100 years have passed since the death of Camilo Pessanha (1867-1926), in Macau, and 100 years later it is time to remember this man who was one of the masters of Portuguese poetic modernity. In the words of Bárbara Spaggiari, one of the greatest (perhaps the greatest) European symbolist poets.
The central question in Pessanha does not involve the biography and what about it are some common places, which hinder rather than clarify the power of his art. If you were an opioman, that’s secondary. The poetry of Clepsydra (ed. Lusitânia, 1920), the only book he published during his lifetime, in 1920, due to the wishes of Ana de Castro Osório, his editor and friend, that is what matters. The way his existence is in his poems and they are the essence of a biography, that is, of a life put and exposed in writing.
It is a poetry that is born from the desire to fix the impermanent reality (“Images that pass through the retina / why don’t you stay?”), at the same time that, to fix the fleeting images of this reality, Pessanha bets on the exploration of the symbol and the image, as, in the path of Mallarmé, the symbolist aesthetics postulated: “The symbol must suggest and evoke”, writes the French poet. Thus, the poem should give not a realistic or mimetic image of the envisioned object, but the fusion of the seen real with an intuited unreal.
To see beyond the immediate would be to write the poem in a permanent transition between reality and transcendence. Achieving essentiality through the intersection of planes (the interior and the exterior, the abstract and the concrete, the physical and the metaphysical, the past with the present and the future), in an extreme experience of sounds, as if only by achieving musical perfection the real could truly be understood by intensely suggesting, this is what Pessanha, since the 90s of the 19th century, in magazines that absorbed the influence of the French symbolists (Blue Bird, New Bohemiaor Or Intermezzo) offers poetry marked by a sentimentality that still has a late-romantic taste.
Poetry that, like ours, was only found in Cesário Verde (1855-1886) and António Nobre (1867-1900), the poets who truly pioneered the aesthetics that would become modern. Pessoa (1888-1935) and Mário de Sá-Carneiro (1890-1916) understand this and emphasize this when talking about Pessanha. For the creator of heteronyms, the poet of “Violoncello” would have taught us to “feel covertly” and for the author of Dispersal (1913), Pessanha was “the great rhythmist”.
And if we reread Pessoa, especially the orthonym, his poems in regular verse, in which the phonomelodic dimension is executed in an excellent way, it is still the echo of Pessanha that we truly sense as a lesson learned. An example? The poem “In the distance in the moonlight/ on the river a candle/ serenely passing by/ what does it reveal to me?” in which from the symbolic image of the candle (signifying the indecipherable enigma) the entire poem is organized. That is to say: one learns from Pessanha this general principle of poetry as a composition based on analogy, on what in Baudelaire (1921-1867) was the theory of correspondences in light of the following fact: “We know that symbols are only obscure in a relative way” (Revue Fantasyist1861).
Therefore, the impression that Pessanha’s poetry gives us is that it is an art of evanescence, of suggestion, of that which is prismatically apprehended but never completely defined. Proving this is this masterpiece of symbolism, “Choral arcades / of the cello! / Convulsed! / Winged bridges / Nightmarish!” There the polysemy of the lexeme “arcades” determines, by analogy, the meaning of the poem: arcades / arches of a bridge where boats pass towards death, future “blocks of ice”… All in fusion with the ambient music of a bow that vibrates on the strings of a crying cello.
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