Letters by a sincere pretender: the esoteric discourse in Fernando Pessoa’s letters

Abstract

The present article is focused in letters that Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) wrote from 1913 to 1916, a period marked by his intelectual and esoteric crisis, and also by the production of cultural projects needed to take away the cultural stagnation from the timid Portuguese capitol. Important letters are from this period, marked by sincerity and confession to the addresses, as Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues (1891-1971) and Mário de Sá-Carneiro (1890-1916), unlike of what happens in the next years after 1927, when Pessoa writes to the members from the Presença magazine, choosing to keep informations as a secret. It’s what happens at the knowing letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, wrote in January 13th, 1935, in which he denies to belong to some secret order, unlike it’s found in a autobiographical write, not published during his lifetime. I take, as main theoretical frame of reference to the study of letters, Crabbé Rocha’s proposals, in the book A epistolografia em Portugal. In many Pessoa’s letters poems transcripts are found. This way, the study about Pessoa’s letters allows to understand the symbolic and metaphoric aspects contained in the poems. To the analysis about the esoteric speech contained in Pessoa’s letters, I use Manuela Parreira da Silva, Dalila Pereira da Costa e Yvette Centeno’s
studies.