An exciting discovery: a forthcoming publication of the Philosophical Essays of Fernando Pessoa.¹ I don’t know offhand how many of the essays were written in Portuguese and whether any were in Pessoa’s sort-of-native English (no translator being named), but judging by the publisher’s self-description this should be a fully English edition.

Pessoa’s forays into philosophy tend to be considered to lack intrinsic interest and to be derivative of already existing secondary literature: as Mendo Castro Henriques puts it, ‘the philosophical notes of young Fernando Pessoa... illustrate his debt to the history of Philosophy more through commentators than through a first-hand protracted reading of the Classics,’ and ‘if we evaluate such texts through a philosophical standard, we must acknowledge their conceptual content as frustrating’. It’s their place within his heteronymic life that mainly lends them interest, and it’s that life and literature that has tended to make people (myself included) philosophically interested in him. It’s for that reason that I’m greatly hoping for illuminating critical apparatus.

1. After last year’s Metaphysical Courier (another book still to get hold of), perhaps it seemed timely. ↩