'Crabbedness' and the backwards advance to Portugal: hyphenation in and the poetic impulse of Fernando Pessoa's 35 Sonnets.

   He that goes back does, since he goes, advance,
   Though he doth not advance who goeth back,
   And he that seeks, though he on nothing chance,
   May still by words be said to find a lack.
   (Sonnet XXXIII, 1-4) (1)

Perhaps once every century or so, a poet of such extraordinary talent appears that even his or her lesser works merit close study. Perhaps once in every five centuries or more, such a talent appears whose work in more than one language deserves such scrutiny. Such is the case of Fernando Pessoa's English poems. (2) These poems are certainly far from being his best work, but they deserve attention and have not yet found their proper place in the context of his entire body of work. (3) The present study will not attempt this more ambitious project, but will be limited to examining one of Pessoa's English-language works, the 35 Sonnets, starting from what is generally considered to be its greatest defect: its frequent hyphenation to coin new words, which I present as the ultimate manifestation of its highly complex and 'concentric' language. (4)

The two unattributed reviews that appeared in the Glasgow Herald and the Times Literary Supplement at the time of the sonnets' publication in 1918 (together with reviews of Pessoa's poem Antinous) both mention the involuted character of the poems' language. The first review is kinder, and suggests this characteristic, 'their ultra-Shakespeareanisms, and their Tudor tricks of repetition, involution and antithesis', as a reason for the interest in the sonnets, although the sonnet cited by the reviewer as an example (no. 30) contains no hyphenated words. (5) The second review is more critical: 'The sonnets are well done, and but for a certain crabbedness of speech, due to an imitation of a Shakespearean trick, would be excellent'. (6) Pring-Mill, in examining the themes of the sonnets in a 1971 article, affirms their worth while admitting that the style might put off the modern reader, and contends that the hyphenated words in particular would have justified the contemporary criticism the sonnets received. (7)

Yara Vieira's approach to the 35 Sonnets begins by taking Pessoa at his word in a letter to Armando Cortes-Rodrigues:

[Fernando Pessoa] nunca deixou de fazer o que 'quis'. Quando morava na Rua da Gloria, achou nos sonetos de Shakespeare uma complexidade que quis reproduzir numa adaptacao moderna sem perda de originalidade e imposicao de individualidade nos sonetos. Passados tempos realizou-os. (8)

She disagrees with Jorge de Sena's assertion that Pessoa was creating an understandable analogy for his friend, who was largely ignorant of English literature, because Cortes-Rodrigues would not understand the real model for the sonnets, a model which dated from the time of Elizabeth I and James I. (9) She asserts that these involutions of language are part of Pessoa's project to imitate Shakespeare, and shows (with some success) a dialogue with some of Shakespeare's sonnets. However, her interpretation of this dialogue does not stand on her analysis:

[E]ssas estruturas [ultra-Shakespeareanisms] servem a um propo sito nos sonetos pessoanos: sao a marca formal de um dialogo em que o segundo interlocutor estiliza, exacerbando-os, certos tracos determinantes do discurso do primeiro. Ha um mimetismo, sem duvida, que, no entanto, forca o objeto imitado a revelar o que poderia ser, uma vez levado as suas ultimas consequencias. (10)

This description, however, fits almost perfectly the following definition of parody: 'critical parody has been defined as the exaggerated imitation of a work of art. Like caricature it is based on distortion, bringing into bolder relief the salient features of a writer's style or habit of mind'. (11) Vieira does not claim that Pessoa is parodying Shakespeare, of course, but the definition she offers suggests that she has taken too seriously the possibility of a Shakespearean reading of Pessoa's sonnets. To establish the possibility of a dialogue between two poems is one thing, but the relationship she suggests is too rigid, and excludes other possible dialogues as an explanation for Pessoa's poems. I will return to Vieira's arguments later when I consider the sonnets in the context of Pessoa's heteronyms.

To analyse the use of this 'crabbed speech', I have focused on sonnets in which hyphenated words (posited before as the epitome of the involuted language of the sonnets) are most common. Within the entire body of the sonnets, forty-eight hyphenated words appear (not counting 'to-day', an accepted alternative form). However, the sonnets with few or no hyphenations tend to be more successful; the hyphenations can be more or less comprehensible to the reader, and successful within the poems, according to the extent to which the poetical constructions of the sonnet both call for their creation and justify it.

Sonnet II, chosen by Pring-Mill as the one with the most encumbered use of hyphenations, (12) contains seven such words. Pring-Mill complains that the majority of the hyphenations in this sonnet 'encumber the meaning without really intensifying it'; (13) however, it seems more accurate to say that they change the meaning, rather than change the degree of meaning, and that these changes are consistent with the overall meaning of the sonnet, even if they make the reader feel encumbered. Because of the number of hyphenations in the sonnet, we give it in its entirety:

   If that apparent part of life's delight
   Our tingled flesh-sense circumscribes were seen
   By aught save reflex and co-carnal sight,
   Joy, flesh and life might prove but a gross screen.
   Haply Truth's body is no eyable being,
   Appearance even as appearance lies,
   Haply our close, dark, vague, warm sense of seeing
   Is the choked vision of blindfolded eyes.
   Wherefrom what comes to thought's sense of life? Nought.
   All is either the irrational world we see
   Or some aught-else whose being-unknown doth rot
   Its use for our thought's use. Whence taketh me
      A qualm-like ache of life, a body-deep
   Soul-hate of what we seek and what we weep.

A principal theme of this sonnet is the physical, and therefore limited, nature of the senses. The words 'flesh-sense' and 'co-carnal' express the indissoluble link between our perception and our bodies. Lines seven and eight also reflect this theme, using not hyphenated words but adjectives with senses in unorthodox combinations: 'warm sense of seeing' and 'choked vision'. The two hyphenations, while not particularly elegant, do function within the scheme of the sonnet and are more or less understandable.

The remaining five hyphenations, all appearing in the last four lines, are considerably more troublesome. The first, 'aught-else', seems to mean simply 'something else whatever', and the second, 'being-unknown' seems to mean 'the state of being unknown'. These two are good examples of our more accurate restating of Pring-Mill's complaint about 'encumbered meaning'; the first gains very little in new meaning by its coining; that is, the concept it appears to imply could have been arrived at otherwise without demanding a novel word, and the second gains almost nothing, because the hyphen cannot be said to change the meaning in any clear way from 'being unknown'.

The couplet contains the last three hyphenations. '[Q]ualm-like' is a reasonably clear use of a common suffix, although the reader would have to be familiar with the less commonly used definition of the word, a feeling like nausea. The last two are perhaps the most ambitious in their attempt to create new meanings; 'body-deep' appears to mean 'as deep as the body is deep', such as in the word 'knee-deep', which is reasonably understandable, but 'soul-hate' is much more confusing. Normal English construction would suggest the meaning 'hate directed towards the soul', or possibly 'hate emanating from the soul'. Because a clause with 'of' follows, the second seems more likely, although Pessoa could be suggesting an identification of 'what we seek and what we weep' with the soul itself, or the inner nature of reality, which is hidden from our external sight, if it exists at all. It seems possible that Pessoa could be attempting to duplicate in a miniature version one of Shakespeare's highest poetic accomplishments: poems that contain two (or more) equally plausible and contradictory readings. Vieira points out the possible double reading of line six: 'Appearance even as appearance lies'. (14) However, most readers would probably agree on the superiority of a purposeful ambiguity using existing English words and definitions, rather than coined words. Although the concepts conveyed in the sonnet are certainly worth exploring, the demands placed on the reader by these hyphenations are not necessarily congruent with the rewards to be gained for engaging with them.

Sonnet v is an example of both fewer hyphenations (four rather than seven) and of a poetic context that better supports their use. In line four, 'time-greed' has a clear meaning in the context; the poet seems to wish for a word like 'avarice', but to describe the selfish consumption of, or desire for time. In line ten, 'Time-to-be' is a clear use of the suffix 'to-be', to describe something in the future. Line thirteen contains two hyphenations: 'true-Christian' and 'flesh-driven'. The first could possibly be an error, despite appearing this way in both the sources consulted, because both have some patent misprints. Whatever the case, there seems to be little difference made by the hyphen's presence. The definition of the second is quite clear: an adjective meaning 'driven by the flesh, or by the body'. This sonnet, then, clearly uses its hyphenated words more to its advantage than Sonnet ii.

Sonnet XVIII is something of a half-way house compared to Sonnets ii and v. It contains five hyphenations, most of which are fairly demanding to decipher, but which seem to relate closely to the sonnet's theme and therefore can better justify their demands on the reader. The first, 'co-substance', is reasonably clear in context, and seems to be a substance together with another substance. The second, in the phrase 'birth-bursting bubbles', is not so clear. Bubbles that burst births are difficult to visualize; 'bubbles that are born in bursts' seems more likely, but remains rather abstract. For the phrase 'high-walled maze', no definition is necessary. Verses eleven and twelve contain the final two hyphenations: 'Holding up to my thinking my thing-hand | And looking at it with thought-alien eyes'. The 'thing-hand' that is the poet's object of contemplation reflects the dual nature of physical matter that the poet posited at the sonnet's beginning, in the 'co-substances' of space and night; that is, the poet's hand is both his and not his; he is both physical object and contemplating subject. The meaning of 'thought-alien eyes' is less clear, but seems to be related to the preceding hyphenation. The poet holds up his hand to his thinking, not his vision, and when he does look, he looks without thought, as opposed to 'looking thoughtfully'. Also, this sonnet reflects similar themes to those touched on in Sonnet ii, specifically, the differences between senses and thinking, and for this reason alone the reader would be more prepared for hyphenations that deal with this theme.

Sonnet IX is perhaps the best example of a sonnet where the hyphenations all work clearly within the concepts presented by the poem. Part of its success may also have to do with its similarity of theme to Sonnet V, the motif of the failure to act or the inability to take action. The poet's description of his will to act contains two hyphenations, but they are both crystal clear: 'Like a fierce beast self-penned in a bait-lair'. Both coinages reflect perfectly the poet's likening of himself to a beast caught in a trap of his own creation; his lair is also the site of his torment. The final hyphenation, '[n]ot-acting', clearly functions as a gerund, and even if not as creative a coining as the others, it still functions well within the sonnet because of the concepts presented before it occurs.

The four sonnets examined give a more or less accurate demonstration of the use of Pessoan compounds, with their varying degrees of success. A fifth bears mention as an example of a nearly perfect sonnet, but for the use of one such compound that throws the reader off the track: Sonnet iii, which contains in line ten the word 'this-wise'. The word appears to use the suffix 'wise', as an indicator of direction or reference, as in the words 'clockwise' or 'moneywise'. Again, as with many of the compounds, the jolting effect on the reader from having to decipher such a word appears not to be justified by any ensuing insight, as the word appears to mean simply 'in this way'. This is unfortunate, because the rest of the sonnet is excellent, and establishes a very interesting dialogue with Shakespeare's Sonnet 81, which promises immortality to the beloved through the sonnet's future readings, as well as aptly expressing a universal concern of poets. (15) If we examine all of the 35 Sonnets' hyphenations, grouping them by theme, we find no clear majority or large categories. But there are a few recurring themes that appear, and are given below by category (some words appear in more than one category):

CATEGORY: SELF, I

WORD               SONNET NO.

self-known              7
self-sport              8
self-penned             9
self-uncontented       21
pageant-I (16)         22
not-I                  35

CATEGORY: 'CO-'

WORD               SONNET NO.

co-carnal               2
co-masked               8
co-substance           18

CATEGORY: NEGATION

WORD               SONNET NO.

Not-acting              9
brink-nothing          12
not-I                  35

CATEGORY: TIME

WORD               SONNET NO.

time-to-be              5
after-enjoyed          16
first-lived            27
to-be                  27
new-waved              27
fore-unwilled          29

CATEGORY: SENSE

WORD               SONNET NO.

flesh-sense             2
day-sense              26

CATEGORY: FLESH

WORD               SONNET NO.

flesh-sense             2
co-carnal               2
flesh-driven            5

While it seems impossible to make definite rules regarding the types of Pessoan compounds, it seems clear that many of them, particularly in the categories given above, are coined in an attempt to express a poetic philosophy, a philosophy which attempts to meet the paradoxes of life on their own turf, so to speak. Clearly the sonnets are the result of a poetic and philosophical intelligence, for all their defects. My analysis of a few of the sonnets that utilize more of these compounds and, I believe, the reader's perusal of the sonnets, will show many of them to be imperfect. Pring-Mill concedes that 'perhaps not more than half-a-dozen of them are totally successful'. (17) But if we view the sonnets as only partially successful, how are we to view them in terms of Pessoa's poetic project, and in light of his complete success in the Portuguese language?

Yara Vieira describes the sonnets as something close to an 'exercicio escolar, nao ao que se refere a qualidade dos poemas, mas ao tipo de impulso que presidiu a sua criacao' (original emphasis), basing this consideration on Pessoa's letter to Cortes-Rodrigues, mentioned previously. (18) She claims that Pessoa got the habit of imitating accomplished authors from his British education, (19) which is perfectly demonstrable, given his admiration and imitation of Carlyle during his adolescence. (20) She goes too far, however, in asserting that this imitation in English acted as a sort of antechamber to his eventual successful use of heteronyms in Portuguese. As an example of a poet with similar beginnings she mentions Swinburne, who in his Heptology published parodies of Tennyson, the Brownings and himself, among others. She says: 'se Swinburne, por exemplo, tivesse, nao escrito como poetas que realmente existiram, com uma feicao ja definida e reconhecida, mas criado, de maneira inconfundivel, um ou mais de um poeta--teria produzido heteronimos'. (21) It is precisely this accomplishment, however, which makes Pessoa highly unusual, if not unique. Vieira appears to have blurred the distinction between parody and imitation, and then the distinction between a dialogue between poems and the creation of heteronyms. Her point about a Pessoan-Shakespearian dialogue is well taken, but it does not lead to an explanation of the Pessoan heteronyms.

Moreover, positing the 35 Sonnets as the antechamber to the Pessoan heteronyms ignores the existence of heteronyms prior to the composition of the 35 Sonnets, which Vieira places between 1908 and 1914. Dr Pancracio, Eduardo Lanca, Charles Anon and Alexander Search all appear by the end of 1905, and the last two would continue as heteronyms into Pessoa's adult life. (22)

There is one statement of Vieira's that bears repeating and ought to be considered in criticism of the 35 Sonnets: her statement that the sonnets were motivated by a sort of 'exercicio escolar'. Pessoa's linguistic and cultural identity have been examined by Onesimo Almeida, using Bernardo Soares's statement, 'a minha patria e a lingua portuguesa'. (23) Almeida demonstrates that Pessoa recognizes no inherent superiority or beauty in Portuguese, but acknowledges its hold on his identity. While Pessoa was certainly strongly affected by his education in South Africa, Portuguese remained his mother tongue, not because he spoke it better, but because of its link to his childhood and family. English, for him, was the language of the intellect, while Portuguese was the language of the heart. (24) This head-heart dichotomy is well illustrated by the 35 Sonnets. Pessoa's identification with Portuguese ultimately led to his poetry in Portuguese being superior to his poetry in English, simply because his poetry was more engaged with the cultural, political and linguistic reality of his homeland; anyone familiar with Pessoa's philosophy should agree that he could never have produced an English-language equivalent of Mensagem, for example. (25) And Pessoa clearly moved beyond any idea of a modern reproduction of Camoes, to suggest an alternative theoretical cultural equivalent. He was too engaged in the reality of Portuguese culture to consider such a project worthwhile. For Pessoa, Camoes was too real, too present, to be imitated or worth imitating. Shakespeare was far away geographically, and his identity as a man had disappeared into his work. We should not wonder at the cerebral and abstract nature of these poems, whose zenith is in the hyphenations. (26)

It is unnecessary to diminish the value of Pessoa's English poems or the 35 Sonnets to assert the poet's true nationality, as some critics have done. If the British formed Pessoa's intellect, his spirit put it to the service of the Portuguese.

(1) All sonnets quoted in the text are taken from Fernando Pessoa, '35 Sonnets', in Poemas Ingleses Publicados por Fernando Pessoa, trans. by Jorge de Sena and others, Obras Completas de Fernando Pessoa, bilingual edition, 11 vols (Lisbon: A tica, 1974), xi. The same poems were published in Fernando Pessoa, Fernando Pessoa: Poemas Dramaticos . . ., ed. by Maria Aliete Galhoz (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1983), pp. 111-28; however, this source had many more errors than Poemas Ingleses, including the replacement of the last six lines of Sonnet xxx by the last six lines of Sonnet xxxiii, making it of little use. The most recent edition of the 35 Sonnets, which corrects the errors of Poemas Dramaticos, is a bilingual edition, Poesia Inglesa, ed. and trans. by Luisa Freire (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 1995), pp. 234-69.

(2) Samuel Beckett may be the best modern example, if indeed there are any other members of any age. I do not, for example, consider Gil Vicente's or Camoes's having written in Spanish as making them as 'bilingually ambitious' as Pessoa, because of the courtly literary traditions common to Iberia in their day. Nor do I include Milton, because he produced his Latin verses for essentially the same, classically-educated audience as his English verses, as opposed to attempting to write for two distinct linguistic and cultural groups.

(3) Jorge de Sena expresses the same opinion in his article, '21 dos "35 Sonnets" de Fernando Pessoa: Apresentacao em portugues', Alfa: Revista do Departamento de Letras, Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciencias e Letras de Marilia, 10, (1966), 7-24. He writes: 'Nao serao, estes sonetos, da maior poesia que Fernando Pessoa escreveu; mas serao sem duvida a sequencia poematica em que ele concentrou maior numero dos seus temas, das suas obsessoes, do seu gosto de jogar com os contrarios, e mais densamente meditou sobre a vida e a morte, o destino e o acaso, a poesia e a nao-poesia' (p. 9). Sena also considered them good enough to present a copy of The 35 Sonnets to the poet Edith Sitwell; see George Monteiro, 'Jorge de Sena/Edith Sitwell: Correspondence', Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies, 1 (1994), 5-28.

(4) This study is based on a paper I presented at the Northeast Regional Meeting of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, September 1996. I would like to thank George Monteiro, Onesimo Almeida and Jose Blanco for their comments and suggestions on the original.

(5) Americo da Costa Ramalho, 'Fernando Pessoa e o Times de Londres', Revista de Historia Literaria de Portugal, 1 (1962), 281-82.

(6) Robert D. F. Pring-Mill, 'The Themes of Fernando Pessoa's English Poems', Studies in Modern Portuguese Literature: Tulane Studies in Romance Languages and Literature, 4 (1971), 9-37 (pp. 36-37).

(7) Pring-Mill, pp. 35, 25.

(8) Vieira, Yara Frateschi. 'A Poesia Inglesa e a Dinamica da Heteronimia', Estudos Portugueses e Africanos, 21 (1993), 35-47 (p. 35).

(9) Vieira, 'Poesia Inglesa', p. 36.

(10) Vieira, 'Poesia Inglesa', p. 44.

(11) Robert P. Falk and William Beare, 'Parody', in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 600.

(12) Pring-Mill, p. 25.

(13) Pring-Mill, p. 25.

(14) 'Poesia Inglesa', p. 44.

(15) 'Poesia Inglesa', p. 43.

(16) None of the first three sources consulted (see note 1) link these words with a hyphen, but as Pring-Mill points out in his note 10 on p. 24, the meaning is clearer if they are read as such; indeed, the line would be redundant otherwise. Pring-Mill had no access to the originals, which have since been partly published in facsimile and with full annotations, in a critical edition by Joao Dionisio: Poemas Ingleses, 5 vols (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional--Casa da Moeda, 1993), v, Tomo I. While Pessoa does not link these words with a hyphen, they are clearly meant to be thought of as a unit, and Pessoa was searching for the best way to convey this idea. An alternative ending to Sonnet xxii by Pessoa appears in the manuscripts of the sonnets, in which the lines 9-14 are rewritten so that a phrase ('I the stiff pageant') substitutes for 'pageant-I' (Dionisio, p. 222). The translations of this term in the bilingual editions reinforce the meaning made clearer by a hyphen ('figurado eu', as rendered by Jorge de Sena, and 'cortejo-Eu', by Luisa Freire).

(17) Pring-Mill, p. 35.

(18) 'Poesia Inglesa', p. 35. For a more detailed discussion of Pessoa's readings of Shakespeare and Shakespearian criticism, see Yara Frateschi Vieira and Brian F. Head, '35 Sonnets: Uma Leitura de Shakespeare', in Um Seculo de Pessoa: Encontro Internacional do Centenario de Fernando Pessoa (Lisbon: Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, 1990), pp. 276-81. The authors dedicate much more of their discussion to Pessoa's thoughts on the question of Shakespearian authorship than to an explicit link between Shakespeare's and Pessoa's sonnets. They note (p. 279) that Pessoa appears more concerned with the identity of Shakespeare than with his sonnets.

(19) Vieira and Head, p. 47.

(20) See Pessoa's essay 'Macaulay', Durban High School Magazine (1904), which praises Carlyle highly, reprinted in Alexandrino Severino, Fernando Pessoa e o Mar Portugues, (Maia: Fundacao Engenheiro Antonio de Almeida, 1988), pp. 64-67.

(21) Vieira and Head, p. 47 (original emphasis).

(22) See Pedro da Silveira, 'Fernando Pessoa: a sua estreia aos 14 anos e outras poesias de 1902 a 1905', Revista da Biblioteca Nacional, se. 2, III, no. 3, Set-Dez. (1988), pp. 97-121, and Fotobibliografia de Fernando Pessoa, ed. by Joao Rui de Sousa, intro. by Eduardo Lourenco (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda/Biblioteca Nacional, 1988).

(23) Onesimo T. Almeida, 'Sobre o sentido de "a minha patria e a lingua portuguesa"', Coloquio-Letras, 97 (1987), 37-47.

(24) Almeida, p. 41.

(25) Luisa Freire concludes that English was the language of research and complex thinking for Pessoa, and that he realised his greatest expression of that thought in Portuguese. See page 57 of 'Fernando Pessoa retraduzido', Actas IV (Fundacao Engenheiro Antonio de Almeida), 2 (1988), 51-63.

(26) For further discussion of the 35 Sonnet's philosophical themes and paradoxes, see Joao Batista B. de Brito, 'Introducao informativo aos 35 Sonnets de Fernando Pessoa', in Fernando Pessoa: Estudos Criticos, ed. by Vilson Brunel Meller and Sergio de Castro Pinto (Joao Pessoa: Associacao de Estudos Portugueses Hernani Cidade, Universidade Federal da Paraiba, 1985), 69-76.

MARK A. LOKENSGARD

BROWN UNIVERSITY