About the project
1. The digital edition
This digital edition of Fernando Pessoa's work was born out of a collaboration between the Estranhar Pessoa project, based at the IELT (Institute for the Study of Literature and Tradition), of the NOVA University of Lisbon, and the CCeH (Cologne Centre for eHumanities), of the University of Cologne. Made available to readers in 2017, it currently includes researchers from the Estranhar Pessoa project (IELT, NOVA FCSH), the University of Rostock and the EAFIT University of Medellín, including consultancy from the IDE (Institute of Documentology and Scholarly Editing) and from specialists in the work of Fernando Pessoa (see here the constitution of the team, institutions involved and sources of funding). Pedro Sepúlveda is responsible for the editorial coordination, Ulrike Henny-Krahmer for the technical coordination; Pedro Sepúlveda, Ulrike Henny-Krahmer and Jorge Uribe are responsible for the edition.
The website presents an edition of Fernando Pessoa's lists of editorial projects, which form a core part of his estate, as well as of the author's publications during his lifetime. In its current version, the edition includes the lists drawn up between 1913 and the end of Pessoa's life. With regard to the publications during his lifetime, we collected all the poetry published by the author between 1914 and 1935, in periodicals, pamphlets and in book form, under the names of Fernando Pessoa, Álvaro de Campos, Alberto Caeiro and Ricardo Reis, as well as all the prose published in lifetime, in newspapers and magazines, under the names of Fernando Pessoa, Álvaro de Campos and Bernardo Soares, from 1912 onwards (see Uribe, "Em vida de Fernando Pessoa — Lista de publicações 1912-1935").
All the documents in the Digital Edition are encoded according to criteria of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), which provide not only a basis for representing written sources on digital media, but also concepts and techniques for recording variants and versions. The reader will find here detailed documentation on the tools and criteria used in the electronic text encoding, explained through examples from the edition. This edition is constantly updated, making different versions available over time, which are indicated at the bottom of the opening page.
2. Project lists
The lists of projects were published in scattered form in various editions, and there was still a significant unpublished corpus, published here for the first time. They are decisive documents for understanding not only editorial but also poetic purposes, regarding the elaboration, fixation and systemic organisation of the work overtime. Their recognised relevance (cf. Cunha 1987, Sepúlveda 2013, Sepúlveda and Uribe 2016) finds expression in the establishment of a reference edition of these documents. This edition emphasises the relationship between the potential nature of the work and what was actually published. Indexes of documents, publications and genres, as well as of occurrences of names, titles and periodicals, make it possible to trace the chronology of both projects and publications, as well as to establish relationships between them.
The corpus of Pessoa's lists of editorial projects is delimited by opposition to other types of lists, also present in his estate, such as lists of readings, books, other objects or tasks to be carried out. With regard to editorial lists, for the purposes of this edition and in line with what has been argued, a distinction is made between lists of projects and editorial plans. While a plan is a list referring to a single work, which structures the constituent parts of a single title, lists of editorial projects bring together several titles of a particular nature, corresponding to different works. This edition only deals with lists of editorial projects, which may also contain plans and editorial notes for the titles listed, in which case they are also included in the edition. It is mainly through the lists of projects that it is possible to trace the history of the development of each title, project or work, as well as of its organisation, which is why they are decisive for the study and analysis of the work as a whole.
3. Publications in lifetime
When editing publications during the author’s lifetime, particular attention is paid to the specific way in which each text was published by Pessoa, taking into account its own characteristics as a bibliographic piece. Preserving these characteristics, to allow for a proper reading, republications that integrate a certain text into a distinct set are edited as autonomous units, while publications of the same text that only present textual variations between them are confronted in a critical text. This particular attention is in line with Jerome McGann's considerations (1991, 13-16) regarding the importance of the text's bibliographic code. Extending his considerations to the field of digital editing, McGann (2001, 11-12) emphasised the need to reconcile, in a digital edition, the purposes of a critical and a facsimile edition, emphasizing the bibliographical elements of each text’s medium, as well as its own context of publication. The edition considers these particularities through the articulation between the facsimile and the edited text, and the presentation of each text as a piece belonging to a given context and published on a certain medium, with its own visual and linguistic characteristics. As the edited text is presented next to the facsimile, its fixation on the new medium doesn’t need to provide an absolute typo- and chirographic correspondence. Instead, the text is presented as a structured version, with specific markings for each element.
While the variations between different publications, which correspond to different entries, are briefly indicated in an editorial note, the textual variations between publications of the same set or of an isolated text, which include punctuation and the use of capitalisation, are presented in an immediately visible way in the body of the text, using the “parallel segmentation method”. In either case, a brief editorial note identifies the various publications of the text and their fundamental differences. The strategy of the "parallel segmentation method" is based on encoding the variants precisely where they are found in the text to be edited. Thus, the apparatus is not stored separately, but directly integrated into the text. All the variants are reproduced in the edition, favouring one of them in the body of the text, according to textual coherence and the circumstances of publication. This is particularly important in the case of Pessoa, allowing to choose a variant corresponding to one of the versions of the text, always taking into account the wider bibliographical context, and thus establishing a critical text that is sensitive to the whole of his work.
4. Criteria and goals of the edition
The edition benefits from the possibilities offered by the digital medium, presenting to the reader a combination of different modalities of editing the texts. Regarding the documents of the estate, three editing modes are presented: 1. diplomatic transcription, including all variants, hesitations and passages later rejected by the author; 2. first version of the text, as established and not rejected by the author, including the development of abbreviations; 3. last version of the text not rejected by the author, also including developed abbreviations. In the case of the publications during lifetime, two types of editing are offered: 1. conservative transcription, preserving the original spelling, and keeping the abbreviations introduced in the text; 2. transcription with modernised spelling, following the Portuguese 1990 Spelling Agreement, including the development of abbreviations in the prose texts. Any page breaks are indicated in square brackets in the margin of the text.
Given the existence of textual variants in the documents of the estate, previous editions in book format are defined on the basis of the textual reading chosen and the established version of each text. As is widely known, some editions tend to follow the first reading of the text, others the last, and there are also cases in which the choice between variants is made on the basis of a hermeneutical approach (cf. Duarte 1988, Lopes 1992, Galhoz 1993, Martins 2011 and Castro 2013). This edition provides different ways of accessing each text, seeking to avoid some of the previous oppositions between editorial criteria and taking into account the dynamism of the author's writing and its different stages.
This combination of different modalities of editing offers new ways of accessing Pessoa's work, focussing both on a significant part of his literary estate, held by the National Library of Portugal (BNP) or by private individuals (CP), and on the publications made during his lifetime. The acronym BNP on the documents, followed by a signature, indicates that they are part of the National Library's collection, contained in its envelope 3. Documents in private collections are referred to by the acronym CP, followed by a number. In publications during lifetime, texts are referred to by their publication titles, respecting the way in which they were published. For a minimal standardisation of titles, modern spelling is used in the access menus; titles of poems are always indicated using capital letters, except for articles and prepositions, in prose only with initial capital letters. In the case of book prefaces, the title is followed by an indication of the work being prefaced.
The edition includes a specialised bibliography, mainly gathering references to the sources that have made the various documents of the estate accessible over the years, offering a glimpse into the potential character of Pessoa's work as a set of projects. This bibliography also indicates editions, essays, academic articles or works of scientific dissemination that, in recent decades, have contributed to the rediscovery of elements of the work published by the author during his lifetime.
The textual variants, as well as the underlined or crossed-out passages, are presented in their entirety in the diplomatic transcription of each document, in a graphically legible way and without any additional symbols. The diplomatic transcription aims to maintain some correspondence to the graphic layout of the original document, reproduced in a facsimile that accompanies each text and complements its reading. In this sense, we kept all the variants and crossed out passages in the diplomatic transcription, not including these elements in notes. Not only does this make the development of projects from one list to another visible, but within the list itself it is often possible to see the substitution of one project for another or the uncertainty maintained regarding different versions of a given project. Hyperlinks are also included between projects mentioned in lists and the author’s publications, whenever there is a clearly identifiable correspondence between a project and its materialisation in a publication. The following symbols are used in the transcriptions:
-
□ blank space left by the author -
* conjectural reading -
/ / segment questioned by the author -
† illegible word -
[ ] abbreviations expanded
In a brief note to each document of the estate, we refer to its previous publication, when it is not unpublished. The reference is made to its earliest publication, except in cases where a more recent publication has significantly improved readability. The notes also refer to material and content elements considered for their dating. Material elements considered for dating are the type of font used, handwritten or typed, and the type of medium. This includes letterheads, many of which relate to firms Pessoa worked for at certain times, and watermarks on the paper.
The abbreviation "c." ("circa") points out the conjectural nature of dating, which depends on an interpretation of the elements and an understanding of the work that goes beyond its materiality. In cases of greater doubt, we indicate a time span of two or more years ("c. 1916-1917" or "c. 1918-1920") or we indicate that the list belongs to a certain period ("1916-1919" or "1920-1927"). The abbreviations "ant." ("before") and "post." ("after") indicate that a document was written close to, before or after a certain date.
A search engine makes it easier to search for specific contents and provides different ways of accessing the information contained in the texts. Texts can be accessed in different ways: by searching for an author, a document, a publication or a literary genre, or by exploring the indexes of names, titles of works and periodicals mentioned in the texts.
The history of projects and publications is also that of the dynamic development of writing and its fixation in a publication or through a proposed editorial organisation. These different fixations are, although they change over time, occasionally significant, contributing to a definition of the work from a point of view that is not only editorial but also poetic and systemic. Tracing the history of Pessoa's projects and publications thus means analysing a work under construction, but one that alludes to a greater purpose, that of a projected formation of its meaning as a fully established whole.
The aim is to contribute, through an editorial work that includes a hermeneutic approach, to a clarification of fundamental critical issues in Pessoa Studies, such as the discussion around the fragmentary or unitary nature of the work (cf. Coelho 1949, Gusmão 2003, Martins 2003, Sepúlveda 2013, Feijó 2015). The fragmentary nature of some of the texts does not exclude the author's intention to go beyond this, envisioning a systemic fixation of the work, which, in line with his permanent dissatisfaction, never reached a definitive form. This edition shows that Pessoa was constantly working on the organisation of his work, as can be seen in the lists of editorial projects gathered and analysed here, in contrast to or in accordance with the publications made during his lifetime. In both types of text we can see how the design of the work depended on the definition of its contents, the establishment of relationships between titles, and the attribution of authorship, expressed in the famous creation of authorial figures, including the one who signs with the poet's own name.