Portuguese American Journal

Book | In the Footsteps of a Shadow: Literary Responses to Fernando Pessoa | Charles Cutler et al – Editor’s Note

This anthology is the first of its kind and represents the huge influence Pessoa has had on the modern and contemporary literary scene. Covering from over one hundred poets and writers in this anthology. Readers will find playful, absurd, profound, and welcoming writing. We have included a selection of work for your perusal.

Poets and writers in the U.S. have been captivated by the Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa since Thomas Merton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Edwin Honig, and Susan Brown began translating his work in the 60s and 70s. George Monteiro was instrumental, through his creative and scholarly work, in bringing Pessoa to wider audiences outside of Portugal and Erin Moure & Richard Zenith have been just as instrumental in keeping those Pessoa fires burning. This anthology is the first of its kind and represents the huge influence Pessoa has had on the modern and contemporary literary scene. To that end, we have work from over one hundred poets and writers in this anthology. 

Pessoa once said, “To pretend is to know oneself.” He took this maxim to the extreme, creating upwards of eighty clearly defined heteronyms that wrote poetry and prose and interacted with each other, the world, and even their creator. These heteronyms were not pseudonyms or disguises but were the spiraling iterations of a person (“Pessoa” means “person” in Portuguese) who ultimately declared—in true Whitmanian form— “I only know myself as a symphony.” Pessoa is utterly contemporary in this time where authors create or dissolve identities at will, write novels on Twitter, and plaster their avatars on social media walls. Kent Johnson considers the future of the culture industry when 10,000 heteronyms are writing to and about each other through time, “re-valuing, dis-assembling, re-making the canon… Heteronyms can float through the walls of the Museum at will.” But the work in this anthology also addresses questions how writers engage the variations of “self” internalized by the act of writing. As contributor Chris Merrill so succinctly puts it, “…the voices running through my lines seem to come from somewhere else, in the manner of his heteronyms. Pessoa taught me how to listen.” In this anthology, readers will find playful, absurd, profound, and welcoming writing. We have included a selection of work for your perusal.

 

“This lush florilegium of poetic evocations, variations, and inquiries is a beautiful testament to how far and fruitfully Pessoa’s shadow reaches.”– Richard Zenith

“This book is one of a kind. What it reveals is how a master of nothingness can inspire an endless fabric of thingness woven by others. This book offers us echoes and reechoes springing from a void. It is a reworking of Genesis. Overwhelming.”– Alexis Levitin

“Fernando Pessoa enters the imaginations of these gifted American poets like a frightening medicine, challenging them to self-divide, multiply, re-nounce stability, and relish in the dead-time that our culture so vehemently abhors. Like a slippery thorn in the myth of bigger, better individualism, Pessoa seems to have privately solicited these poets for disturbing conversa- tions about nothing: a nothing that he promotes as everything.” — Larissa Szporluk

“This superb anthology offers ample testimony to Pessoa’s place now in the North American literary mainstream as well as to the momentum towards this distinction that has been building over time.” — Onésimo Almeida

 

About the Editors

 Charles Cutler, a Professor Emeritus at Smith College, specialized in Romance Languages and Literatures, with a Fulbright-funded focus on Spanish-Portuguese literary relations in the 17th century. His fascination with Pessoa shaped his teaching, particularly a Poets Translating Poets workshop that inspired this anthology.

Dan Mahoney, a writer, editor, and translator, earned his MFA in poetry from UMass Amherst. His book Sunblind Almost Motorcrash explored fictional music reviews that became real collaborations with musicians. He met Cutler during his MFA years and has since played a key role in finalizing the Pessoa anthology.

Gaby Gordon-Fox,  along with Dan Mahoney editor-in-chief at Bateau Press, provided additional support. A former managing editor at AdHat Press, she was a great help in organizing this project. 

 

Book Details

Title: In the Footsteps of a Shadow: Literary Responses to Fernando Pessoa

Editores: Charles Cutler, Dan Mahoney, Gaby Gordon-Fox

Publisher‏:‎ MadHat Press

Publication Date: February 1, 2025

Language‏: ‎English

Paperback: 386pp

Available @ Amazon.com

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