A Literature on the Brink of Dawn

The scandal generated by its partial publication in The Little Review, between 1918 and 1920, may not have reached Pessoa's attention, but by 1933 he knew all about its celebrity status as a banned book, judged obscene and still unavailable in the United Kingdom and the United States. Pessoa's less than enthusiastic reaction to the book recalls Virginia Woolf's comment in a diary entry written shortly after the complete novel was first published in Paris, in 1922: "When one can have cooked flesh, why have it raw?" It might also remind us of Edmund Wilson's much more positive reaction in the book review he wrote for The New Republic: "Mr. Joyce manages to give the effect of unedited human minds, drifting aimlessly along from one triviality to another, confused and diverted by memory, by sensation and by inhibition. It is, in short, perhaps the most faithful X-​ray ever taken of the ordinary human consciousness." The Book of Disquiet tends to be distortedly autobiographical, but sometimes Pessoa and Soares perfectly coincide. Whether the experience described in a passage for the book written on September 8, 1933, happened in fact or only in Pessoa's imagination makes little difference, but I will suppose it to have been factual. Pessoa's small bedroom, situated in the middle of the apartment on Rua Coelho da Rocha, was overrun by books and papers-​papers in his wooden trunk, and books as well as papers piled on the table, the dresser, and the nightstand next to his bed. Pessoa, who had always cringed at the mere idea of belonging to a collective, any collective, configured in The Book of Disquiet an absurdly tenuous form of solidarity: isolated individuals who, enveloped by silence and mystery or perhaps mere nothingness, realize that there are others immersed in that same mystery or nothingness. His translations include Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet and Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems, which won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.