Fernando Pessoa’s sonnets: Dislocations in form, persona and language

Abstract

Not widely known as a sonneteer, modernist poet Fernando Pessoa wrote enough sonnets to be considered prolific in that poetic form: in 2012, a total of 282 of his sonnets were known, including poems in Portuguese, English, French—and even one poem combining French and Portuguese. Since then, other sonnets have been transcribed from Pessoa’s archive, augmenting the published corpus to 312 poems. Approaching Pessoa’s sonnets as a privileged cross-section of the poet’s work, this article investigates the many dislocations—in form, persona, and language—they perform. Pessoa’s complex writing process, forming multiple intertextual webs, seems to be deeply informed by translation and other complex processes of migrating between languages. As an appendix, three previously unpublished English sonnets from 1933 are presented with critical apparatus.