From Florbela To Pessoa in English Eight

From Florbela to Pessoa (in English):
Eight poems by Maria Lúcia Dal Farra with commentary

[De Florbela para Pessoa (em inglês):
Oito poemas de Maria Lúcia Dal Farra comentados]
Chris Gerry*
Keywords
Translation, Florbela Espanca, Fernando Pessoa, Imaginary encounters, Poetic dialogues.
Abstract
In 2015, Pessoa Plural published a set of poems by Maria Lúcia Dal Farra entitled De Florbela
para Pessoa, com amor [From Florbela to Pessoa, with love] in which Florbela Espanca, the
Portuguese poet, short story writer, and translator, addresses Fernando Pessoa from beyond
the grave, suspecting him to be the elusive soul-mate she has been seeking throughout her
life. Maria Lúcia structures her work around quotes from both authors, revisiting the themes
that nurture most poetry―love, life, pain, and death―and provides a poignant portrayal of
two of the most prominent voices of early 20th Portuguese literature. This translation (of her
revised 2017 version) and the accompanying commentaries aim to invite reflection on the
seemingly unlikely hypothesis that, despite their contrasting literary styles and lifestyles,
their thematic preoccupations and personal philosophies often converge. Soul-mates?
Perhaps not, but they are much closer kin than we might have imagined.
Palavras-chave
Tradução, Florbela Espanca, Fernando Pessoa, Encontros imaginários, Diálogos poéticos.
Resumo
Em 2015, Pessoa Plural publicou uma série de poemas de Maria Lúcia Dal Farra intitulados De
Florbela para Pessoa, com amor, através dos quais a poeta, contista e tradutora Florbela Espanca,
suspeitando que Fernando Pessoa poderia ser a elusiva alma gêmea que sempre procurava,
escreve-lhe do Além. Maria Lúcia estrutura os poemas na base de citações pessoanas e
florbelianas, revisitando alguns dos temas que mais nutrem a literatura – amor, vida,
sofrimento e morte – oferecendo-nos um retrato pungente de duas das vozes mais sonantes da
literatura portuguesa vintecentista. A intenção da tradução (da versão revista de 2017) e dos
comentários é de suscitar uma reflexão sobre a hipótese aparentemente improvável de que, não
obstante os seus estilos literários e de vida divergentes, as suas respectivas preocupações
temáticas e filosofias pessoais não raras vezes convergem. Almas gêmeas? Quiçá não, embora
parentes muito mais próximos do que poderíamos ter imaginado.
* Universidade de Lisboa, Gender Studies Unit, CLEPUL (https://www.clepul.eu); and Universidade

de Sergipe, Women and Epic Literature (G18), CIMEEP, São Cristóvão (https://www.cimeep.com/gts).
Gerry From Florbela to Pessoa
Introduction
The literary reputations of Fernando Pessoa and Florbela Espanca depend more on
their poetry than on their prose, and even today both remain far less known to
readers outside the lusophone world than they deserve. Though more of Pessoa’s
work has now been translated into English and other major languages, that of
Florbela lags far behind (GERRY, 2022a; 2022b; 2022c). Moreover, Maria Lúcia’s own
work―be it poetry, academic research, or literary criticism―is available primarily
in Portuguese, notwithstanding its intercultural scope and relevance.
Unusually, in these poems, we find a writer (Maria Lúcia) writing about a
writer (Florbela Espanca) who is writing to a writer (Fernando Pessoa) about what
writers write about (such as life, love, pain, and death). Rather as an artist might use
brush and paint, Maria Lúcia uses her own poetic skills and sensibilities, along with
extensive quotations from Pessoa and Florbela―both direct and adapted―to create
what Gilda SANTOS (2021) has called “a poetic love triangle of intertwined Florbelian
and Pessoan verses.”
Generally speaking, translators appreciate the opportunity to have access to
the authors on whose texts they are working and usually (albeit not unanimously)
regard the outcomes as positive. Inevitably, the commentaries accompanying the
present translation revisit some of the material Maria Lúcia Dal Farra included in
her prefatory essay to the poems when they were first published (DAL FARRA, 2015);
these reflections were ‘patched together’ using fragments of conversations between
us in 2018 and again in 2021, regarding not only the source of the quotations from
Pessoa and Florbela that abound in these poems, but also what they reveal about the
lives, philosophies, and thematic priorities of the two writers.
There seems little doubt that Florbela and Pessoa were aware of each other’s
existence (DAL FARRA, 2015: 118), not least because, for those who took an interest in
literature at the time―whether writers, publishers, or readers―the appearance of
the Orpheu journal in 1915 could hardly have gone unnoticed. Furthermore, young
writers and intellectuals such as Alfredo Guisado, Américo Durão, and Mário
Beirão, who already knew Pessoa and had gained admittance to his circle, were
fellow students of Florbela’s at Lisbon University.
Maria Lúcia intended these poems to read as if they were drafts of letters
written postmortem by Florbela to initiate a dialogue with Pessoa. The Florbela she
imagined is “already aware of the speculations and suspicions” regarding the
possibility that their paths might have crossed and, being “an assiduous reader of
Pessoa’s work” (DAL FARRA, 2015: 125), she draws more often on his words, which
she greatly admires, than on her own, which in real life Florbela often deprecated.
Using phrases from his and her own works that evoke events in their own lives, the
lives of those around them, and in the turbulent times in which they lived, Florbela’s
avatar provides the reader with an incisive and poignantly critical portrayal of
Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 157

Pessoa, while Maria Lúcia looks over her shoulder, so to speak, challenging us to
disentangle their braided biographical, literary, and philosophical orbits.
The patchwork structure of the poems is reminiscent of the cento, described
by the poet, literary critic, and anthologist David LEHMAN (2006: 27) as a poem
assembled using only quotations drawn from other poets. It is:
[…] a collage-poem composed of lines lifted from other sources―often, though not always,
from great poets of the past […] [resembling] a quilt of discrete lines stitched together to
make a whole […] The ancient Greeks assembled centos in homage to Homer, the Romans
[…] to Virgil. Ever since T. S. Eliot raided Elizabethan drama and 17th-century poetry for
“The Waste Land”, the collage has held a strong attraction for modern poets.
In at least three senses of the word, the poems presented here in English translation
could be thought of as an extended semi-cento. I use the prefix “semi” advisedly
because, first of all, these poems contain as much of Maria Lúcia’s own voice and
poetics as those of Pessoa and Florbela. Extending Lehman’s textile analogy, it is as
if a seamstress has constructed a patchwork by interspersing scraps of cloth from
her own garments with the fabric she has recovered from other sources. Second, in
addition to containing numerous quotes and near-quotes, the poems repeatedly
allude to the minutiae that serendipitously link the hypothetically interwoven
biographies of the poet-protagonists, rather like the filling and the lining that lie
beneath the patterned surface of a patchwork quilt. Finally, in these epistolary
fragments, neither the poetry nor the sewing is completely finished. At some point
in the future, more patches may be added, introducing unfamiliar fabrics, and any
remaining loose threads hidden from view. Indeed, these eight poems could be
thought of as a work in progress: much research still remains to be done on the lives
and works of Pessoa and Florbela, the findings of which will be a source of new
materials (excuse the pun) to be incorporated into future missives.
The two poets may not, after all, have met in life and, in these poems, seem
yet to meet in the afterlife. Despite being a prolific correspondent, Pessoa may decide
to ignore Florbela’s epistolary provocations. The two poets may continue to circle
each other, as if each were riding their own Lisbon tramcar, running on separate
routes that suddenly diverge, then run parallel and occasionally intersect, obliged
to obey tracks and timetables deliberately designed to avoid collisions, with each
poet yearning to defy the forces that conspire to keep them apart.

ANNEX
A poem-by-poem commentary
The commentaries that follow were not written with the intention of deconstructing
Maria Lúcia Dal Farra’s eight poems so as to explicate every contextual, intertextual
or interpersonal reference. Neither was the aim to interrogate the creative process
through which she wrote these poems, nor even to justify choices made by the
translator. The main purpose of the commentaries is to clarify for readers less
familiar with the language, lives, and literary works of the poems’ main
protagonists, some of the key references they might otherwise have found obscure
or incomprehensible and, in doing so, allow them to explore with Maria Lúcia a very
particular and influential slice of the early 20th century Portuguese literary scene.
To distinguish the historical figure from the Florbela whom Maria Lúcia has
imagined, the latter’s name appears in italics. All translations, unless otherwise
stated, are mine.
Preliminaries – Presenting Florbela
For those unfamiliar with the details of Florbela Espanca’s short and turbulent life,
it reads rather like the plot of one of the romantic novels she would later come to
translate. She was born in 1894 in rural Portugal, the illegitimate daughter of a
commercial photographer and antiquarian who was also among the country’s first
itinerant exhibitors of silent films. Notwithstanding her inauspicious beginnings
and somewhat bohemian upbringing, she was one of the first generation of
Portuguese girls to attend secondary school and, at that time, one of the very few to
attend university. In defiance of the prevailing mores, she married three times in a
little over 10 years, published several collections of poetry that generated not a little
notoriety due to their confessional and erotic tone, wrote two volumes of short-
stories and translated ten foreign novels into Portuguese. 1
Florbela’s emotional relationships with men never seem to have been simple.
From her father she expected greater family stability: both she and Apeles, his son
from the same extramarital relationship, were raised by João Espanca’s wife who,
being unable to conceive, tolerated her husband’s infidelities. While Florbela’s father
spared no expense in providing for his children’s care and education, he made no
move to have his paternity legally recognised. It was in this somewhat unstable
environment that sister and younger brother grew up together in great emotional
complicity and, as Florbela got older, it was Apeles who increasingly became the
benchmark by which she would assess her suitors.
1 For details of this neglected dimension of Florbela’s creative work, see GERRY (2012; 2018).

Florbela yearned for her Prince Charming to appear so that her future life
could become more settled and the material and emotional constraints on her
literary ambitions removed. She had high expectations of her lovers, and was quick
to desist when they proved unable (or, in rare cases, unwilling) to match them.
When her first serious attachment―a holiday romance―ended, she wed the
childhood friend whom everyone had expected her to marry. By the time she
entered university in 1917, the relationship was effectively over and, in 1920, she
began an affair with António Guimarães, whom she married in 1921. In 1924
Florbela left him to live with Mário Lage, soon to become her third husband.
In Poem I, Florbela describes herself as also being “no longer a sister to
anyone.” 2 In 1927, her brother Apeles, following the unexpected death of his fiancée,
was killed when his Navy seaplane crashed into the River Tagus with such force
that neither his body nor the aircraft were ever recovered. Devastated, Florbela
mourned in the only way she found possible: by writing. Eschewing poetry, and
suspending work on O Dominó Preto [The Black Domino], chronologically her first
collection of short stories, she composed in just a few short months the eight contos
of her collection As Máscaras do Destino [The Masks of Destiny], a complex enfabulation
of the rise and demise of her brother in which she, Apeles, and Milady Death―a
figure to be cherished rather than feared―repeatedly appear.
The last few years of Florbela’s life were spent translating foreign novels into
Portuguese and readying what would be her last collection of poems for publication.
Having suffered from poor physical and mental health throughout her adult life, she
died from an overdose of barbiturates on her 36th birthday. With the publication of
her remaining poetry and prose, Florbela’s work gradually gained acceptance as a
key element in the canon of 20th century Portuguese literature and has provided
extremely fertile ground for academic research, both in Portugal and Brazil.
2Florbela’s sonnet “In memoriam”, dedicated to Apeles, ends with the couplet “Eu fui na vida a irmã
de um só Irmão | E já não sou a irmã de ninguém mais!” [I was in life the sister of one Brother only | and
now I am the sister of nobody else!”] (ESPANCA, 2013: 128).

De Florbela para Pessoa. Com amor From Florbela to Pessoa. With love
Poem I
No tempo em que festejavam o dia [At the time when they were celebrating the day on
dos meus anos which I was born
eu era infeliz I was far from happy
e já estava morta. and I was already dead.
Filha ilegítima de pai incógnita, irmã Illegitimate daughter, enigmatic father, sister to
de ninguém mais, no-one else
nunca never
(ao volante do Chevrolet pela estrada de (driving the Chevrolet home on the road from
Cascais) Cascais)
tive direito a truques did I have the right to use tricks
ou a psicografias. or automatic writing.
Nesta negra cisterna em que me afundo In this black pit into which I find myself sinking,
prendi espinhos I’ve grasped every thorn
sem tocar nas rosas. Caro me cobraram yet never touched a rose. My daring cost me
a audácia dear without needing to
mas nem Crowley conheci. Perdi-me make Crowley’s acquaintance. I went missing
para me encontrar to seek out the real me
e por fim achei-me ultimately finding
ao pé de uma parede sem portas. myself before a wall with no way out.
Quis amar, amar I wanted to love, to love

– e amei perdidamente ―and did so―with abandon
mas por dois maridos seguidos but two of my husbands in tandem
(e desigualmente) in quite diverse ways
fui dobrada double-crossed me
à moda do Porto. à la mode d’Oporto.]
Poem I. Just a little trickery and deceit
In these poems, Florbela Espanca, as imagined by Maria Lúcia Dal Farra, is addressing
Fernando Pessoa from beyond the grave. However, it is not clear a priori if she is
doing so at some point during the 5-year hiatus between their deaths (December
1930 and November 1935, respectively), or is writing to an already-deceased Pessoa
whose celestial whereabouts she has yet to ascertain.
In Poem I, Maria Lúcia first signals that it is Florbela’s birthday, which also
happens to be the day on which she died. We will hear these words again, for Álvaro
de Campos―one of Pessoa’s main literary heteronyms―begins several verses in his
poem “Aniversário” [Birthday] with the same phrase: “No tempo em que festejavam
o dia dos meus anos…” [At the time when they were celebrating the day on which I was

born …]. Here, however, it is followed not by Pessoa’s macabrely cheerful words “Eu
era feliz, e ninguém estava morto” (PESSOA, 2013: 131) [I was full of happiness and
nobody was dead], but by Florbela’s grim self-portrait: she is unhappy (as usual),
illegitimate (as ever), grieving (latterly)… and (finally) dead.
Suddenly, we find ourselves heading out of Lisbon in a borrowed Chevrolet.
The setting is also borrowed: it comes from “Ao volante do Chevrolet pela estrada
de Cintra” [At the wheel of a Chevrolet on the road to Sintra], the opening line of another
Álvaro de Campos poem (PESSOA, 2014: 214-216), which in turn echoes O Mysterio
da Estrada de Cintra [The Mystery of the Road to Sintra], the novel co-written by Eça de
QUEIROZ and Ramalho ORTIGÃO that caused a sensation when serialised in the Lisbon
press in 1870. To set the scene, however, rather than climbing into the hills northeast
of the capital, the car must head westwards along the coast to a beauty spot near the
resort of Cascais where the suicide of a visiting foreign celebrity is to be faked.
Florbela is bemoaning the fact that success seems to have come more easily to
poets like Pessoa, either because they used sleight of hand or because she lacked
their courage and impetuosity. 3 Though outwardly reserved and self-absorbed,
Pessoa was not averse to using trickery to attain his objectives, be they aesthetic or
sentimental. For example, with the sole intention of stirring up public interest, he
confirmed to the press that the English occultist Aleister Crowley, whom he was
eager to cultivate, had indeed disappeared while visiting Cascais. He also used
deception (and not a little emotional manipulation) in his more intimate affairs,
infiltrating Álvaro de Campos and another of his literary heteronyms, A. A. Crosse,
into his letters to Ophélia Queiroz, identifying them as friends whose written
testimonials might persuade her parents to consent to the marriage. Pessoa may
even have believed that all poetry was essentially an exercise in trickery. In
“Autopsicografia” (PESSOA, 2013: 48), he characterises poetry as a form of “sincere
pretence” that provides its audience with pleasurable relief akin to Schadenfreude:
poets suffer a double dose of distress, for while readers are spared the anguish of
directly feeling the pain that writers experience, the latter―as they compose―are
obliged to relive the event that first stimulated their poetic imagination.
Comparing herself again to Pessoa―and notwithstanding the daring her
real-life counterpart had so often shown in the face of the established bourgeois
views on women, morality, marriage, and suicide―Florbela ruefully concludes that
she had not needed to meet anyone quite as eccentric as Crowley for her life to be
dogged by ill-luck, and that every time she summoned up the courage to affirm
herself, she paid a heavy price. To express metaphorically how fate seemed to target
Florbela for unjust treatment, Maria Lúcia repurposes lines from “Sou eu!” [It’s me!]
from the Charneca em Flor [The Heath in Bloom] collection (ESPANCA, 2013: 132):
3The phrase “truques e psicografias” [tricks and automatic writing] refers not only to Pessoa’s use of
heteronyms but also his belief that spirits were responsible for some of his works.

Sou eu! Sou eu! A que nas mãos ansiosas [It’s me! It’s me! She whose hands so eagerly closed,
Prendeu da vida, assim como ninguém More often than anybody else’s did,
Os maus espinhos sem tocar nas rosas! Round life’s sharpest thorns, yet never touched a rose!]
Poem I then employs the opening lines of the iconic sonnet “Amar!” [To love!] 4
(ESPANCA, 2013: 115) to suggest that by losing herself in love―by loving perdidamente
[with abandon], Florbela aimed to fill the emotional void that had been preventing
her from discovering her true identity. 5
Yet Florbela refuses to wait for her fate to be sealed. She plans to escape to
somewhere beyond the dark pits and blank walls with which she has had to contend
in life. By echoing the transcendent and more hopeful last line of the same sonnet,
Maria Lúcia draws attention to Florbela’s pantheistic belief that we can take death,
both literally and metaphorically, into our own hands: it provides the opportunity
for the ultimate self-affirmation, a voyage of self-discovery, in short, a transfiguration
(ESPANCA, 2013: 115).
E se um dia hei de ser pó, cinza e nada [And if one day I’m to be dust, ashes, nothing at all
Que seja a minha noite uma alvorada, Let a dawning be created out of that nightfall
Que me saiba perder... p’ra me encontrar. Let me learn to be lost … so myself I may find.]
In these lines, Florbela’s impassioned advocacy of suicide resonates strongly; as

early as 1916, in a letter to her friend Júlia Alves, she had written of her admiration
for those who had the strength to “simply, dispassionately, bid farewell to life”
(ESPANCA, 1986: 152), a theme revisited in “The passion of Manuel Garcia”, her conto
about the impossible, obsessive love of a stonemason for a nobleman’s daughter:
Oh, a medonha coragem dos que vão arrancando de si, dia a dia, a doçura da saudade do que
passou, o encanto novo da esperança do que há-de vir, e que serenamente, desdenhosamente,
sem saudades nem esperanças, partem um dia sem saber para onde, aventureiros da morte,
emigrantes sem eira nem beira, audaciosos esquadrinhadores de abismos mais negros e mais
misteriosos que todos os abismos escancarados deste mundo!
(ESPANCA, 2015: 166)
[Oh, the awesome courage of those who (…) renounce the tender memories of what has gone before and
the new delights of what may come to pass, and serenely, contemptuously, with neither regret nor
hope, one day take their leave without knowing where they may be going, venturers in the land of the
dead, wanderers with neither hearth nor home, travellers with the temerity to cross chasms darker and
more mysterious than the most yawning abyss the world can offer.]
4 The first lines of the sonnet “Amar!” have become well-known throughout the lusophone world:
“Eu quero amar, amar perdidamente! | Amar só por amar: Aqui... além... | Mais Este e Aquele, o
Outro e toda a gente… | Amar! Amar! E não amar ninguém!” [I want to love, love with total abandon!
| Love just for love’s sake, love hither and yon…| First this one, then that one, then the other ones, all at
random…| To love! To love! And yet to love no-one!].
5Maria Lúcia also chose Perdidamente as the title for her edition of Florbela’s love letters to António
Guimarães (ESPANCA, 2008).

Poem I ends with an extended metaphor in which disappointments, both

amorous and gastronomic, intersect. Throughout the poem “Dobrada à moda de
Porto” [Tripe in the style of Porto], Pessoa’s heteronym Álvaro de Campos repeats the
name of this key item in the cuisine of Portugal’s second city. Looking at life as one
might peruse a restaurant menu, he orders a helping of love, but the “waiter”, whom
we must assume is Destiny, serves him tripe instead. “Não comi, não pedi outra coisa,
paguei a conta, | E vim passear para toda a rua”, says de Campos [I didn’t eat it, I
ordered nothing else | I just paid, left, and went strolling round the streets]. Incredulous
that Destiny could be so doubly cruel as to dash his hopes and then laugh in his face,
he asks himself: “Mas, se eu pedi amor, porque é que me trouxeram | Dobrada à
moda do Porto fria?” (PESSOA, 2014: 346-347) [But since I had ordered love, why was it
then that I was brought | tripe à la mode d’Oporto, and cold at that?]. Florbela then adds
a further layer to this metaphor by turning it into a pun. She is able to associate tripe
with treachery―the latter being a dish that, at least according to tradition, is best
served cold―because the word “dobrada” is also the past participle of the verb “to
double cross”. Florbela can thus claim that her second and third husbands (who both
hailed from the North) deceived her in the Oporto style, both proving unpalatable,
as neither could meet her exacting standards.
Poem II
Mas tu, Fernando, mesmo [But you, Fernando, even

te afundando na garganta do diabo when you found yourself landing in the devil’s maw
(de Miss Jaeger?) (Or Miss Jaeger’s?)
– sabiamente te ocultaste por baixo da ―very wise it was of you to hide yourself away
gabardine e do teu oblíquo guarda-chuva, beneath a gabardine and your uptilted umbrella,
e atento seguiste p’ra além doutro oceano, steadily proceeding beyond that other ocean,
ocultismos adentro. occult knowledge at the ready.
Sempre te restou intacto e seco It was always kept dry, so spick and span, Pacheco,
(ó Pacheco!) old man
o digno fato negro de mago that sober black suit you wore as wizard
das palavras of the written word
e de cavalheiro das moças. and gentleman to all the girls.
Mesmo dos teus flagrantes delitros You even turned your most flagrante of litres
fizeste humor. Mas foi into jokes. But it was
num desses copos que afogaste Ophélia. in your cups that you drowned your Ophelia.
E as outras – And the others―
Mary (com quem lias Burns) Mary (with whom you read Burns)
Daisy, Cecily, Chloé Daisy, Cecily, Chloé
a noiva em cio do epitalâmio the bride-to-be, rehearsing her part so wantonly
Lídia, Neera, Maria Lydia, Neera, Maria
a Monster Escarlate the Scarlet Monster
e mesmo as invertidas (como tu dizias) and even the inverts (as I think you used to call them)

– todas têm-te em alto apreço. ―all those girls hold you in such high esteem.
Mas o que foi feito de Freddie, o Baby?! But whatever became of Freddie the Baby?!
Ignoramos, Campos. Somos estrangeiros Nobody really knows, Campos. We’re all foreigners
onde quer que wherever
estejamos. we happen to be.]
Fig. 1. The opening of Poem II. The deleted lines, with references to Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page,
and Loch Ness (where Aleister Crowley had his castle), appeared in Maria Lúcia Dal Farra’s
original version of these poems, published in Pessoa Plural, n.º 7 (2015).
Poem II. Passions, penchants, and prohibitions
Here, we meet a series of women who, despite holding Pessoa “in high esteem”,
may have become as much his victims as Ophélia did. The list begins with “Miss
Jaeger”, a German femme fatale the poet briefly met, moves on to Ophélia Queiroz,
the love of his life, and finishes with some of the female characters who are scattered
across his poems, and who may represent women whose lives had intersected his.
Hanni Larissa Jaeger came to Lisbon in 1930 in the company of the English
occultist Aleister Crowley. In the cosmology of Thalema, the religion he founded,
Hanni served as “The Scarlet Woman”, the earthly avatar of Babalon, symbolising
the universal feminine principle, participating in the cult’s key rites with such
enthusiasm that Crowley nicknamed her “The Scarlet Monster”. Pessoa was
immediately attracted to Hanni (DAL FARRA, 2015: 121) and may have been her
partner in some of Crowley’s erotic rituals (LOPES, 2008: 62). Understandably,

Florbela asks herself whether Pessoa was more in danger from Hanni’s welcoming
embrace than from the Devil’s Maw, the tidal grotto near Cascais where the English
magus was to fake his own disappearance as a publicity stunt.
Most of the other names in Florbela’s list refer to women who appear,
fleetingly or repeatedly, in Pessoan poetry. Those most frequently mentioned
include Lydia 6 (addressed in ten of Ricardo Reis’s poems), Chloe 7 (invoked twice,
as well as appearing in two by Álvaro de Campos, and in one by Pessoa ‘himself’)
and Neera 8 (mentioned in seven Ricardian odes). Once transposed from the
Horatian universe of modest maidens and confident courtesans that gave birth to
them, these three, separately or together, become a metaphysical presence in the
poetry of Ricardo Reis, bearing silent witness to his meditations. Others, such as
Mary, 9 Daisy 10 and Cecily, 11 can be found elsewhere in Pessoa’s poems.
Lydia and Daisy are two of the women to whom Ricardo Reis addresses his
poem “A vida é para os inconscientes […] e o consciente é para os mortos” (PESSOA,
1993a: 134) [Life is for the unmindful (…) and mindfulness is for the dead], a poem whose
paradoxical opening provides a succinct expression of Pessoa’s “philosophy of
acceptance”. His strategy for living resonates uncannily with the personal
philosophy of self-interested submission at which Florbela had hinted, many years
before, notably in “A oferta do destino” (ESPANCA, 2011: 239-240) [The gift of destiny]
and later in her short story “O resto é perfume” (ESPANCA, 2015: 145-154) [The rest is
6Pessoa also sees Lydia (a Roman courtesan) and Chloe (a timid maiden, perhaps being groomed for
the profession) as classical objects of desire, invested by the poetic imagination of Ricardo Reis with
just enough verisimilitude for his readers to believe they really existed (PESSOA, 1990a: 417).
7In the Odes of Horace so admired by Pessoa, the name appears four times, possibly representing
successive stages in one woman’s life as she transitions from a girl “inexperienced in the world of
men to a mature mistress who plays the dominant role in her love affairs” (McCUNE, 2016: 573).
8 Reputedly, Neera was also a courtesan. She is mentioned in various versions of “Olho os campos,
Neera” (PESSOA, 2020: 22, 66, 140) [I look at the fields, Neera], “Quero, Neera, que os teus lábios laves
na nascente tranquila” (PESSOA, 2020: 33) [I want you, Neera, to bathe your lips in that languid spring],
and in the two versions of “O mar jaz; gemem em segredo os ventos” (PESSOA, 2020: 18, 49) [The sea
is in repose; winds moan under their breath], among others (PESSOA, 2020: 45, 50, 101).
9 The name “Mary” (as opposed to Maria) rarely appears in Pessoa’s writings: once with plainly
religious connotations in a poem in English in his collection The Mad Fiddler, and once in “Sentir tudo
em todas as maneiras” [Feel everything in every way] from “A Passagem das Horas” (PESSOA, 1993a:
26) [The Passing of the Hours].
10In the last of Pessoa’s Three Sonnets, which begins “Olha, Daisy, quando eu morrer…” [Look, Daisy,
when I die…], Álvaro de Campos reminisces about a youth who may or may not have been the same
Freddie, describing him as “aquele pobre rapazito | que me deu tantas horas tão felizes” (PESSOA,
2013: 13) [that little boy | who gave to me more hours of happiness than I can say].
11In the same sonnet, she is described to Daisy as “essa estranha Cecily | Que acreditava que eu seria
grande” (PESSOA, 2013: 13) [that eccentric girl Cecily | Who was so convinced that I’d be famous]. Moreover,
Pessoa himself, in Poem 21 of his English Poetry, expresses the hope that, against all the odds, a nun
called Cecily might see fit to include him in her prayers (PESSOA, 1995: 368).

perfume].12 Maria Manuela VALE (1988: 72-82) explains Pessoa’s stoic stance of principled
passivity, as evidenced in his Ricardo Reis poems, as follows:
O Amor, como a vida, é regido pelo Fado. Para o fruir assume a máscara da “inconsciência”,
da distracção, construindo uma forma de “estar” misto de estoicismo-epicurismo, gozando a
liberdade que o Destino lhe permite gozar, evitando sabiamente o sofrimento, sabendo a
ataraxia, condição essencial de felicidade.
[Love is governed, as is life, by fate. To experience either, we must don the mask of ‘unmindfulness’,
or rather [conscious or mindful] distraction, and construct a way of ‘being’ that blends stoicism and
epicureanism, by which we may enjoy the liberty our destiny allows us, prudently avoid suffering,
and attain ataraxia [equanimity], the essential condition of happiness.]
As an epigraph to the Máscaras do Destino stories which she dedicated to her

recently-deceased brother (ESPANCA, 2015: 113), Florbela chose a quotation from the
Roman emperor and stoic philosopher MARCUS AURELIUS (1908: 73): “Several grains
of incense, all destined to burn, are cast upon the same altar. One grain falls sooner,
another later; but what difference does that make to them?” Seemingly, Florbela
shared Pessoa’s view that happiness depends on the serenity with which we bear
the burdens Destiny imposes on us: by being true to ourselves and to what is good
in each of us, we can be sure of leading a good life and, when our allotted time is
over, we need have no fear of what awaits us.
Towards the end of her list of Pessoa’s female acquaintances, Florbela asks
about the fate of one remaining character. Though his gender remains unspecified
and he shares Pessoa’s pet-name for Ophélia, 13 “Freddie the Baby” appears to be to
an adolescent male. Florbela quotes Pessoa’s words to answer her own rhetorical
question: “nobody really knows” Freddie’s whereabouts, adding enigmatically that
“Ignoramos […] Somos estrangeiros onde quer que estejamos” [(w)e’re all foreigners
wherever we happen to be]. 14 However, the mysterious Freddie had already made his
debut as early as 1916 in a parenthetical aside towards the close of “A Passagem das
horas” (PESSOA, 1993a: 26) [The passage of the hours] when Álvaro de Campos
reminisces over past lovers, both male and female (CASTRO, 2008: 243). Using
masculine adjectival endings, the poet explains Freddie’s nickname as follows: “Eu
12António José da Silva Pinto―writer, critic, Balzac’s translator, and editor of Cesário Verde’s poetry,
was a favourite of Florbela. Her adaptation of his oriental parable describes her lifelong quest for a
soulmate (ESPANCA, 2015: 240), and in her conto “The rest is perfume”, it is the dead who hold all the
secrets of life, and the living who are mere epiphenomena of those who have passed on.
13 Bebé [Baby] was the nickname Pessoa used most frequently with Ophélia and may have had
something to do with to their age difference, she being only 19 and he 31 when they first met. They
also favoured diminutives such as Ofelinha and Nando or Fernandinho and, in 1929, when the
relationship was briefly resuscitated, Pessoa sometimes called Ophélia “Vespa” [wasp] or “Fera” [wild
thing], reflecting perhaps the confidence and assertiveness she had acquired in their years apart.
14 The origin of the phrase is a 1932 poem by Ricardo Reis (PESSOA, 2020: 115 ).

chamava-te Baby porque eras louro, branco e eu amava-te” [I called you Baby because
you were blond, white and I loved you]. Then, with barely a pause for breath, he admits
to being unable to count “quantas imperatrizes por reinar e princesas destronadas”
[(h)ow many yet-to-be empresses and deposed princesses] Freddie had been to him, this
time deploying female nouns in a seeming attempt to effeminise Freddie. Campos
then recalls Mary―beside whom he read Burns and dreamed of an uncomplicated
suburban life―a nostalgic indulgence he abruptly dispels by rebuking Freddie,
Mary, and the others for never giving him a second thought, and lamenting how
little impact he had had on their lives (PESSOA, 2014: 136-137).
Completing Florbela’s role-call are all the nameless “inverts” 15 Pessoa has ever
known. He used this term in a social and a sexual sense, firstly applying it to women
who challenged the “natural” order of gender relations by abandoning their role as
hunters of husbands, choosing to earn their own livings in professional spheres
monopolised by men. He also applied it specifically to lesbians who, whatever their
role in the division of labour, seemed to be colluding in a broader sapphic rejection
of male tutelage and companionship (PESSOA, 1990b: 425). 16
Primeiro, a mulher desvia-se do seu papel normal de captar o homem. Feito isso, ela já está
invertida, está homem. Safo, por exemplo, caindo no erro terrível e imoralíssimo, de,
sendo mulher, escrever versos, ficou ipso facto invertida; uma vez invertida, tomou-se
psiquicamente homem.
[First a woman departs from her normal role of capturing a man. Once this has occurred, she is already
inverted, already a man. Sappho, for example, committed the awful and most immoral error of writing
verses, even though she was a woman, making her ipso facto an invert; and once an invert, she became
psychically a man.]
Pessoa further asserted that “no woman has a right to be a sexual invert; in a woman,
that is degeneracy”, suggesting that he considered male homosexuality, broadly
speaking, a legitimate expression of superior aesthetics and its female counterpart a
deplorable sexual deviation.
Elsewhere, Pessoa even used the concept of “inversion” to portray his own
sexuality, claiming that in his case the process was incomplete “uma inversão sexual
fruste”, and that he had “um temperamento feminino com uma inteligência
masculina” (PESSOA, 1966a: 28) [a feminine temperament and a masculine intelligence].
In matters of the heart, he admitted a strong preference for passivity over
proactivity: “sempre gostei de ser amado, e nunca de amar” [I always liked being loved,
15 The early psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) viewed homosexuality as an “inversion” of

cerebrally-imprinted gender traits occurring before birth, causing some males to feel they are women
“trapped” in a man’s body, and some women to believe they are men “occupying” a female form.
16By opting to work for a living, females lose sight of their fundamental purpose―says
Pessoa―prostitutes being the only women not “spoiled” by working for a living (PESSOA, 1990a: 425).

but never enjoyed loving back] he admitted, though the intensity of his courtship of
Ophélia suggests his self-diagnosis was somewhat inaccurate.
Taken at face value, Pessoa’s attitude to life and love would appear to diverge
totally from Florbela’s credo of loving whomsoever she wanted, whenever she
wanted, unconstrained by social convention and without becoming anyone’s
property. Yet she and Pessoa were stubbornly averse to moderating their single-
minded commitment to their art, both suffered bouts of physical ill health, and
endured periods of profound depression and torpor that deeply marked their
psyches. Thus, their respective psychologies appear to converge as much as they
diverge, with Pessoa’s pensive passivity and Florbela’s hyperactive hedonism
leading inexorably from their own particular points of departure to the same
destination of regret and frustration: patient Ibis, gazing out to sea, and the restless
eagle forever soaring into an empty sky.
Poem III
No dia em que festejavam os meus anos [On the very day when they used to celebrate my birth
festejam nowadays
hoje it’s
a minha morte. my death instead.
Já não ouço passos no segundo andar, estou I can no longer hear footsteps on the floor above, I’m
sozinha com o universo inteiro. all alone with the entire universe.
Oh inexplicável horror Oh, the inexplicable horror
de saber que esta vida é a verdadeira! of knowing that this life is the real one!
Qualquer que seja ela Whatever it may be
é melhor que nada! it’s better than nothing!
Perante a única realidade que é Faced with the only reality, namely that
o mistério de tudo everything is a mystery
(e tudo é certo, logo que o não seja) (and everything’s certain, so long as that’s ne’er the case
confesso-te, Nando: I must admit, Nando:
sempre te esperei. I was always waiting.
Emissário de um Rei desconhecido Messenger of some King as yet unidentified,

passaste (entanto) past me you went (although)
ao largo desta Princesa Desencanto, at a good distance from Princess Disenchantment,
órfã e órfica! the orphaned oracle!
Jamais vieste ter comigo naquela You didn’t seek me out and approach me on that
rua da Baixa city-centre street
e entretanto cruzaste por mim nevertheless, our paths did overlap,
que vim ao mundo só para te achar – I, who only came into this world to find you―
embora na vida nunca me encontrasses! though in life you’d never meet me!]

Poem III. Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?
At the start of Poem III, Florbela hints that she now inhabits a realm of death quite
distinct from the Christian heaven, where she finds herself in the company of those
for whom she has greater affection than those she has left behind. 17 To symbolise
what might seem Florbela’s isolation, Maria Lúcia evokes a building quietening as
its residents prepare for sleep, as described in the Álvaro de Campos poem “Começa
a haver meia-noite, e a haver sossego” (PESSOA, 2013: 162) [Midnight is drawing near,
and its quietness too]. And yet Florbela’s sense of being “sozinha com o universo
inteiro” [all on my own with the entire universe (my emphasis)], a quote from the self-
same poem, contains a paradox, combining feelings of isolation (from much of
humanity and its values) with an intense sense of belonging (to a much vaster
cosmic scheme of things). While this conflicted state of being is often present in
Florbela’s poetry, it can also be found in her prose, particularly in the Máscaras do
Destino stories, throughout which her thinly-disguised brother Apeles or one of her
alter egos appear as lone, almost heroic, figures struggling to discover how to
frustrate the huge forces life has ranged against them.
Florbela admits that while the life we are all fated to live is no illusion, it is
“better than nothing,” a cliché that conceals a more nuanced subtext: life may well
be better than the nothingness the atheist predicts will follow death, but the afterlife
as perceived by the pantheist is infinitely preferable. She also understands that life
will remain a mystery in the fullest Orphean sense of the term unless and until we
discover the deeper truth to which only initiates are privy. Her words come from
the opening lines of a poem by Pessoa’s Álvaro de Campos: “Ah, perante esta única
realidade, que é o mistério, | Perante esta única realidade terrível — a de haver uma
realidade” (PESSOA, 1992: 281-282) [Ah, faced with this one reality, that after all it’s all a
mystery, | Faced with the one awful reality that reality does exist], thoughts that are also
echoed in the opening line of Theme 2 in Pessoa’s “Fausto” (PESSOA, 1988). With
words from another poetic fragment (PESSOA, 1956: 107), Florbela adds a proviso,
employing the word “certo” with seemingly deliberate ambiguity to capture not
only the truism that all is well until it is not, but also the philosophically more
challenging notion that the precondition for certainty is its total absence.
Sim, tudo é certo logo que o não seja, [Yes, everything’s certain, so long as that’s ne’er the case
Amar, teimar, verificar, descrer – Loving, resisting, proving, disagreeing―
Quem me dera um sossego à beira-ser What I’d give for a calmer edge to my being
Como o que à beira-mar o olhar deseja. The sort that, at the ocean’s edge, our eyes yearn to embrace.]
17. Florbela speaks of “Amigos vivos que me morreram, amigos mortos cheios de vida” [living
friends who are dead to me, and dead friends full of life] in her “Carta da herdade” [A Letter from the
farm], published in 1930 (ESPANCA, 2002: 81).

Also, by describing herself as an “órfã e órfica” [orphaned oracle], Florbela adds a few
more scraps of personal information reflecting both the fractured family environment
in which she grew up, and the mysticism that underpins much of her writings.
Surprisingly, perhaps, taking “orphaned” in the widest and “oracular” in the fullest
sense of the terms, this epithet fits Pessoa as well as it does Florbela.
Florbela’s biological mother left following the birth of a second child, and
died young; her stepmother was divorced by Florbela’s father, who only legally
recognised his paternity long after his daughter’s death; and her younger brother
Apeles, her only sibling, whom she considered her “alma gêmea” [twin soul],
predeceased her. Moreover, by describing herself as “órfica” Florbela suggesting she
is the equal of any of the writers associated with the avant-garde and exclusively
male Orpheu, the literary periodical in which Pessoa played such a vital role, and
whose existence―albeit ephemeral―was pivotal to Portuguese modernism. The
same term also identifies Florbela with the rites and mysteries through which Orpheus,
the poet and musician of ancient myth, sought to reconcile the physical and spiritual
aspects of humanity and gain the power of prophecy―aspirations with which
Florbela and Pessoa would have readily identified.
As for Pessoa’s family background, when he was five years old, his father fell
victim to tuberculosis, and six months later his younger brother died. He was little
more than seven years old when his mother remarried, and he spent the best part
of the next ten years in South Africa as the new member of a family he hardly knew.
Pessoa’s attachment to the mystical arts is well-documented, his interests ranging
from astrology and spiritualism, through esotericism and occultism, pantheism and
paganism, to rosicrucianism and freemasonry. He believed himself a medium,
practiced automatic writing, wrote extensively on the occult, and translated into
Portuguese some of the key works of the theosophical movement.
It remains unclear―not to mention hotly disputed―to what extent these
unconventional micro-contexts contributed to Pessoa’s and Florbela’s respective
and disparate personalities. Yet it should not surprise us that, in the vortex of social
and cultural change that constituted their meso- and macro-contexts, the aesthetics
of conservative modernists (such as Pessoa) and radical romantics (such as Florbela)
might overlap to some extent. Nor should we find it unusual, in a world of
uncertainty and rapidly shifting paradigms, that mysticism―albeit more pronounced
in Pessoa’s than in Florbela’s writings―might inform and infuse the work of artists
whose perspectives, in all other respects, diverged.
Despite her own mystical tendencies, Florbela knows only too well that
prophesies and real-world outcomes rarely coincide. To illustrate the arbitrariness
pervading our lives, she adapts the first line of a poem by Pessoa’s Álvaro de
Campos, who recalls being stopped in the street by a beggar whose distress had
given him pause for thought: “Cruzou por mim, veio ter comigo, numa rua da
Baixa” (PESSOA, 2013: 174) [Our paths crossed, he just came up to me, in a street in

downtown Lisbon]. Her choice of words is an implicit reprimand to Pessoa for having
the time to converse with beggars, but none to devote to her, whose sole raison d’être
had ever been to meet him. Further reinforcing the idea that time, place and intent
rarely coincide to produce an outcome other than that which Destiny ordains,
Florbela wonders―as Pessoa himself had in the first of what he called his
“intersectionist” poems (PESSOA, 2006: 38)―if she may be no more than a figment
of his imagination, conjured up, kept alive, but never actually encountered. Thus,
Poem III ends with words recycled from Florbela’s Livro de Mágoas sonnet
“Eu…”(ESPANCA, 2012a: 85) [I…]:
Sou talvez a visão que Alguém sonhou, [I may be a vision that someone else dreamed,
Alguém que veio ao mundo p’ra me ver, Someone who came into the world just to see me,
E que nunca na vida me encontrou! And who never met me in life, so it seems!]
Poem IV
Prince Charmant, [Prince Charming,

vi-te nas névoas da manhã one misty morn I saw you from afar
quando ias de carro prô Lumiar. when you were on the tram to Lumiar.
Seguias (recordas tal estranha You were heading (do you recall how foreign the geography
geografia?) para o Pombal e was?) first to Pombal and then
para a Índia, to India,
e eu para a minha Conchinchina. and I was going to my Conchinchina.

Ah, as malhas que a República tece! Comigo, Ah, the tangled webs the Republic weaves! Beside me
o meu Alferes; my Second Lieutenant;
contigo, a tua Bebé das calcinhas rosas – beside you, your Baby, she of the rosy-pink panties―
a amorosa shakespeareana. your ardent Shakespearean fantasy.
No entanto, Fernando, jamais pressentiste That being said, Fernando, didn’t you ever suspect
que fosse eu that I was
a Olga dos oráculos?! Aquela the Olga the spirits prophesied?! The one
de que tens saudade sem saber por que? you yearned for, not knowing why?
Aquela que, na noite voluptuosa (ó meu Poeta!) The one whose kiss, in the voluptuous night (O, poet mine!)
é ainda o beijo que procuras? is still the one you’re searching for?
Entretanto, tu, ou alguém por ti After all, in that trunk of yours, you left,
na tua arca or had someone leave
(e é do último sortilégio que se trata) (surely it was a case of the latter sort of wizardry)
tem afirmado seres a alma gêmea, a note claiming you were my soul’s twin, a victim,
igual a mim, just the same as I,
nesse pavoroso e atroz mal de trazer of that awful, foul and pitiless curse of having
tantas outras a gemer countless other souls wailing
dentro da minha! inside my own!

Mas por que chegaste tarde, ó meu Amor? But why couldn’t you have arrived on time, my Love?
Que contas dás a Deus To God, how will you account
passando tão rente a mim for having passed by so close
sem me encontrares?! and yet failed to find me?!]
Poem IV. Streetcars named ‘Desire’
Poem IV is predicated on the fact that, as documented in the published letters of

both poets (ESPANCA, 2008; PESSOA & QUEIROZ, 1996), they regularly took long tram
journeys across Lisbon in order to discretely conduct romantic assignations with
their respective sweethearts. During 1920, Florbela wanted above all to avoid the
scandal of being seen with her lover, 2nd Lieutenant António Guimarães, at the time
stationed in Lisbon, until her divorce with her first husband Alberto Moutinho had
been granted. As for Pessoa, the letters he exchanged with Ophélia during the two
phases of their courtship (1919-1920 and 1929-1930) often refer to the strategies they
adopted in order to spend more time together than the chaperoned rituals at
Ophélia’s home allowed. In the first flowering of their relationship, they often
arranged to meet at her dressmaker’s shop or at various public buildings. Also,
Pessoa would walk past Ophélia’s house at a predetermined hour, and she would
similarly ride on a tram that passed his home, with the sole purpose of catching a
glimpse of each other.
The specific ploy of using tramcars for their courtship developed early; in
their letters during May 1920, both comment on the inconvenience of having to use
the coastal train service during a strike by tram-workers. By the time their
relationship briefly revived in 1929, Pessoa was using the n.º 28 tram to travel from
his home in Campo de Ourique the centre of Lisbon; since it passed close to
Ophélia’s house, it soon became a favourite of theirs. Also, the resumption of their
courtship was in part the result of a chance meeting on a tram: Ophélia’s cousin had
shown her a photograph of Pessoa drinking during working hours, and when she
asked her cousin to procure a copy, Pessoa obliged, scrawling on the back “in
flagrante delitro” as a reminder of his prodigious appetite for wine (MORAIS, 2013;
PIZARRO, FERRARI & CARDIELLO, 2013: 169-170). In his reply to Ophélia’s thank-you
letter, he mentioned having seen her recently on a tram and apologised for showing
no sign of recognition (PESSOA, 1978: 139).
To maximise their time together, both pairs of lovers needed to take the
longest journeys possible, often travelling from one terminus to another and back
again. Lumiar, on what would then have been the northern outskirts of the city, was
the terminus of a tram route that began in the bohemian quarters of the old city
centre, and would have figured prominently in Pessoa’s clandestine meetings with
Ophélia. The Avenida da Índia route would have been another favourite, as it
followed the river estuary westwards out of the city, as would the Poço do Bispo

line, which hugged the banks of the Tagus as it proceeded upstream to the new
factory districts around Chelas (PESSOA, 1978: 35).
According to DAL FARRA (2015: 124), Pessoa and Ophélia transformed the
names of key tram routes and termini into their own libidinous lexicon, thereby
creating their own “estranha geografia” [weird geography]. For example, Praça
Marquês de Pombal [Marquis of Pombal Square], a major crossroads between Lumiar
and the old city centre, not only bears the name of the 18th century Portuguese
reformer, but also evokes the traditional pombal, or rounded dovecote, thus acting
as Pessoa’s architectural euphemism for Ophélia’s breasts. Moreover, since the
Avenida de Índia line evoked the South Asian subcontinent, it served admirably as
a geometrical and climatic signifier for her loins. When their courtship resumed,
Pessoa even felt the need to remind Ophélia of the erotic code contained in the
names of the tram stops: “Queria ir, ao mesmo tempo, à Índia e a Pombal. Curiosa
mistura, não é verdade? Em todo o caso, é só parte da viagem. Recorda-se desta
geografia?”] (PESSOA, 1978: 40) [I want to go to India and Pombal at the same time. A
curious combination, eh? In any case, that’s only part of the journey. You do remember the
geography, don’t you?]. Pessoa seems to be hinting that the relationship might move
to a new level, with stolen kisses and furtive caresses replaced by more complex
physical and emotional entanglements.
Among the tram routes Florbela mentions by name in connection with her
own liaisons (ESPANCA, 2008: 107) is the “Co(n)chinchina” line which, by the late
1920s, terminated before the Monsanto Forest on the city limits on a road leading
north-westwards to the hills around Sintra. In the Iberian imaginary,
“Co(n)chinchina” symbolised the farthest ends of the earth, just as Timbuktu once
did for many Northern Europeans. The Portuguese, having been among the earliest
Western visitors to the Far East, before establishing themselves at Macau, baptised
present-day Vietnam by appending the “China” suffix to the name of their Indian
settlement at Cochin. For Florbela, the erotic charge may have originated in the
toponym’s exotic alterity or its similarity to “conchinha”, a word denoting the
intimate position couples adopt when sleeping ‘like two spoons in a drawer’. But a
military man such as Guimarães, familiar with maps of European possessions in
Asia, would surely have noted a resemblance between the male member and the
coastal strip French colonisers called “Tonkin, Amman and Cochinchina.” 18
Florbela’s reaction to these complex courting rituals is to exclaim “Oh, the
tangled webs the Republic weaves”―a reference both to the regime that replaced
Portugal’s monarchy in 1910 and to the central Lisbon thoroughfare named in
18 To Europeans, Cochin-China had become synonymous―deservedly or not―with factionalism,

profligacy, nepotism, and a subservient civil service (BARROS, 2021: 182). In Spain, the word was used
to universalise a ‘local’ practice; parents would tell their children, for example, “Que no se habla con
la boca llena, se sabe acá y en la Conchinchina” [Everyone, from here to Conchinchina, knows you don’t
speak with your mouth full].

honour of the event. This phrase echoes Pessoa’s parenthetical aside “Malhas que o
Império tece!” [The webs the Empire weaves!] towards the end of his elegy for a soldier
killed in a distant military campaign (PESSOA, 2006: 62-63). 19 It may even have its
origin in the aphorism “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise
to deceive!”, from Marmion, the verse romance by Sir Walter SCOTT (1835: 228), a
writer whose work Pessoa knew well but did not altogether appreciate.
According to Teresa Rita Lopes (PESSOA, 1990b), in one of his frequent
psychic experiments, Pessoa asked the spirits to tell him who was destined to bring
about his sexual awakening and understood the reply to have been “Olga”. Though
he concluded, after meeting Ophélia, that the spirits had been mistaken, Florbela
cannot understand why it never occurred to Pessoa that she and not Ophélia might
have been the chosen one, since all three women’s names have several letters in
common. 20 Florbela pushes her claim further by submitting as evidence the unsigned
type-written poem found among Pessoa’s unpublished manuscripts, describing her
as “alma sonhadora | irmã gêmea da minha” [the dreaming soul that is twin to my own].
Surely, she thinks, this proves that Pessoa admired her work, was drawn to its
creator and had left the poem as a sign that he was a contender for the vacant
position as her soulmate? 21
Florbela’s empathy for Pessoa also grows because she suspects that he, too,
has long struggled with his mental health: his compulsive use of heteronyms
suggests a disorder akin to multiple personality 22 and, rather like her, he was prone
to manic-depressive mood swings. She quotes from the last tercet of “Loucura”
(ESPANCA, 2004: 355) [Madness], the poem around which she conceived―surely with
her ex-husband in mind―her conto “À margem dum soneto” (ESPANCA, 2019: 126-
135) [In the margins of a sonnet], in which an army officer becomes convinced that his
novelist wife is possessed by the women characters who populate her stories.
Pre-empting any accusation that she might shoulder some of the blame, the
poem ends with Florbela asking her improbable Prince Charming how he intends to
explain to God their failure to meet. To achieve the desired effect, she uses the last
19 This poem, “O Menino da sua Mãe” [His mother’s boy], was first published in 1926 in the Lisbon
literary review Contemporânea, 3rd series, n.º 1. The hostilities referred to in the poem could have taken
place during Portugal’s participation in World War I, or as part of a colonial policing operation.
20Olga was a name Pessoa could not entirely erase from his memory. Hoping to resolve his often-
parlous financial situation, he once devised a rather improbable plan to write, under the pen-name
“Olga Baker”, a series of popular manuals covering women’s attire, housekeeping, and motherhood.
21The author was, in fact, a certain Eliezer Kamenezky, a Jewish émigré from Donetsk, whose poetry
Pessoa was translating (DAL FARRA, 2015: 117, note 4, citing personal communication, Jerónimo
Pizarro, May 11th, 2015).
22See, for example, “Vivem em nós innumeros” (PESSOA, 2016:175) [Those who dwell in us are without
number] attributed to Ricardo Reis, and his own “Não sei quantas almas tenho” (PESSOA, 2005: 375) [I
know not how many souls I have].

lines of “Tarde demais” [Too late] from her Soror Saudade (ESPANCA, 2012b: 119)
collection [Sister Yearning].
E há cem anos que eu era [Now a hundred years have passed since I was
nova e linda!... that handsome prize!…
E a minha boca morta grita ainda: Yet even so from my dead mouth the self-same question flies:
Porque chegaste tarde, ó meu Amor?! How is it possible you missed me, my Love?!]
Poem V
E agora que te vejo e que te falo [And now that I can see you and I’m talking to you
não sei se te alcancei I don’t know if I had you
se te perdi. figured or not.
É que guardo antiga zanga contra ti, The thing is, I still have that old grudge against you,
Fernando. Fernando.
Deploro o que não fizeste por Judith It’s odious what you didn’t do for Judith
e por toda a sua troupe da Europa and for her whole Europa gang
– gente que, afinal, ficou sem! ―people who, without her, were left with neither
eira nem Teixeira hearth nor home!
Quem incinerou-lhe os versos só lhe viu Those who had her verses burned saw no more in them than
a carne Nua (que viande de paraître) Judith Naked (oh, such viande de paraître);
e tosquiou-a verrinamente em efígie. The press lampooned her, as if burning an effigy.
Mas era também But she was speaking
De Mim que ela falava, de todas nós, as outras: Not just About Me, but of every woman, all we others:
do nosso direito à vida, à ética, à arte and the right to our lives, to our own ethics, to our own art―
— à luxúria! and to our own lust!
E pensar que tu, Pessoa And to think that you, Pessoa,
(honra da Literatura de Sodoma!) (such is honour in the Literature of Sodom!)
só foste leal ao Raul e ao Botto (o invejoso): were loyal only to Raul and to Botto (the envious):
Judith jamais te existiu! Judith never existed for you!
Seria a tua célebre fobia a... Would that be something to do with your famous fear of…
trovoadas? thunderclaps?
Afinal, sempre conheceste So, after all, you really did know
alguém que tivesse levado porrada! someone who’d been given a good slapping!
Mas hoje que a tarde é calma e o céu tranquilo: But today, on a calm afternoon with a tranquil sky:
– cadê o teu decadentismo? ―where’s your decadentism now?
Teus Poemas também são de Bizâncio, I’d say your own Poems are rather Byzantine, too,
caro Íbis, my dear Ibis,
e (talvez por isso) and (perhaps that explains)
foste embirrar com a única mulher modernista! why you were so irked by the only woman modernist we had!
Deveras. O dia deu em chuvoso. Indeed. The day turned out rainy, after all.]

Poem V. The Literatura de Sodoma affair
The whole of Poem V is devoted to Portugal’s greatest literary scandal since Camilo
Castelo Branco and Ana Plácido were arrested for adultery some 60 years before. In
1923, the right-wing Lisbon Students’ Action League pressed for the city’s Civil
Governor to have books by António Botto, Raul Leal, and Judith Teixeira seized and
destroyed as examples of what one reviewer described as the Literatura de Sodoma.
While Botto and Leal were members of Pessoa’s intimate circle, notwithstanding her
modernist credentials, Judith Teixeira was no more than an acquaintance. After all,
in his dealings with the opposite sex, Pessoa was drawn more to much younger
women such as Hanni, Ophélia, and Madge Anderson 23, than members of his own
generation. As suggested above, Pessoa felt a certain disquietude regarding female
professionals, adhering to the then-prevalent bourgeois view that a woman’s role
was merely to be decorative (to secure a husband and act as his trophy) and
procreative (to reproduce the same cycle indefinitely).
Just as Botto’s poetry had a strong homoerotic charge, and Leal’s aesthetics
affirmed the superiority of male homosexual relations over all others, Judith’s poetry
was a paean to her own same-sex preferences, an “error” for which she was
punished severely (PESSOA, 1990b: 425), not only by those from whom she could
expect no mercy, but also by those on whom she may have thought she could
depend. Despite the work of all three authors being impounded and destroyed for
outraging public decency, as a lesbian, Judith was treated by press and critics alike
with a violence reserved for those most loathed by the establishment. Her later work
also attracted vicious hostility: in 1926, under the heading viande de paraître (i. e.
“meat on view”, a pun on the French term for “hot off the press”), the periodical O
Sempre Fixe [Always In Vogue] marked the launching of Judith’s next collection of
poems, Nua – Poemas de Bisâncio, [Naked – Byzantine Poems], by publishing a caricature
portraying a Rubenesque Judith naked, attended by Eros (averting his eyes in
disgust), a dog (panting lasciviously), and a handgun (firing at her head).
Poem V opens with Florbela doubting how accurately she had imagined
Pessoa: seeing him (from afar, in the misty distance of the afterlife), and speaking to
him (albeit by letter, thus far unanswered), she identifies two main caveats―both
reflecting Pessoa’s passivity―that tarnish his eligibility as her chosen one. In her
view, he made no effort either to seek her out (referred to in Poem IV) or to defend
a fellow modernist (addressed her in Poem V). Regarding the latter, Florbela
contradicts Pessoa’s claim―made by Álvaro de Campos in “Poema em linha recta”
[Straight line poem]―never to have known anyone who had taken a sound beating.
23Around Easter 1935, Pessoa met and subsequently corresponded with Madge Anderson, who went
on to work as a wartime cryptographer at Bletchley Park and with military intelligence in London
(BARRETO, 2017: 599 et seq.).

Notwithstanding the poem’s intensely ironic tone, its author would not have
counted someone ostensibly as insignificant as Judith among the “princes” and
“champions” with whom he habitually mixed (PESSOA, 2013: 180). Florbela
sarcastically blames Pessoa’s inaction on the bad weather: he admitted to his friends
that if there were the slightest chance of rain, he would never go out without a
raincoat and umbrella and, if a storm were raging, he would only feel safe at home
(PESSOA, 1966a: 29). With typically dry humour, he claimed that, for as long as they
lasted, only bad weather and penury depressed him (PESSOA, 1982: 71). By linking
two apparently unconnected elements―Pessoa’s fear of storms and his role in the
Literatura de Sodoma affair―Florbela testily questions his motives for treating so
unequally those being persecuted by the authorities.
Pessoa’s phobia symbolises his aversion to becoming further embroiled in the
controversy over the homoerotic content of Botto’s verses (Canções), Leal’s “theo-
metaphysics” (Sodoma Divinizada) and Judith’s poetry (Decadência). 24 His protective
raincoat and uptilted umbrella could be thought of as signifying the defensive
argumentation he used to demonstrate, in print, that Botto’s “invertedness” was
incidental to his status as an authentic aesthete (PESSOA, 1922), and that Leal was
neither madman nor sodomite, but a cutting-edge philosopher (BARRETO, 2012).
Avoiding the students’ key complaints, Pessoa took pains to “distance himself from
the polemical poetess” (ALONSO, 2015: 25, apud DELGADO, 1999) and later went as far
as to declare Judith a minor protagonist in the whole affair (DAL FARRA, 2015: 119,
apud PESSOA, 1996: 61), his comment that “não tem lugar […] entre os maiores” [she
had no place (…) among the major protagonists of the affair] seemingly intended to
denigrate her work rather than defending her by deflecting public attention from it.
A more plausible explanation is that Judith’s talent and courage had not escaped
Pessoa and, feeling threatened both as a modernist and a male, he churlishly failed
to come to her defence. Without accusing him outright of hypocrisy, Florbela suggests
his poems are just as “byzantine”―i. e., furtively transgressive―as Judith’s. As
someone who prized poetry’s surreptitiousness and subversive potential, it may well
have irked Pessoa to see those attributes so well deployed by someone who would
later be described as Portugal’s only female modernist poet (VIANA, 1977: 201).
Poem VI
No tempo em que festejavam o dia [At the time when they were celebrating the day
dos meus anos, on which I was born,
24While there were no complaints after the 1921 publication of the Agartha and Libânio da Silva
editions of Botto’s Canções, when Pessoa’s Olisipo Press chose to publish a second edition, complete
with a provocative photograph of his friend, it attracted the attention of conservative students, who
pressed for the authorities to have the book impounded and destroyed.

uma como que lembrança do meu futuro féretro something like a memory of my resting-place-to-be
me estremece o cérebro. is making my head spin.
Nesta hora absurda – And at this absurd hour―
pousada sob o fausto do meu claustro Saudade my body buried amid the splendour
de Sóror of Sister Saudade’s cloisters
(ó suntuoso túmulo de morta!) (for a dead girl, a truly sumptuous tomb!)
virada no avesso e sem meus ossos turned inside out and relieved of every single bone
– tropeço na sombra lúgubre da Lua que ―I stumble around in the pall cast by a Moon that
lá fora (Satanás!) outside (Devil knows!) so
seduz! enthrals!
Tenho ódio à luz e raiva à claridade Sunlight I hate most of all and rage against its brightness
e não estou de bem com Deus só por medo and I’ll not try to stay in God’s good books just out of fear
do Inferno. Que ninguém of the flames. Let no-one
me faça a vida! Deixem-me ser eu mesma! try to run my life! Just let me be myself!
Esta sou eu: a Bela Who I am is Bela

a Intangível, a leve águia na subida the Intangible; lithe eagle flying ever upward
– tal como resultei de tudo. ―and that’s exactly the way it turned out.]
Poem VI. “There are those who rise as they descend”
Poem VI begins with Florbela recalling her birthdays, and how unnerving it had
been, on one such occasion, to have seen so clearly where her final resting-place
would be, almost as if it were already a memory. 25 While her bones lay encased in
sumptuous marble, her spirit was stumbling around in the shadows, deprived of the
moonlight that had always thrilled and nourished her. In this disembodied liminal
state, Florbela feels incomplete and impotent, rather like the young woman whom
death separates from her lover in the short story “A Morta” (ESPANCA, 2015: 125-
132) [The Dead Girl]. She quotes the opening lines of the sonnet “A minha tragédia”
[My tragedy] to explain why it is “Tenho ódio à luz e raiva à claridade | do sol”
[(s)unlight I hate most of all and rage against its brightness]: she prefers “Gosto da Noite
imensa, triste, preta” [the immense, sad blackness of the night-time], because she fears
daylight “eu tenho medo | que me leiam nos olhos o segredo | de não amar
ninguém, de ser assim!” (ESPANCA, 2012a: 109) [will reveal the secret in my eyes, | that
I love no-one and that’s the way I am].
And yet, in life, Florbela felt herself driven ever onwards and upwards by the
sad remembrance of what she had lost and what had eluded her, and her yearning
for what her future might hold. However, many of those around her, including her
third husband Mário Lage, had already concluded that she was caught in a
downward spiral into neurosis. Her friend BOTTO DE CARVALHO (1919: 39) dedicated
25In 1964, amid considerable controversy, Florbela’s remains were transferred from the North to her
birthplace in the South. Mário CLAÚDIO (2011) claims that one of her admirers went as far as stealing
a bone to keep as a relic.

a poem to her when she was still at the Faculty of Law in Lisbon, vividly
memorialising the physical marks her dogged self-destructiveness had left:
Frio e esguio, num dos seus pulsos, [Across one of her wrists, candidly unswerving,
Finos, nervosos, convulsos, Pulsing with life, so unnerving,
Terrível, pequenino, inapagável, The narrowest, most awful and indelible
O primeiro sinal de um suicídio em vão… Tell-tale sign of a first dalliance with self-immolation…
Firme, inalterável, Fixed, unchangeable
Como vontade sublime e acesa, As the will, sublime in its stubbornness,
Da Princesa Of the Princess
Desolação. Desolation.]
In contrast, Florbela was convinced that her personal journey, while admittedly
vertiginous, was transcendental, for “há quem suba a descer” (ESPANCA, 2015: 165)
[there are those who rise as they descend]. In the sonnet “Mais alto” [Higher!], Florbela
imagines herself rising above all earthly cares, like a Virgin Mary ascending into
heaven, or a bird soaring ever higher (ESPANCA, 2013: 123); in her set of tributes to
Camões, having asked a golden eagle to guide her upwards from defeat (ESPANCA,
2013: 39), she observes that “quanto mais funda e lúgubre a descida, | mais alta é a
ladeira que não cansa!” (ESPANCA, 2013: 148) [the deeper and more gloomy the steep
descent may be | the higher the summit that tirelessly I’ll climb].
In an essay accompanying a selection of Florbela’s works (ESPANCA, 2002: 22),
Maria Lúcia explains this single-minded motivation in the following terms:
[…] nesse impulso ascensional, Florbela devaneia em se tornar a Intangível, a Turris Ebúrnea,
uma Virgem Maria envolvida pela luz brilhante e incorruptível dum impossível. Mas trata-
se de uma Virgem que, em lugar de pisar “o mal da vida” […], deseja, ao contrário, acolhê-
la nos seus braços, nos seus já “divinos braços de Mulher”.
[Florbela is impelled forever upwards and dreams of becoming the Intangible, the Ebony Tower, a sort
of Virgin Mary surrounded by the brilliant and incorruptible light of the impossible. But this is a
Virgin who, rather than treading the world’s evil underfoot (…) wants to offer it the embrace of a
woman who already knows what it is to be divine.]
And, in her short story “The Passion of Manuel Garcia” from The Masks of Destiny,
Florbela herself hints at what it means to become the object of such worship
(ESPANCA, 2015: 163-164):
[…] não era dele, não, meu Deus! Não a podia cobiçar sequer, mas não era de ninguém. Vaso
sagrado por onde nenhuma boca matara a sede, templo que nenhuns passos tinham
profanado ainda, torre de marfim do seu amor a que nenhum olhar subira, não era dele, não,
mas era a Pura, a Intangível, era A que não era de ninguém!
[Though she was not his — Lord knows she wasn’t, nor could he even bring himself to covet her — at
least she did not belong to anyone else. She was a sacred vessel on whose contents no mouth had ever
slaked its thirst, a temple still unprofaned by the tread of human feet, an ivory tower of love whose

pinnacle no eye had yet yet beheld; she wasn’t his, oh no, but she was untouchable, purity personified,
She-who-belonged-to-no-one!]
Could this be the same Florbela who, in her sonnet “Amar!” (ESPANCA, 2013: 115)
aspired to “Amar só por amar: aqui... além... | Mais este e Aquele, o Outro e toda a
gente...” [Love just for love’s sake, love hither and yon… | First this one, then that one,
then the other ones”?].
Only those with the potential to become her soul-mate would be able to
resolve the contradiction between Florbela the saint and Florbela the libertine.
Though in society’s eyes she risked descending into depravity, from her own
perspective she had found the path towards her true identity, a way of rising above
and beyond the “O mundo [com] os seus preconceitos idiotas, as suas leis inumanas
e ilógicas” (ESPANCA, 2019: 166) [the world (with) its stupid prejudices and heartless,
illogical laws] life imposes. An initiate into mysteries revealed to only a very few, she
is ready to take a leap into the unknown, where she will become just one more ripple
on the cosmic sea 26 or, as she puts it in her sonnet “Nostalgia”, “Ah! Não ser mais
que a sombra duma sombra | Por entre tanta sombra igual a mim!” (ESPANCA, 2013:
116) [nothing more than a shadow’s shadow | Amid so many shadows the same as me].
Poema VII
Ah, um verso meu de amor [Ah, that a love poem of my own

que te fizesse ser eterno por toda a eternidade, might have the power to make you eternal for all eternity,
ó Desejado, Eleito, Infante, Amante! My heart’s Desire, my Chosen One, Prince and Lover!
Minha boca guarda uns beijos mudos, My mouth yet holds a few mute kisses for you,
minhas mãos uns pálidos veludos, My hands stretch out, skin downy, pale of hue;
e noite e dia all night and all day
choro e rezo e grito e urro – I weep and pray, call out and howl―
e ninguém ouve... ninguém vê... ninguém... and no-one hears… no-one sees… no-one…
Se me quiseres, Fernando, If you want me, Fernando,

hás de ser Outro e Outro num momento You must be that other One, that Other One, at once
princípio e fim, via láctea fechando my alpha and my omega, my Milky Way sealing off
o infinito! the infinite!
Eu sonho o amor de um deus!... What I dream of is the love of a god …!
Vê, repara, Nando, dá-me as tuas mãos. Wait Nando, it’s like this, you see… give me your hands.
Alguma coisa em mim nasceu antes dos astros Something in me was born before the stars
26This phrase comes from the closing lines of Florbela’s short story “A Morta” [The Dead Girl].
Elements of Florbela’s philosophy of life and death can be found in several of her short stories,
notably “Amor de outrora” [A love from times long past], “O resto é perfume” [The rest is perfume], “A
Morta” [The dead girl], and “A paixão de Manuel Garcia” [The passion of Manuel Garcia].

e viu and saw

lá muito ao longe in the far, far distance
começar o sol... the sun’s beginning…]
Poem VII. “What I dream of is the love of a god!”
Inured to the pity of those closest to her and the disdain of those outside her circle,
Florbela yearned to be worshipped by the lover she felt she deserved. In order for
her to love, be loved, and yet belong to no-one, she needed her chimerical soul-mate
to make his presence felt, and to prove himself to be in all respects ‘the one.’ Poem
VII opens with Florbela accepting part of the responsibility for her plight, for she has
been unable to write verses with the power to conjure up her Prince Charming. And
yet, with words borrowed from “Sonho Vago” (ESPANCA, 2004: 336) [Vague Dream],
she also blames him for failing to appear, for not putting an end to her suffering:
Onde está ele o Desejado? [So where is he then, my heart’s Desire?

O Infante? Where is my sweet dauphin?
O que há de vir e amar-me em He who should be here now to love me with
doida ardência? a passion that is rare?
O das horas de mágoa e penitência? He of my many hours of penitence and of despair?
O Príncipe Encantado? O Eleito? Where is my Enchanted Prince, my Chosen One?
O Amante? My lover-man?]
Using the last lines of the sonnet “Languidez” [Languor], Florbela assures her elusive
lover that she not a spent force, and still has plenty to offer him (ESPANCA, 2012a: 105):
E a minha boca tem uns beijos mudos… [My mouth yet holds a few mute kisses for you…
Minhas mãos, uns pálidos veludos, My hands stretch out, skin downy, pale of hue,
Traçam gestos de sonho pelo ar … Tracing dreamy arabesques in the air …]
Not for the first time, we can sense the tension between, on the one hand, Florbela’s
lack of self-esteem (because she remains a mystery both to herself and to others) and,
on the other, her self-affirmation, as embodied in her avatar’s defiance before God,
Destiny, and society: “Let no-one | try to run my life! Just let me be myself!”. But,
more often than not, it is her self-absorption―referred to by some as her
narcissism―that, prevails. Indeed, in two love-letters written to António Guimarães
(ESPANCA, 2008: 91; 99), she explicitly advises him that the terms of any future
relationship would be set by her and her alone:
Tens que me aceitar como eu sou visto que só assim eu creio que me possam ter amor [7
Março, p. 91] […] Meu amigo, se esperas ter uma mulher sem areia nenhuma morres de
aborrecimento e de frio ao pé dela e não será com certeza ao pé de mim. […] Hás de gostar
mais de mim assim, do que se eu fosse a própria Deusa Minerva com todo o juízo que todos
os deuses lhe deram [9 Março, p. 99].

[You have to take me as I am because, I believe, that’s the only way you can love me, (7th March) (…)
My friend, if you’re after a woman with no quirks or foibles, then you may die of boredom and of cold
by her side, but that won’t be me, that’s for sure. (…) But you’ll like me all the better the way I am
than if I were the goddess Minerva herself with all the wisdom the gods gave her (9th March).]
Marriage to Guimarães turned out to be a mistake, for while he was a source of

earthly, physical passion, she sought a more powerful, transcendent love that only
someone who followed the same star could provide. “What I dream of is the love of
a god!”, Florbela cries, echoing the closing line of her sonnet “Ambiciosa” (ESPANCA,
2013: 117) [Ambitious]. Adapting the text of an unfinished, untitled poem still lacking
its opening stanza, and in a tone far less conversational than the love letter cited
above, Florbela warns Pessoa that she refuses to belong to anyone, and that it is he
who must change (ESPANCA, 2004: 350):
Eu não sou de ninguém!… Quem me quiser [I’ll be no-one’s … If it’s me that you want
Há-de ser luz do Sol em tardes quentes On a hot afternoon my sun you must be
[…] (…)
Há-de ser Outro e Outro num momento! You must be that Other One, that Other One right now!
Força viva, brutal, em movimento living brute force, advancing, never bowed
Astro arrastando catadupas de astros! A star trailing behind it, its own stellar train!]
At the end of the poem, Florbela imports a phrase from Jorge de Sena’s
Portuguese translation of Pessoa’s “English Sonnet XXIV” (ALONSO, 2021: 153). 27 In
Pessoa’s original English version, he proclaims: “Something in me was born before
the stars | And saw the sun begin from far away” (PESSOA, 1966b: 20-21; PESSOA,
1974: 180), words that recall Florbela’s own pantheistic beliefs, according to which
the matter from which all life is made dates back to the dawn of time and disperses
at our death, ready to play a new role in the permanent process of creation. She
understood that only those able to penetrate beyond the limits of their earthly
existence would learn that they were present at the very beginning, long before the
earth took shape and humanity appeared. Florbela’s words spell out her
demands―her soulmate must know how to transcend himself and fulfil her every
desire, for only a god will suffice.
Poem VIII
Se ridículas são todas as cartas de amor [If it’s the case that all love letters are ridiculous
as minhas then mine
27Most of the sonnets that Pessoa originally wrote in English were translated into Portuguese by Jorge
de Sena, Adolfo Casais Monteiro, and José Blanc de Portugal. Many of them can be viewed in a
bilingual presentation: https://periodicos.fclar.unesp.br/alfa/article/viewFile/3280/3007

(em verdade) (if truth be told)

não passam de uma necessidade voraz Signify no more than my voracious need
de fazer frases. to feed the world with words.
Tão pobres somos, Nando, Such paupers are we, Nando,
que as mesmas palavras usamos that we will employ the same expression
para afirmar ou falsear. to affirm the truth or falsify.
Mas aclara-me, Fernando So, please explain to me, Fernando:
O que impede um vero e injusto Fado Is there a force that can mitigate a real yet
de ser criado? undeserved Fate?
Tudo coexiste! O mundo Everything coexists! The world―

é uma teia urdida só de sonho e erro. it is nothing but a web woven out of dream and error
A vida... branco ou tinto, é o mesmo: And life... be it white or red... it matters not a jot:
é p’ra vomitar! Go on! Throw it up!
Brindemos ambos, inda que não mais possamos: So let’s raise a glass―though neither one of us now can:
– viva o bicarbonato de soda! ―our toast shall be: bicarbonate of soda!]
Poem VIII. Love letters straight from the heart
In the final poem of the sequence, Florbela takes up the theme of love letters, on
which she and Pessoa expended much time and which, alongside amorous tram-
journeys, were key to their respective courtship strategies. In one of his Álvaro de
Campos poems, Pessoa queries the value of expressing romantic sentiments in
epistolary form, going as far as to dismiss every item of his correspondence as
“ridiculous” (PESSOA, 2013: 169):
Todas as cartas de amor são [Every single love letter is

Ridículas. Ridiculous.
Não seriam cartas de amor se não fossem How could they possibly be love letters if they weren’t
Ridículas. Ridiculous.
Também escrevi em meu tempo cartas de amor, I must admit that in my time, I’ve written love letters,
Como as outras, Like all my others,
Ridículas. Ridiculous.]
For her part, in the diary she kept during the last year of her life, in the entry for
July 16th, 1930, Florbela freely admits that “Até hoje, todas as minhas cartas de amor
não são mais que a realização da minha necessidade de fazer frases” (ESPANCA, 2019:
67) [to date, every one of my love letters has done no more than meet my need to spin
phrases]. So powerful and compulsive was her vocation as a writer that, from an
early age, she indulged in what might be called performative epistolography, in
which she was the writer (in both senses of the term), with the recipient acting as

both reader and audience. 28 For Pessoa, too, notwithstanding his comments to the
contrary, letter-writing was a serious matter and an authentic act of literary
creativity: he kept carbon copies of much of his correspondence and, in his letters,
often criticised his own style or clarity. Florbela admits that writing is such a complex
process and the means of expression available to us so poor that, if her elusive
soulmate was to finally appear, she wonders if she would have anything novel or
sincere to say to him (ESPANCA, 2019: 67).
Florbela now returns to the question of destiny, where we encounter a second
phrase from de Sena’s Portuguese translation of Pessoa’s English Sonnets, this time
from Sonnet VII. Pessoa interrogates the immutability of fate: once the lot is cast, is
there really no turning back, as depicted in the tragedies of Ancient Greece? Or do
we have access to a countervailing force that can protect us, individually or
collectively, from an arbitrary and unjust fate? In his original, Pessoa asks “Yet what
truth bars | An all unjust Fate’s truth from being believed?!”, rendered by de Sena as
“O que impede um vero e injusto Fado de ser criado?!” [What bars | An unjust Fate
from being created?!], a translation that omits the noun “truth” and replaces the verb
“believe” with “create” (PESSOA, 1966b: 12-13; PESSOA, 1993c: 70 and 98-99). It seems
unlikely that de Sena thought “criado” [created] an acceptable translation of
“acreditado” [believed]. A more likely explanation is that, in order to reproduce
Pessoa’s hendecasyllabic line, de Sena opted for the archaism “crido” [believed], a
word the typist or typesetter failed to recognise and, believing it to be a lapse by the
translator, mistakenly ‘corrected’ it, inadvertently producing an internal rhyme (fado
– criado) that is absent in the original.
Using a final quotation from the English Sonnets, this time from Sonnet XXVI,
Florbela approaches from a different angle the world in which we live out our days
and the manner in which we try to make sense of life’s perplexities. While her phrase
in Portuguese “o mundo | é uma teia urdida só de sonho e erro” is identical to Sena’s
version, my own translation lengthens Pessoa’s succinct and highly Shakespearean
first line “The world | is woven all of dream and error” in order to match Maria
Lúcia’s syllable count without departing too much from Sena’s own choice of words
(PESSOA, 1966b: 21-22; PESSOA, 1993c: 116-117).
In his original sonnet, Pessoa had deployed the metaphor of the mirror to
explore the compulsive yet ultimately futile nature of philosophical speculation. In
a mirror’s reflection we perceive a reversed image of ourselves and the world
around us and, despite knowing this image to be false, we continue our struggle to
see “what is true”. In the words of Saint PAUL (1 Corinthians 13:12), though today
we only “see through a glass darkly”, at some point in the future everything will
28Florbela’s letters to ‘Madame’ Carvalho, the Director of the women’s periodical Modas e Bordados
[Fashion and Embroidery] and, in particular, to Assistant Director Júlia Alves, are full of examples of
this ‘performative’ letter writing (ESPANCA, 1986: 28-97).

become clear. In Pessoa’s contrasting view, strongly influenced by stoicism, we

persist in peering into the gloom, in spite of “sabendo que jamais sabemos” (PESSOA,
1966b: 21) [knowing we ne’er shall know]. For Pessoa, life remains a conundrum: it is
too short, passes too quickly, and we can only guess what lies beyond it. The advice
of his heteronym Ricardo Reis is to “Circunda-te de rosas, ama, bebe | E cala. O mais
é nada” (PESSOA, 2020: 94) [(s)urround yourself with roses; love, drink | And keep silent.
All else is worth naught], a desideratum Pessoa himself managed to fulfil only
partially and sporadically. The main distinction between these sentiments and
Florbela’s own philosophy, both of which contain stoic and epicurean elements, lies
in the vigour with which the two poets led their respective lives―he with passive
gravity, she with passionate (almost manic) animation. Though Florbela lived for
the moment, wanting to “love with abandon”, her unquiet spirit drove her to pursue
chimeras; while she yearned to surround herself with beauty, she encountered more
thorns than roses; and, as an analgesic, temporary or otherwise, against life’s
tribulations, she favoured barbiturates over alcohol.
The final poem nevertheless ends with Florbela wishing she could join Pessoa
in drinking to the health, if not of life, then of their respective literary posterities,
even though they have yet to meet, and their ethereal state would probably prohibit
such a celebratory gesture. ALONSO (2019: 13) explains that “by appropriating
Pessoa’s personal irony, [Maria Lúcia’s] Florbela is able to propose a toast to a
means of survival that remains available to them both”. Were it possible for the two
spirits to physically raise a glass, in Florbela’s view, the toast should be “To
bicarbonate of soda!”, the antacid powder that, in the eponymous poem by Álvaro
de Campos, symbolises whatever measures we choose to take in order to relieve the
pain of being alive (PESSOA, 1950: 285).
In several of his poems, Pessoa develops his thesis on the complex
relationship between physical and metaphysical malaise, and proposes a variety of
remedies for life’s anguish, ennui, and desolation, ranging from patent medicines,
through prescription drugs, to alcohol or, as a last resort, suicide. In the poem
“Bicarbonato de soda”, Pessoa’s Álvaro de Campos vacillates between taking his
own life and easing his discomfort in a less drastic and irreversible way. “devo
tomar qualquer coisa, ou suicidar-me?” [Should I take something, or kill myself?], he
ponders, with mischievous ambiguity, for in Portuguese the phrase “tomar alguma
coisa” can apply just as well to alcohol as to medicine. Pessoa thus hints at the
absence of any meaningful choice in life, and suggests that the outcome is the same
whatever we decide to do.
Florbela ends her missive by expressing a view of life and death, compatible
in most respects with that of her putative soulmate. The distinction lies in the fact
that, while her philosophy also contains elements of fatalism, passivity, and
submission, above all it is driven by a determination to act. Her one caveat, however,
is that while enjoying life to the fullest extent that destiny permits may well be better

than nothing, doing so risks becoming so contaminated by life that we lose our
capacity to take the one decisive step that would free us from its clutches. Borrowing
words from the last couplet of “Vilegiatura”, an Álvaro de Campos poem (PESSOA,
1990a: 330) that deploys his much-favoured regurgitation metaphor to express his
desire to efface memory or thought, his own self or even our shared existence,
Florbela invites us to renounce life, whatever we had once believed the contract
promised: “E a vida... branco ou tinto, é o mesmo: é p’ra vomitar!” [Life... be it white
or red... it matters not a jot: Go on! Throw it up!]. 29
29The expression “Throw it up!” has the advantage of ambiguity, signifying both the act of vomiting
and that of relinquishing a job or opportunity.

Bibliography
Note on digital sources. Readers wishing to gain rapid access to specific works on which Maria Lúcia
Dal Farra has drawn for her poems, or to which I have referred in the commentaries, may wish to
consult two sites on which Fernando Pessoa‘s and Florbela Espanca’s works are published in
Portuguese in digital form: the Arquivo Pessoa (http://arquivopessoa.net/) and the Biblioteca Digital do
Alentejo (https://www.bdalentejo.net/index.html), respectively. Though the Pessoa archive has a
useful―albeit rudimentary―search facility, the site should be used with caution, as its texts do
contain errors of transcription and referencing, and its sources tend to be outdated non-critical
editions. Nor does the Espanca archive use recent, critical editions of Florbela’s poetry and prose, but
it nevertheless has the advantage of displaying digitalised pages (rather than transcriptions) from the
usually reliable Gonçalves, Dom Quixote, and Bertrand editions of her works.
ALONSO, Cláudia Pazos (2021). “Maria Lúcia e Florbela – clarividências”. A crítica e a poetisa: Estudos
sobre Maria Lúcia Dal Farra. Edited by Ana Luísa Vilela, Fábio Mário da Silva, Inês Pedrosa,
and Rosa Fina. Recife: Libertas Editora.
_____ (2015), “Estudo introdutório. Judith Teixeira – um caso modernista insólito”. Judith Teixeira.
Poesia e prosa. Edited by Cláudia Pazos Alonso and Fábio Mário da Silva. Lisbon: Publicações
D. Quixote, pp. 21-38.
BARRETO, José (2017). “A última paixão de Fernando Pessoa”, Pessoa Plural―A Journal of Fernando
Pessoa Studies, n.º 12 (special issue: New Insights into Portuguese Modernism from the Fernando
Távora Collection; guest editor, Ricardo Vasconcelos), Fall, pp. 596-641. Brown Digital
Repository, Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0QJ7FJ9
_____ (2012). “Fernando Pessoa e Raul Leal contra a campanha moralizadora dos estudantes em
1923”. Pessoa Plural―A Journal of Fernando Pessoa Studies, n.º 2, Fall, pp. 240-270. Brown Digital
Repository, Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.7301/Z02V2DM3
BARROS, Júlia Leitão de (2021). O Jornalismo Político Republicano Radical – “O Mundo”, 1900-1907,
Lisbon: Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa. Coleção ‘Caminhos do Conhecimento’.
BOTTO, António (1921). Canções do Sul. Lisbon: Agartha Press. [Republished as Canções by Pessoa’s
Olisipo Press, Lisbon, in 1922.]
BOTTO DE CARVALHO, João (1919). Sol Poente. Lisbon: Imprensa Libânio da Silva.
CASTRO, Mariana de (2006). “Oscar Wilde, Fernando Pessoa, and the art of lying”, Portuguese Studies,
vol. 22, n.º 2, pp. 219-249. www.jstor.org/stable/41105265
CLÁUDIO, Mário (2011). “A vida e obra de Florbela Espanca” [The life and works of Florbela Espanca],
interview by Teresa Sampaio, episode in the series “Ler mais, ler melhor” [Read more, read
better]. Rádio e Televisão de Portugal, Channel 2. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=0Ss_fyyEz6U
DAL FARRA, M. L. (2017). Terceto para o fim dos tempos. São Paulo: Editora Iluminuras.
_____ (2015). “De Florbela para Pessoa, com amor”. Pessoa Plural―A Journal of Fernando Pessoa
Studies, n.º 7, Spring, pp. 116-131. Brown Digital Repository, Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0VQ315V
DELGADO, António Saez (1999). Orficos y Ultraistas: Portugal y España en el diálogo de las primeras
vanguardias literarias (1915 -1925). Mérida: Editora Regional de Extremadura.
EÇA DE QUEIROZ, José Maria; ORTIGÃO, J. D. Ramalho (1870). O Mysterio da Estrada de Cintra: Cartas ao
‘Diário de Notícias’, Lisbon: Diário de Notícias, 24th July-27th September.
ESPANCA, Florbela (2019). Diário | O Dominó Preto. Edited by Fábio Mário da Silva, scientific
counsultation by Ana Luísa Vilela. Lisbon: Edições Esgotadas.

_____ (2015). As Máscaras do Destino. Critical fixation of texts and notes by Cláudia Pazos Alonso
and Fábio Mário da Silva. Lisbon: Editorial Estampa.
_____ (2013). Charneca em Flor. Critical fixation of texts and notes by Cláudia Pazos Alonso and
Fábio Mário da Silva, scientific consultation by Ana Luísa Vilela, introductory studies by
Cláudia Pazos Alonso, Renata Bonfim, and Nuno Júdice. Lisbon: Editorial Estampa.
_____ (2012a). Livro de Mágoas. Critical fixation of texts by Cláudia Pazos Alonso and Fábio Mário
da Silva, scientific consultation by Ana Luísa Vilela, introductory studies by Fábio Mário da
Silva, Eliana Luiza dos Santos Barros, and Ana Luísa Vilela. Lisbon: Editorial Estampa.
_____ (2012b). Livro de “Sóror Saudade”. Organisation, critical fixation of texts and notes by Cláudia
Pazos Alonso and Fábio Mário da Silva, scientific consultation by Ana Luísa Vilela,
introductory studies by Cláudia Pazos Alonso, Derivaldo dos Santos, and António Cândido
Franco. Lisbon: Editorial Estampa.
_____ (2011). Obras de Florbela Espanca. Vol. 3 – Contos. Edited and introduced by José Carlos Seabra
Pereira. Lisbon: Presença.
_____ (2008). Perdidamente: correspondência amorosa 1920-1925. Edited by Maria Lúcia Dal Farra. Vila
Nova de Famalicão: Quasi.
_____ (2004). Poesia Completa. 5th edition, Lisbon: Bertrand Editora.
_____ (2002). Afinado Desconcerto: (Contos, Cartas, Diário). Maria Lúcia Dal Farra. São Paulo: Iluminuras.
_____ (1986). Cartas 1906-1922. Vol. V of Obras Completas de Florbela Espanca. Edited by Rui Guedes.
Lisbon: Publicações Dom Quixote.
GERRY, Chris (2022a). “Florbela Espanca traduzida”. Dicionário de Florbela Espanca. Edited by Jonas
Leite, Maria Lúcia Dal Farra, Fábio Mário da Silva. Lisbon: CLEPUL/Edições Esgotadas, p. 5.
_____ (2022b). “Florbela Espanca traduzida em antologias”. Dicionário de Florbela Espanca. Edited by
Jonas Leite, Maria Lúcia Dal Farra, Fábio Mário da Silva. Lisbon: CLEPUL/Edições Esgotadas, p. 3.
_____ (2022c). “Bibliografia atualizada das traduções realizadas por Florbela Espanca”. Dicionário
de Florbela Espanca. Edited by Jonas Leite, Maria Lúcia Dal Farra, Fábio Mário da Silva. Lisbon:
CLEPUL/Edições Esgotadas, p. 7.
_____ (2018). “Acerca dos romances traduzidos por Florbela Espanca”. Revista 7faces – Caderno-
revista e poesia, Ano IX, n.º 17, Natal, January-July, pp. 203-219.
http://www.revistasetefaces.com/2018/12/7faces.html
_____ (2012). “Florbela tradutora”. Florbela Espanca – o espólio de um mito. Edited by Maria Lúcia Dal
Farra, António Cândido da Silva, Fabio Mario da Silva, and Ana Luísa Vilela. in Callipole –
Revista de Cultura, n.º 21, Edições Colibri / Câmara Municipal de Vila Viçosa, pp. 163-184.
LEAL, Raul (1923). Sodoma Divinizada, Lisbon: Olisipo.
LEHMAN, David (2006). “These fragments I have shored”. New York Times, April 2nd, Section 7, p. 27.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/books/arts/poem-these-fragments-i-have-shored.html
LOPES, Teresa Rita (2013). “O seu a seu dono”. Modernista – Antologia de artigos da revista ‘Modernista’.
Edited by Teresa Rita Lopes. Lisbon: Grupo Interdisciplinar de Estudos Pessoanos e Modernistas,
Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universidade Nova de Lisbon, pp. 11-28.
_____ (2008). “O falso virgem”. Egoísta, special issue. Lisbon: Casa Fernando Pessoa, June, pp. 60-64.
MARCUS AURELIUS (1908). Marc-Aurèle — Pensées. Translated by Pierre Commelin. Paris: Garnier.
McCUNE, Blanche Conger (2016). “Chloe tempestiva, misera, docta and arrogans (Horace, Odes 1.23, 3.7,
3.9 and 3.26)”. The Classical Quarterly, vol. 66, n.º 2, December 2016, pp. 573-579. Available at:
https://www.cambridge.org/
MORAIS, Ricardo Belo de (2013). “Em flagrante delitro, ou uma segunda história de amor”. O meu
Pessoa, 22nd October. https://omeupessoa.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/em-flagrante-delitro-
ou-uma-segunda-historia-de-amor/
PAUL, Saint (n/d). “First Letter to the Corinthians”. The Bible―King James Version (KJV), 13:12.
https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/1-Corinthians-Chapter-13

PESSOA, Fernando (2020). Poemas de Ricardo Reis. Edited by Luís Fagundes Duarte. Digital edition.
Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa de Moeda.
_____ (2016). Obra Completa de Ricardo Reis. Edited by Jerónimo Pizarro and Jorge Uribe. Lisbon:
Tinta-da-china.
_____ (2014). Obra Completa de Álvaro de Campos. Edited by Jerónimo Pizarro and Antonio Cardiello.
Lisbon: Tinta-da-china.
_____ (2013). Poemas Escolhidos de Álvaro de Campos. Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim.
_____ (2006). Poesia de Fernando Pessoa. Edited by Adolfo Casais Monteiro. Lisbon: Presença.
_____ (2005). Poesia 1918-1930. Edited by Manuela Parreira da Silva, Ana Maria Freitas and
Madalena Dine. Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim.
_____ (1996). Correspondência Inédita. Edited by Manuela Parreira da Silva. Lisbon: Livros
Horizonte.
_____ (1995). “Sister Cecily.” Poem 21 of The Mad Fiddler, in Poesia Inglesa. Edited and translated by
Luísa Freire. Lisbon: Livros Horizonte.
_____ (1993a). Álvaro de Campos – Livro de Versos. Critical edition, edited by Teresa Rita Lopes.
Lisbon: Estampa.
_____ (1993b). Pessoa Inédito. Edited by Teresa Rita Lopes. Lisbon: Livros Horizonte.
_____ (1993c). Poemas Ingleses: Antinous. Inscriptions. Epithalamium. 35 sonnets. Edited by João
Dionísio. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda.
_____ (1992). Poemas de Álvaro de Campos. Edited by Cleonice Berardinelli. Lisbon: Imprensa
Nacional-Casa da Moeda.
_____ (1990a). Poemas de Álvaro de Campos. Edited by Cleonice Bernardinelli. Lisbon: Imprensa
Nacional-Casa da Moeda.
_____ (1990b). Pessoa por Conhecer: Textos ara um Novo Mapa. Edited by Teresa Rita Lopes. Lisbon:
Estampa.
_____ (1988). Fausto – Tragédia Subjectiva. Edited by Teresa Sobral Cunha. Lisbon: Presença.
_____ (1982). Cartas de Fernando Pessoa a João Gaspar Simões. Edited by João Gaspar Simões. Lisbon:
Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda. 2nd edition.
_____ (1978). Cartas de Amor de Fernando Pessoa. Organization, postface, and notes by David Mourão-
Ferreira, preamble and establishment of text by Maria da Graça QUEIROZ. Lisbon: Ática.
_____ (1974). “35 Sonnets”. Poemas Ingleses. Fernando Pessoa. Translated by Jorge de Sena, Adolfo
Casais Monteiro, and José Blanc de Portugal. Ática. First published in 1921 as 35 Sonnets.
Lisbon: Olisipo.
_____ (1966a). Páginas Íntimas e de Auto-Interpretação. Edited by Georg de Rudolf Lind and Jacinto
do Prado Coelho. Lisbon: Edições Atica.
_____ (1966b). “21 dos 35 Sonnets de Fernando Pessoa – apresentação em português”. Alfa —Revista de
Linguística. Translated by Jorge de Sena, Adolfo Casais Monteir, and José Blanc de Portugal.
Universidade Estadual Paulista – Marília, São Paulo, n.º 10, pp. 7-24. https://periodicos.fclar.
unesp.br/alfa/article/viewFile/3280/3007
_____ (1956). Poesias Inéditas (1919-1930). Lisbon: Ática.
_____ (1950). Poesias de Álvaro de Campos. Lisbon: Ática.
_____ (1922). “António Botto e o ideal estético em Portugal”. Contemporânea, n.º 3, Lisbon, July, pp.
121-126.
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by Manuela Parreira da Silva and Manuela Nogueira. Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim.

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CHRIS GERRY gained his PhD in economics from the University of Leeds (UK) for a thesis on the
relations between large private companies, the State, and the micro-enterprises of the ‘informal’
economy in Dakar, Senegal. Between 1976 and 1997 he taught at Swansea University’s Centre
for Development Studies, conducting numerous studies on employment, poverty, and
development in countries such as Senegal, Colombia, Chad, Mozambique, and Kenya. In 2002,
he was appointed Professor of Economic Theory and Policy at the University of Trás-os-Montes
and Alto Douro (Portugal), later acting as Director of its Centre for Transdisciplinary
Development Studies (2008-2016). His main research concerns have been the urban informal
economy in Africa and Latin America, postcolonial socialist transition in Southern Africa, and
policies to promote entrepreneurship and local development in the sparsely-populated
territories of Portugal’s interior. Having undertaken translations throughout his career, since his
retirement in 2016, he has combined literary translations (e. g., Florbela Espanca’s short stories
and Judith Teixeira’s novellas and aesthetic manifestos) with research into some of the first
Portuguese women author-translators (Ana Plácido, Aurora Jardim, and Florbela Espanca) and
the emergence of translation as a profession in Portugal.
CHRIS GERRY é doutorado em Economia pela Universidade de Leeds (Inglaterra); a sua tese
analisou as relações entre as grandes companhias privadas, o Estado e as microempresas da
economia ‘informal’ em Dakar, Senegal. Entre 1976 e 1997, lecionou no Centro de Estudos do
Desenvolvimento da Universidade de Swansea, onde estudou problemas de emprego, pobreza
e desenvolvimento em países como Senegal, Colômbia, Chade, Moçambique e Quênia. Tornou-
se Professor Catedrático de Teoria e Política Económicas da Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e
Alto Douro (Portugal) em 2002, tendo sido eleito duas vezes Diretor do Centro de Estudos
Transdisciplinares para o Desenvolvimento (2008-2016). Tematicamente, a sua investigação
abrangeu não apenas a economia ‘informal’ das grandes cidades africanas e latino-americanas,
mas também a transição socialista pós-colonial na África Austral e as políticas de promoção do
empreendedorismo e do desenvolvimento local nos territórios de baixa densidade populacional
do Interior de Portugal. Tendo atuado como tradutor ao longo da sua carreira, desde a sua
aposentação em 2016, tem prosseguido projetos de tradução literária (por exemplo, os contos de
Florbela Espanca e as novelas e manifestos estéticos de Judith Teixeira), bem como estudos de
algumas das primeiras autoras-tradutoras portuguesas (Ana Plácido, Aurora Jardim e Florbela
Espanca) e o emergir da profissão de tradutor(a) em Portugal.

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From Florbela to Pessoa (in English):

Eight poems by Maria Lúcia Dal Farra with commentary

Translation, Florbela Espanca, Fernando Pessoa, Imaginary encounters, Poetic dialogues.

Tradução, Florbela Espanca, Fernando Pessoa, Encontros imaginários, Diálogos poéticos.

* Universidade de Lisboa, Gender Studies Unit, CLEPUL (https://www.clepul.eu); and Universidade

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 157

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 158

Preliminaries – Presenting Florbela

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 159

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 160

Quis amar, amar I wanted to love, to love

à moda do Porto. à la mode d’Oporto.]

Poem I. Just a little trickery and deceit

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 161

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 162

In these lines, Florbela’s impassioned advocacy of suicide resonates strongly; as

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 163

Poem I ends with an extended metaphor in which disappointments, both

Mas tu, Fernando, mesmo [But you, Fernando, even

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 164

Poem II. Passions, penchants, and prohibitions

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 165

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 166

As an epigraph to the Máscaras do Destino stories which she dedicated to her

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 167

15 The early psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) viewed homosexuality as an “inversion” of

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 168

Emissário de um Rei desconhecido Messenger of some King as yet unidentified,

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 169

Poem III. Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 170

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 171

Prince Charmant, [Prince Charming,

e eu para a minha Conchinchina. and I was going to my Conchinchina.

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 172

sem me encontrares?! and yet failed to find me?!]

Poem IV. Streetcars named ‘Desire’

Poem IV is predicated on the fact that, as documented in the published letters of

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 173

18 To Europeans, Cochin-China had become synonymous―deservedly or not―with factionalism,

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 174

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 175

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 176

Poem V. The Literatura de Sodoma affair

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 177

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 178

Esta sou eu: a Bela Who I am is Bela

Poem VI. “There are those who rise as they descend”

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 179

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 180

Ah, um verso meu de amor [Ah, that a love poem of my own

Se me quiseres, Fernando, If you want me, Fernando,

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 181

e viu and saw

Poem VII. “What I dream of is the love of a god!”

Onde está ele o Desejado? [So where is he then, my heart’s Desire?

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 182

Marriage to Guimarães turned out to be a mistake, for while he was a source of

Pessoa Plural: 21 (P./Spring 2022) 183