Message

Message […] coincided, without any planning or premeditation (I’m incapable of being practical or premeditating anything), with one of the critical moments (in the original sense of the word) in the remodeling of the national subconsciousness. What I did by chance and what was bolstered by all the talk of others, had been perfectly sketched out, with Square and Compass, by the Great Architect.

Fernando Pessoa, in Letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, 13 January 1935

Message is one of the greatest poems in the whole of Portuguese literature. It was also Fernando Pessoa’s only book written in Portuguese to be published during his lifetime. At the time of its release, in October of 1934 (just over a year before the author’s death), Europe of the Enlightenment and freedom was succumbing to the advance of modern dictatorships, the escalation of expansionary nationalisms and a brand of imperialism based on atheistic materialism which, half a decade later, would trigger the Second World War.

It is out of this atmosphere of general European decline, and with unwavering focus on his own country in particular, that Pessoa orchestrates his Message: a telling of the great events and protagonists behind the genesis of Portugal, of the golden age of maritime discovery and of subsequent national entropy, all of it predictive and flowing towards the future construction of a new and different empire: the Fifth Empire, which, in the author’s vision, would be a matrix of spirituality, messianism and millenarianism.

Introduced and annotated by António Apolinário Lourenço, the present bilingual edition of Message offers to its readers both a guide for understanding and an interpretation of the poem in light of the history of Portugal and the doctrines of esoteric and heterodox Christianity, all of which played a central role in the intellectual education of Fernando Pessoa. This bilingual edition, with translations by Martin Earl, is introduced and annotated by António Apolinário Lourenço and illustrated by Fatinha Ramos.