Mariana Gray de Castro – författare

Eighteen short essays by the most distinguished international scholars examine Pessoa's influences, his dialogues with other writers and artistic movements, and the responses his work has generated worldwide.Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa claimed that he did not evolve, but rather travelled. This book provides a state of the art panorama of Pessoa's literary travels, particularly in the English-speaking world. Its eighteen short, jargon-free essays were written by the most distinguished Pessoa scholars across the globe. They explore the influence on Pessoa's thinking of such writers as Whitman and Shakespeare, as well as his creative dialogues with figuresranging from decadent poets to the dark magician Aleister Crowley, and, finally, some of the ways in which he in turn has influenced others. They examine many different aspects of Pessoa's work, ranging from the poetry of the heteronyms to the haunting prose of The Book of Disquiet, from esoteric writings to personal letters, from reading notes to unpublished texts. Fernando Pessoa's Modernity Without Frontiers is a valuable introduction to this multifaceted modern master, intended for both students of modern literature and general readers interested in one of its major figures.

The Portuguese Antonio Pedro (1909-1966) was a cosmopolitan and multifaceted artist; one of the pioneers of surrealism in Portugal, both as a visual artist and as a writer. He was involved in the London surrealist group in 1944-5. Today Pedro is perhaps best remembered for his steadfast opposition to Salazar's long dictatorship, initially as a BBC radio broadcaster in wartime London and, on his return to Portugal, as the director of TEP (Teatro Experimental do Porto) throughout the 1950s.Just a Story (1942) comes at the halfway point in his forward-looking transnational trajectory. Pedro lived in Brazil in 1940-1 and, while largely ignored up to now, his experience of modernity in the tropics included encounters with major Brazilian cultural players such as Mario de Andrade, Jorge de Lima, Jorge Amado, and Antonio Candido. Just a Story stands, up to a point, as a miniature Portuguese equivalent of the groundbreaking Brazilian rhapsody Macunaima: an iconoclastic novella- or a novel, if we adopt the label Pedro bestowed on his creation simply ‘because he felt like it'. Illustrated by the author, it combines surrealist tendencies with the irreverent streak that so frequently distinguished Brazilian modernism. Written predominantly from a first-person perspective, this surreal tale follows the amazing adventures of the protagonist, including his birth in the rural North of Portugal, his picaresque migration to the city, his uncanny love tryst with alluring Lulu, and his final homecoming and mind-blowing demise. To read it is to step into a child-like world of dreams and playful delight in the nonsensical. Yet, at the same time, this thought-provoking work also invites the reader on a meaningful, profound journey through human experience and reality.