See book on Sublunary Editions
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JACKET COPY
The Mariner: A Static Drama in One Act (1913), Fernando Pessoa’s only completed play, features three women in a circular room in an old castle keeping vigil over a dead body. As their conversation unfolds, the mystery of their situation deepens, and they circle around the knot at the heart of the play: the relation between dream and reality, memory and grief. Altogether, it is a strange, brief, and haunting work. This bilingual facing edition of the play includes an essay on the The Mariner by Antonio Tabucchi, as well as an afterword by translator Geoffrey Brock.
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COMMENTARY
“[T]he play was drafted in 1913 and revised and published (in the first issue of Orpheu) in 1915, which is to say in the eye of the heteronym hurricane… The play was written in a single burst (as Pessoa explained) in the space of a few hours, during the night of October 11-12, 1913. But shortly before publication, Pessoa made substantial and I would say substantive revisions, changes so significant as to suggest that in the meantime (that is, over the two intervening years) he had solved a problem in his poetics and was now in complete possession of the key. And because we know from his diary that those were precisely the years in which he was pursuing the secret, as he called it, of the ‘Shakespeare problem,’ the secret to translating the fiction/truth question into the realm of literature, it might not be too far-fetched to see The Mariner as shaped less by Maeterlinck’s symbolism than by the Shakespearian poetics Pessoa had studied with such zeal and tenacity: the ‘play within a play’ of Hamlet and of Prospero, characters through whom Shakespeare translated the ‘fiction’ that is life into the fiction that is theatre. The Mariner, however, is disguised in reverse, and to discover the Shakespearian one need not undress it but re-dress it. It could be a Shakespearean work stripped of action, of misfortune, of humanity: it is the grammar of Shakespeare that Pessoa, on the lathe of his reason, applies to the voices in his play.” —Antonio Tabucchi, “A Riddle for The Mariner”