Third and final part of the second collection of verse by the orthonymous, English-language Pessoa
With a rare autograph inscription from the author to his friend and fellow writer Augusto Ferreira Gomes, co-founder with Pessoa of the Olisipo publishing house:
« Ao Ferreira Gomes / com um abraço / off[erece] / Fernando Pessoa / Março, 1925 »
The year 1921 marks, in Pessoa’s life and work, the founding of Olisipo, a publishing and trading house whose name refers to Olisipolis, the mythical name for Lisbon, the “city created by Ulysses.” Thanks to a small inheritance, Pessoa created this entity—both commercial and literary—together with two friends, the engineer Geraldo Coelho de Jesus and the writer-journalist Augusto Ferreira Gomes, one of whose aims was to promote Lusitanian culture internationally. Freshly established by the three friends, this publishing house above all allowed Pessoa to bring out, in December of that same year, English Poems, in the form of two separate booklets: I-II for Antinous and Inscriptions, III for Epithalamium, together forming two of the five works the poet would publish during his lifetime. An unfortunate editorial venture, Olisipo would cease all activity in 1923, much like the many projects Pessoa undertook without ever fully carrying them through.
Epithalamium was composed, according to the date given at the end of the poem, in 1913. Pessoa places it within a cycle of five poems, each corresponding to an “empire” of amorous feeling. In a letter to João Gaspar Simões dated 18 November 1930, Pessoa writes: “Antinoüs and Epithalamium are the only poems (indeed the only compositions) I have written that are clearly what may be called obscenities […] This is where you will find the entirely unexpected violence of the obscenity revealed in these two poems—and above all in Epithalamium, which is direct and bestial. I do not know why I wrote these poems in English.”
It should be recalled that Pessoa owed his perfect command of English to his schooling in South Africa, where he followed his mother after she went to join João Miguel Rosa, her second husband, in Natal. Pessoa had already been composing poems in English during that period, notably under the pseudonym Alexander Search.
Of the utmost rarity.
