Centre stage for Pessoa

It was like a mini Portuguese invasion in the Parnell Square environs of Dublin last week when the Irish Writers' Centre and …

It was like a mini Portuguese invasion in the Parnell Square environs of Dublin last week when the Irish Writers' Centre and the James Joyce Centre on nearby North Great George's Street were the venues for 'Fernando Pessoa and James Joyce: Two Writers, Two Cities', a dual celebration and compare-and- contrast session about the pair.

The brainchild of the Portuguese ambassador to Ireland, Fernando d'Oliveira Neves, speakers included translator Richard Zenith. Zenith virtually has another career now, deciphering the handwriting on the remaining unpublished manuscripts of Pessoa (1888-1935), who liked to drink while he wrote, which exacerbated illegibility. Zenith spoke of how Pessoa's habit of inventing personas or heteronyms, under whose names he later wrote the bulk of his work, dated back to childhood. The fact that Pessoa's niece, who is still alive, has a floral book that belonged to the writer's mother, in which the child Pessoa listed the name of his earliest invented persona, the Chevalier de Pas, showed how much - even then - Pessoa sought to give real exitstence to his personas. This was, Zenith added, evidence that the heteronomy central to the writer's work was more than a literary game.

Zenith said Pessoa studied the link between madness and genius and felt the fact that his grandmother was insane was a sign he had genius.

Though Pessoa owned a copy of Ulysses, Zenith said, "I don't think he got through it. I don't think he had all that much sympathy for it".

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David Butler, of the James Joyce Centre, said that while, at first sight, W.B. Yeats seemed the obvious writer to compare with Pessoa, once one thought of the nature of the great theatre of the self that plays itself out in their work it was obvious that Pessoa had much more in common with Joyce (and also Samuel Beckett). He mentioned many of the coincidental things that Pessoa (pictured below) and Joyce had in common: their spectacles, which made them look uncannily alike; the inordinate number of addresses they passed through, creating a pattern of uncertainty of abode established in childhood whose trauma informed their writing. Both were educated by religious, Joyce by the Jesuits, Pessoa by Irish nuns. There is also a most obvious point of comparison - the facility with which they moved between European languages. And there was their relationship to their native cities, Dublin and Lisbon.

"If Joyce is the self-exiled writer whose art is eternally obsessed with the city from which he is absent, Pessoa is the internal exile who becomes an absence at the heart of the city to which he has returned," Butler said. He also raised tantalising questions about Stephen Dedalus and the mutation of the self. The mind boggled with possibilities: was Stephen Joyce's semi-heteronym?

Butler's Selected Poems of Fernando Pessoa, just published by Dedalus (reviewed on page 11, Weekend Review), is available at both centres as well as in various bookshops.

A musical recital linked to the work of the writers also took place at the James Joyce Centre, while an exhibition, Pessoa Revisited, organised by Fernando Pessoa House in Lisbon, was opened at the Irish Writers' Centre, where it will run until May 7th. A handsomely produced book by Butler and Zenith about the two writers is also available.

Joao Francisco Ramos de Vilhena, who conceived the exhibition, describes it as a short journey to Pessoa's immense universe, experienced through the different senses. Particularly appealing is the water pool in the centre, filled with cellophane-wrapped notes. You'll have to go there to see what they say.

Six left in Orange

The Orange Prize for Fiction often throws up surprises and this year is no exception. Monica Ali's Brick Lane was on the longlist but failed to make the shortlist announced this week, while a 25-year-old from Nigeria, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, made it with her debut novel, Purple Hibiscus. The young writer has been catapulted onto a list dominated by such doyennes as Shirley Hazzard, with The Great Fire, and Margaret Atwood, with Oryx and Crake. The winner of the £30,000 prize for women's writing will be announced on June 8th. The Nigerian author is the only first-time novelist on the shortlist, with her coming-of-age tale set in her home country during the military dictatorship of the mid-1990s.

The three other shortlisted books are The Colour by Rose Tremain; Ice Road by Gillian Slovo; and Small Island by Andrea Levy.