e editor de Fernando Pessoa. Escritor. Vive e trabalha em Lisboa Adapted from a paper presented on 8 March 1999 as part of the III Jornadas organized by the Grupo Universitrio de Investigao em Lnguas, UNIL, at the Universidade de Lisboa. 1 Catalogue #75A/22 in the Pessoa archives at the National Library of Lisbon. p o l i f o n i a , Lisboa, Edies Colibri, n. 3, 2000, pp. 173-180
**

to this lapidary phrase in Pessoas Livro do Desassossego, which in my English translation reads:
Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From whats in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but theres always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.2

The norm for Pessoa is that no norms exist. Or if any exist, they are so far beyond us that they have no practical significance in our world. All manifestations are variations, notes in the margin, exceptions. This radical, unconditional relativity is the premise that lies at the heart of Postmodernism. And the theme for these Jornadas, Norms and Variations, has everything to do with Postmodernism. How curious that years before this word even existed, its spirit was perfectly incarnated by a then unknown writer in a forgotten corner of Europe! Everyone here knows about the fragmentation of Pessoa into heteronyms, semiheteronyms, subheteronyms, and so forth, and most but perhaps not everyone in this room knows that this fragmentation was not just a literary game but a fundamental trait in Pessoas psychology, going all the way back to his early childhood.3 That writers such as Lyotard and Derrida should gain international renown for postulating the death of the author (as part of their attack on the notion of canonicity) is at least contradictory, if not hypocritical. Pessoa, without any hype, lived out the intertextual dream, or nightmare, in his own flesh, or negation of flesh. Even if we cross out all the dozens of names under which Pessoa wrote, much the way you and I breathe (and the famous list of 72 names drawn up by Teresa Rita Lopes is by no means exhaustive4),
2

The Book of Disquietude (Carcanet Press, 1991), p. 88. The original Portuguese reads: Tudo quanto o homem expe ou exprime uma nota margem de um texto apagado de todo. Mais ou menos, pelo sentido da nota, tiramos o sentido que havia de ser o do texto; mas fica sempre uma dvida, e os sentidos possveis so muitos ( Livro do Desassossego , Assrio & Alvim, 1998, p. 164). In a letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro dated 13 January 1935, Pessoa affirmed that his first heteronym, or nonexistent acquaintance, was the Chevalier de Pas, in whose name Pessoa wrote letters to himself, when he was six years old. Besides this unprovable affirmation, there is the concrete evidence in the Pessoa archives of make-believe newspapers written out in neat columns by Pessoa in his early teens. These contain stories, news, poems, puzzles and jokes signed by a host of invented literary characters. The list appears in her Pessoa por Conhecer (Estampa, 1990), pp. 167-69. Heteronyms not on the list include Dr. Florncio Gomes, author of a

we are left with an oeuvre whose entropy has no equal among major Western writers of this century or perhaps of any century. Besides all the poetry, ranging in style from classical odes to folk quatrains to haikus, besides all the static and not-so-static drama, including hundreds of pieces of an unorganizable Fausto, besides the equally fragmentary Livro do Desassossego and the dozens of unfinished short stories, there are reams of political writings (most of which are still unpublished), a vast output of literary criticism (likewise largely unpublished), philosophical texts, astrological and esoteric texts, writings on mathematics, linguistics, psychology, sociology and all of this, poetry and prose alike, written in English and French as well as in Portuguese. The key verse of Alberto Caeiro, according to Ricardo Reis, was Nature is parts without a whole5. This may or may not be true of Mother Nature, but it is undoubtedly true of Fernando Pessoas nature. Pessoas skittishness and hesitation permeate the very web and woof of his writing. His texts are littered with alternates sometimes as many as six or seven for the same word or phrase. Pessoas writing habits, to be sure, are not unique. Many authors are every bit as indecisive as they search for the best words to express a particular thought or feeling. What makes the case of Pessoa so special, and so exasperating, is that he published only a small percentage of what he wrote. Even for certain works he did publish such as 35 Sonnets, Mensagem [Message], and O Banqueiro Anarquista [The Anarchist Banker] Pessoa subsequently introduced changes in his personal copies and/or left manuscripts with new and revised passages, and these notations are often ambiguous: did he know for sure that he wanted to change a certain word or phrase, or was this just a possibility to be considered when, at a later date that almost never arrived, he would undertake an overall revision for a new edition? If this is a problem for the few things Pessoa published and the same problem exists for the published output of certain other great authors, notorious for republishing their works with more or less extensive revisions, which are not necessarily improvements6 it
fragmentary Tratado de Doenas Mentais [Treatise on Mental Diseases] (catalogue # 27 9E2/6) and Professor Jones, author of an Essay on Poetry, Written for the Edification and Instruction of Would-be Poets (catalogue # 146/72). A Natureza partes sem um todo , from the 47th poem in O Guardador de Rebanhos . Reis praises this verse in his fragmentary Preface to the Complete Poems of Alberto Caeiro. Most critics, for example, prefer the earlier versions of the poems that W. H. Auden revised or rewrote to conform with his changing politics and aesthetics. Should the authors wishes be respected? Or does a work, once

becomes an editors nightmare when dealing with all the unpublished material. Where Pessoa has left two, three or more alternate phrases on a manuscript, which one should an editor adopt? This is probably the main point of divergence among the various editions of Pessoas work. Those produced by tica, Pessoas near-exclusive publisher until 1985, always preferred the first word or phrase written by Pessoa, and this preference is shared by Teresa Rita Lopes and the members of her research group at the Universidade Nova. They argue that the first thing Pessoa wrote in the heat, as it were, of original creation has an organic veracity that gives it priority, unless Pessoa actually crossed it out or otherwise clearly showed his preference for a variant written above or below the word or phrase in question. These variants, they contend, were mostly just possibilities for Pessoa to consider later, once he finally got around to preparing a manuscript for publication. Ivo Castro and the other members of the Equipa Pessoa (the research group which is undertaking a critical edition of Pessoas poetry) feel, on the contrary, that an editor should respect the last thing Pessoa wrote, since it is, after all, his final statement on the matter. An editor would naturally like an objective criterion, but to arrive at one requires a subjective choice, and neither of these two choices is wholly satisfactory. I agree with Teresa Rita Lopess group (independently of the fact that Im part of it) that Pessoas first version is generally the best choice, based on the following evidence: the archives contain many rough drafts with variants in the margins that Pessoa did not incorporate in subsequent, clean copies of the same texts. But there are also some cases where the contrary occurs. Pessoa, in other words, usually wrote marginalia for use in a future revision, but sometimes a manuscript with marginalia is that revision. And it is not at all easy to tell the two situations apart. The fact is that Pessoa often left assorted versions of a single word or whole sentence or entire stanza without so much as a tentative preference among them. One way to resolve the editorial dilemma would be through a computer edition, since the variants could flash on and off at timed intervals, with no need to privilege one over the other. Readers could choose the version they prefer. This seems to me the best solution, because arent all the variants left by Pessoa finally legitimate? Perhaps the most emblematic and problematic work of Pessoa, from an editors point of view, is the Livro do Desassossego, whose very title perfectly expresses its uncertain nature. It changed

it is published, become public property, limiting or even eliminating the authors right to tamper with it?

drastically from its inception, in 1913, when a magazine in Oporto7 published the long and wispy Na Floresta do Alheamento [In the Forest of Estrangement], identifying it as an excerpt from the Livro do Desassossego, in preparation. Pessoa worked on this book for the rest of his life, but the more he prepared it, the more unfinished it became. Unfinished and unfinishable. Without a plot or plan to follow, but as disquiet as a literary work can be, it kept growing even as its borders became ever more indefinite and its existence as a book ever less viable. What began as a series of dreamy, post-symbolist texts attributed to Fernando Pessoa went on to become a rather cerebral diary signed by Vicente Guedes, and ultimately ended up as the Confessions, or factless autobiography8, of a highly impressionable and solitary assistant bookkeeper named Bernardo Soares. Pessoa left a few hundred passages belonging to the Livro do Desassossego in a large envelope, but he never made the slightest attempt to organize this material, and many other Desassossego passages were left among the 25,000+ manuscripts that constitute his archives. Some, but not all passages, are labeled L. do D. So how can we know what Pessoa would or would not have included in this book that was never more and can never be more than fragments toward a book? How articulate these fragments? What will we call the books author? Its no wonder that the first edition of the Livro do Desassossego came out only in 19829, forty-seven years after Pessoas death! The difficulties for an editor are well illustrated by the two editions published by Teresa Sobral Cunha (Presena 1990-91, Relgio dgua 1997). Both editions divide the work into two volumes and two authors Vicente Guedes and Bernardo Soares but a number of passages attributed to Bernardo Soares (those dating from 1929 on) in her first edition are attributed to Vicente Guedes in the second, and vice-versa. Some passages were tossed out altogether, and many more new ones were added. Both editions aspire to be chronological (the second more rigorously so than the first), but the order established changes drastically. A number of the passages from the Presena edition were articulated differently in the Relgio dgua edition (with paragraphs
7 8

A guia , July-December 1913. On p. 54 of Livro do Desassossego, op. cit., we read: Nestas impresses sem nexo, nem desejo de nexo, narro indiferentemente a minha autobiografia sem factos, a minha histria sem vida. So as minhas Confisses (...). Livro do Desassossego , ed. Jacinto do Prado Coelho, tica, 1982. Maria Aliete Galhoz devoted years of diligent work collecting and deciphering passages, and was eventually joined in her labors by Teresa Sobral Cunha.

being switched around, certain passages being divided into two, etc.), and there were significant differences in the readings of the originals. The editorial procedures also changed. The Livro do Desassossego has more than six hundred variants, and while Pessoas original wording was preferred in the first edition, the second edition opted for the last thing he wrote. As for my own edition, which came out only a few months ago10, I must confess that I already have a list of improved readings and corrections to make. Im well aware that my take on the book is merely the latest contribution, and my Introduction stresses that it does not in any way pretend to be definitive. The notion of a definitive text for the Livro do Desassossego is a pipe dream, or a fools dream. Substituting the terms of the epigraph with which I opened my remarks (There are no norms; all people are exceptions to a rule that doesnt exist), we may say, about the Livro do Desassossego: There are no definitive editions. All versions are exceptions to a base text that doesnt exist. I would go yet further, affirming that each new edition of the Livro do Desassossego has an almost moral obligation to organize the book in a new way, so as to make it clear that there is no right way to organize it. Any edition of this book cannot help but be subjective, for an editor must decide which pieces of text to include and how to display those pieces. I, and I think most editors, would at least like to be transparent, but this transparency must be weighed against the cost of diminishing readability. By which I mean: if we load down the text with too many notes, too many signs and symbols to convey the variants and uncertainties in the original, then we will end up with a reader-hostile book. Previous editions of Desassossego used diagonal lines to set off text that Pessoa, in his manuscripts, had marked with one or another symbol to indicate his dissatisfaction with the word(s) hed written. These lines are distracting to the reader and of dubious value, since Pessoa was more or less dissatisfied with almost everything he wrote, and so I chose not to use them. I also decided not to record those variants which are mere synonyms mas in place of porm, for example or which involve insignificant changes in verb tense. I relegated the notes to the back of the volume, and I also relegated some of the very fragmentary passages to an appendix. On the other hand, I resisted the temptation to edit Pessoa. There are places where Pessoa left blank space for an adjective or adverb that obviously isnt crucial, such that it could be smoothed over made to disappear, that is without betraying the basic meaning of the sentence. This procedure would, however, betray the fragmentary
10

The Assrio & Alvim edition came out in October of 1998.

spirit that informs the book. I also feel that it is important to indicate, in the notes, whether a given passage was actually marked L. do D. by Pessoa, or included in the aforementioned envelope where he left material for the Livro do Desassossego (and which corresponds, today, to the first five envelopes in the Pessoa archives). Translating the Livro do Desassossego into English, though it was a mammoth task, presented far fewer editorial problems. A serious scholar of Pessoas work is going to refer to the original Portuguese, not to translations, and so these need not be too concerned about the nuances of text presentation, treatment of variants, lacunas, and so forth. Translation is so subjective anyway that a little more subjectivity will hardly matter. And so, in the case of alternate wordings, I translated whichever seemed to work best first, last, or in between in the main body of the text, footnoting only the most significant variants. In my translations of Pessoas poetry11 I have also chosen the alternates that, to my ear, produce the best version in English. To my ear. Translation, as far as Im concerned, is all about ear. Im convinced that certain translations, had the translator ever bothered to read out loud what he or she had written, would never see print. This doesnt mean that a translation merely needs to sound good. Most translators do read their renderings out loud and perhaps do produce something that sounds acceptable, or even inspired, but is it in tune with the original? To capture the voice of the source text requires that the translator become, in a certain way, the mouthpiece perhaps even the medium of the writer being translated. Just as a conscientious actor, when playing the part of, say, Winston Churchill, will learn about Churchills time and place, read what Churchill wrote, cultivate (at least mentally, imaginatively) what Churchill cultivated, and otherwise steep himself in things Churchillian, so a serious translator will undergo a process of intense identification in order to be able to produce in his or her own language what the author might have produced, had the author written in that language. This identification can involve a certain risk. It is surely hard for a long-time translator of Pessoa to continue with the case Ive been discussing not to be somewhat affected by his implacable skepticism and complete absence of sentimentality, and this influence may not be felicitous. However intense ones identification, a few ground rules for translation are necessary. The translator-as-mouthpiece should be just that, never daring to inject his or her own speech, much less ideas, into the original authors poetry or prose. Fernando Pessoa has a quirky, sui
11

Fernando Pessoa & Co. Selected Poems (New York: Grove Press, 1998).

generis syntax that often gets sanitized in translation, and his deliberate use of repetition tends to be downplayed or disregarded altogether. These are characteristics, among others, that make Pessoa Pessoa, and the translator has no right to normalize one of the twentieth centurys strangest writers. Of course, even ground rules are made to be broken. There are no norms, or at least no hard and fast ones. Sometimes that strange syntax of Pessoa has no foreign equivalent, or that deliberate repetition sounds too clunky in a translation, with no compensatory benefit. In my discussion I have been assuming, of course, that the translator is linguistically competent, but this is, far too often, a false assumption. In a recently published translation of lvaro de Camposs Triumphal Ode, we find squilo translated not as Aeschylus, the Greek playwright, but as Squirrel, complete with a capital S . Granted, the words are very similar in Portuguese, but the two previous verses contain the names of Plato, Virgil, and Alexander the Great. Further on in the poem, a mans corrente de ouro que atravessa o colete is translated not as a gold watch chain but as a stream of gold running across the waistcoat. Then there is the curious exclamation: O farms in shop windows! O mannequins! O latest fashions. Miniature toy farms? No, just fazendas nas montras. In this same translation we find the comet of a regicide/ Lighting the skies with Freak and Fanfare, and workers who, when their workday is over, walk along scaffolding to go home. We seem, suddenly, to be reading not a futurist poem but a surreal one. All translators make mistakes, and it is mean and unfruitful to nit-pick over the occasional error, but this translator should be barred, if not from the profession, then at least from translating Pessoa. Though I might vote to outlaw gross incompetence, my view on translation is otherwise libertarian. If Pessoa sometimes left three, four or five alternates to try to get at the thought or feeling he wished to convey but that no one word or phrase could capture, it is likewise useful to have various, variant translations of the same source text. Taken together, they may arrive at the particular genius that informed the original. And if they dont, well, perhaps theyll at least amuse the great Squirrel who writes the worlds tragedies in some far-flung, heavenly burrow.