Mediating Transnational Reception in Portuguese Modernism: Fernando Pessoa and the English Magazines

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This essay argues that Fernando Pessoa played a key role as a cultural mediator between English and Portuguese modernist movements, presenting new findings about the importance of literary and cultural magazines for his reception of English Modernism. An examination of sources present in Pessoa’s archive, mentioned in his writings on modernist aesthetics and correspondence or relating to works in his private library, shows that Pessoa was familiar with important cultural magazines published in London in the first decade of the twentieth century. Additionally, such an examination traces Pessoa’s reception of writers, works, and movements featured in English magazines from the 1910s, and analyzes his engagement with the British avant-garde in his critical writings and literary production for Portuguese magazines.

KEYWORDS: Fernando Pessoa, Álvaro de Campos, poetry, heteronym, literary magazine, Blast, Orpheu, Cubism, Futurism, Imagism, Sensationism, Vorticism