Epic Skies and Lyric Seas in Portuguese Macau

In the Portuguese poet Camilo Pessanha’s early-twentieth-century Macau, the work of the great maritime poet Luís de Camões (ca. 1524/25–80) was quite literally in the air. On 4 July 1924, a trio of Portuguese aviators carried out the first-ever nonstop flight from Lisbon to Macau—a feat that Pessanha called, in a celebratory speech delivered the same evening, “o primeiro raid aéreo Lisboa–Macau” (“the first Lisbon–Macau air raid”; Pessanha, Contos 16).Footnote ¹ “Raid,” a term that had been lately imported from English, lent a bellicose rhetorical edge to the colonial-era air show. Coming to the aid of this verbal blitz was Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads), the much celebrated epic poem that Camões had published nearly four centuries earlier, in 1572. The poem recounts Vasco da Gama’s 1497–99 voyage opening the sea route to India, a feat that the aviators recognized as the historical antecedent to their own uncharted crossing. In his 1925 account of their journey, the crewmember Sarmento de Beires would explain that the word “Pátria” (“Homeland”) had been inscribed on the silvery fuselage of their Bréguet 16 biplane, as a nod to a verse from the poem’s third canto honoring Portugal (10): “Esta é a ditosa pátria minha amada” (“This is my beloved homeland most blessed”; Camões 3.21). The airmen’s choice to invoke Camões on their journey over Portugal’s long-standing colonial enclave in East Asia aligned with broader trends in twentieth-century aviation throughout the lusosphere. Kenneth David Jackson notes that the first transatlantic flights between Portugal and Brazil were linked in art, literature, and public oratory to early modern sea voyages (Cannibal Angels 133). In amplifying this resonance, the Pátria’s crew also hoped to recapture something of the imperial luster that Camões, himself a seasoned mariner, had warily memorialized in his epic poem, hailing as they did from a politically and economically hobbled Portugal.

Camilo Pessanha (1867–1926) was a Portuguese poet, essayist, and translator of Chinese poetry. In 1894, after an abortive career as a jurist in his native city of Coimbra, he sailed to Macau, taking up a post as an instructor of philosophy at the Portuguese lyceum. In 1920, he published his only book of poems, Clepsydra (or Clepsidra in some editions), in close collaboration with his longtime confidant Ana de Castro Osório. Through a series of posthumous expansions, Clepsydra would go on to include the vast majority of his unpublished and separately published poems. Pessanha composed roughly half of his poems in the colony of Macau and the other half in Portugal (Pessanha, Clepsidra 130). Like others cheering on the Pátria that day, Pessanha venerated Portugal’s oceanic bard. To his way of thinking, the Portuguese aviators’ successful journey registered, however fleetingly, the recovery of a Camonian spirit of colonial enterprise that he believed characterized the best literature written abroad in Portuguese.

Pessanha was active at a time of aesthetic transition and critical reflection on the Portuguese maritime tradition, straddling the lusophone symbolist movement and the modernist wave known as the geração d’Orpheu (the generation of writers associated with Orpheu magazine). His poetry, like Camões’s before it, broadly admitted foreign influence, even if Pessanha’s lyrically expressed emotion was avowedly Portuguese and his most deeply felt maritime intertext Os Lusíadas. Located at the crosscurrents of French symbolist aquatics and traditional Portuguese maritime literature, Clepsydra was product and catalyst of a turn-of-the-century francophile milieu where Camões, shipwreck tropes, and fin de siècle notions of ennui, or stylized boredom, intermingled. Through his synthesis of these motifs and themes, Pessanha would go on to reenergize a Portuguese tradition of oceanic writing that had calcified into the literary nostalgia of a waning imperial power. I chart Pessanha’s Franco-Portuguese waters for two reasons. First, guided by the compass of his French readings, Pessanha secured his place of distinction among Portugal’s oceanic writers and as a lodestar for Portuguese maritime modernism. His French-influenced poetry of marine ennui embraced the suggestive potential of shipwreck and amplified the always-already fluid citational practices of maritime literature. This alone marked a significant point of contrast between Pessanha and his politically revanchist contemporaries, for whom shipwreck straightforwardly figured Portuguese political and cultural decline. It also showcased the dynamic flow of sensations that would come to define Portuguese modernism, particularly in the paulista (“swampist”) and interseccionista (“intersectionist”) variants developed by Fernando Pessoa and his collaborators. Second, Pessanha’s French-inflected maritime poetry contains an articulation of ethnic sentiment that is itself a disavowal of ethnopoetic purity, a paradox that calls into question Pessanha’s status as a self-professed “intérpret[e] do sentimento étnico” (“interpreter of ethnic sentiment”; China 122) residing in Macau.

I map Pessanha’s oceanic voyages (literally to East Asia and literarily to Paris) in terms of their ironic intertextual hybridity to argue that Pessanha’s Macau-based Franco-Portuguese poetry debuted what I call a blue poetics of citation.Footnote ² A cosmopolitan poet who had drunk deeply of his country’s maritime tradition, Pessanha refined a poetic practice that understood oceanic literature as innately recursive and transnational, one whose citational openness went on to generate maritime writing that was neither deracinated nor provincial. Its unique confluence of domestic and foreign literatures also foregrounded the role of sound in oceanic writing, establishing a basis for maritime subjectivity—with postcolonial reverberations—in the acoustic correspondence between poetic voice and oceanic soundscape.

Camilo Pessanha’s Discovery of the Old World

Pessanha’s first encounter with the French symbolists may have come about between 1884 and 1891, while Pessanha was a law student at the University of Coimbra. At Coimbra, he struck up a number of enduring intellectual friendships, most notably with Alberto Osório de Castro, one of the directors of Bohemia nova (New Bohemia) and Ana de Castro Osório’s brother. Osório de Castro’s journal contended with Os insubmissos (The Uncowed) for the title of most prestigious literary review affiliated with the university. While Pessanha did not contribute any writing of his own to either student publication, through his peers’ recommendations he would amass an extensive bibliography on the fin de siècle French poets. Bohemia nova regularly ran a column entitled “De Paris” (“From Paris”), a reading list blending national and foreign authors, mostly French. Along with symbolist heavy hitters, such as Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé, the columns featured lesser-known names like Francis Poictevin (Bohemia nova 27). In his essay “Macau e a gruta de Camões” (1924; “Macau and the Grotto of Camões”), Pessanha characterizes the ideal poet as a “suprem[o] intérpret[e] do sentimento étnico” (“supreme interpreter of ethnic sentiment”; China 123). Nevertheless, if one is to judge by Pessanha’s own output, the ideal poet’s interpretation could be voiced in a foreign cadence. While Pessanha commemorated Camões’s “velhos ritmos” (“ancient rhythms”; Clepsydra 107; 108) in “San Gabriel,” his poem on da Gama’s flagship, in a letter to Carlos Amaro he wrote of his great metrical debt to Verlaine’s “Le son du cor s’afflige vers les bois” (“The Sound of the Horn Wails toward the Woods”). Pessanha described the poem’s decasyllables—the same meter of “San Gabriel”—as haunting (Contos 171).

Pessanha’s long-standing identification with French verse style took on added significance in the wake of turn-of-the-century debates in Portugal regarding the “nacionalização” (“nationalization”; Bohemia nova 75) of traditional French forms such as the twelve-syllable alexandrin with a medial caesura. In 1889, the “polémica dos alexandrinos” (“polemic of the alexandrines”) played out across the pages of Bohemia nova and Os insubmissos. Representing Bohemia nova, Osório de Castro expounded on a novel form that consisted of three feet of four syllables each, with or without a caesura. Writing for Os insubmissos, the prominent symbolist Eugénio de Castro countered that Osório de Castro’s form had strong precedents in the French tradition. Eugénio de Castro would rehearse the same argument a year later, in the preface to his influential Oaristos (1890; Intimate Conversations), taking his compatriots to task for their misapprehension of the imported French metrics and the “vulgaridade” (“vulgarity”) of their rhymes (21; see 21–22). In matters of prosody, Pessanha avoided attaching a sectarian quality to the scansion of his poems. Instead he affirmed an unqualified cosmopolitan streak that would bring his work into sympathy with that of the Portuguese modernists, even as he found himself adrift between the currents of French and Portuguese symbolism—and between nationally chauvinist and fluidly transnational maritime literatures.

Throughout Pessanha’s poetic oeuvre one readily observes the superimposition of French symbolist synesthesia and intellectual preoccupations onto traditional Portuguese maritime leitmotifs and frame narratives. Consider, for instance, Pessanha’s most famous contribution to the long tradition of Portuguese shipwreck literature, the untitled poem known as “Chorai arcadas” (“Weep, O Wildly”), composed in 1900 though first published in 1916 and alternately titled “Violoncelo” (“Cello”). The poem was among Pessoa’s favorite poems, and the critic Fernando Cabral Martins has called it one of the Portuguese symbolist movement’s most vivid exemplars (“Appearances” 248). It is also Portuguese maritime tragedy’s most imaginatively aloof descendant. In Pessanha’s shipwreck poem, the cello’s bridge gives rise to a nightmarishly synesthetic scene that calls to mind Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne” (“Autumn Song”) from his 1866 Poèmes saturniens (Poems under Saturn). Compare the following passages from Pessanha’s and Verlaine’s poems:

A number of lusophone scholars have alluded in passing to the intertextual relationship between these two poems,Footnote ⁴ but to my knowledge none has homed in on how Pessanha harnesses the tropes of Portuguese maritime literature to transform Verlaine’s wuthering orchestra. A shipwrecked reimagining of Verlaine’s 1866 classic, Pessanha’s poem kicks up even stronger winds and trades in Verlaine’s nasally heartache for the retching of a mariner driven to madness: a psychosomatic dis-ease reinforced, acoustically, by the poem’s profusion of “sh” sounds (represented above by the digraph ch and word-terminal s). This sonic patterning evokes not only the frenzied action of bow against string but also the waves that violently submerge Pessanha’s images (“barcos despedaçam,” “urnas quebradas,” “arcadas / despedaçadas [“boats break into pieces,” “shattered urns,” “tattered / bows”; Pessanha, Clepsydra 72; 73]). In short, the poem relates the tale of literary subjectivity’s cacophonous wreckage. Pessanha’s was a tale with far-reaching literary precedents in the Portuguese context.

Josiah Blackmore has argued that the shipwrecked literary subject was among the foremost innovations of Renaissance-era Portuguese poetry and deeply rooted in the collective history of Portugal. The threat of shipwreck had long overhung the work of ancient Greek and Roman authors (and Renaissance authors after them), but for Camões and his Iberian contemporaries, the oceanic imagination viscerally engaged real and recent historical antecedents (“Shipwrecked Swimmer” 318–19). Camões’s lyric and epic poetry had emanated from his direct experience of life at sea and from an extensive canon of historiographic works written in Portuguese, including the nautical writings of the royal chroniclers Fernão Lopes and Gomes Eanes de Zurara, as well as the shipwreck narratives authored by the cartographer Manuel de Mesquita Perestrelo and the historian Diogo de Couto, the latter of whom Camões knew personally. If the Camonian turn in maritime literature entailed taking aboard the experiential cargo of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century nautical expansionism, then why did Pessanha—the self-described interpreter of ethnic sentiment who was enamored of Camões and who spent months at sea and years living in a colonial enclave—shy away from concretion in his nautical poems? In scripting his poetic vessel according to the French symbolist naufrage (“shipwreck”), what imaginative predicament did Pessanha seek to overcome?

Ennui on the High Seas

“More than a metaphor,” writes Jackson, “water was Pessanha’s reality” (Preface 9). Like the clepsydra, or water clock, that gave his 1920 debut its title, the poet’s frequent ocean voyages between Lisbon and Macau registered the ebb and flow of his lived experience. Pessanha channeled this mari-time awareness to devastating effect in “Enfim, levantou ferro” (“Anchors Up, at Last”; alternatively titled “Roteiro da vida” [“Life’s Rutter”]), a poem charting its speaker’s psychic katabasis in distinctly nautical terms. Structurally and titularly, the poem alludes to the roteiro, or rutter, a highly productive literary-nautical genre of imperial Portugal, which blended technical information about a ship’s journey with elements of travel narrative, ethnographic observation, and historiography (Blackmore, Inner Sea 55). In “Enfim, levantou ferro” and other sea poems, Pessanha charts the chronotopes of ship-bound lyrical subjectivity to overwrite a traditional genre intimately linked to collective witnessing, with a first-person narrative of shipwreck.

The overseas expansion of the early modern period had birthed a nautical optic distinctive to Iberian literature—a revisionary tendency by which the mariner-writer saw double, as it were, imposing an old-world hermeneutic on the new-world signs spotted aboard a ship. The nautical gaze was simultaneously one of marvelment and recognition. In his influential 1982 monograph, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, Tzvetan Todorov describes the phenomenon. In his letters, claims Todorov, Christopher Columbus’s self-certainty and proclivity for molding new landscapes to his medieval Christian assumptions stripped the civilizations being encountered by European navigators of their geographic and cultural specificity (14–20). In his Crónica dos feitos da Guiné (1452–53; Chronicle of the Conquest of Guinea), Zurara likewise carries over the discursive traditions and hermeneutic certainty of the so-called Reconquista (Christian reconquest) to Portuguese expansionary ventures along the West African coast. Specifically, the chronicler recasts diverse North African and sub-Saharan peoples, polities, and littoral enclaves as mere extensions of by-then defunct Ibero-Islamic states (Blackmore, “Moor” 107). Through their systematic use of the rhetorical device of assimilatio, or likening, maritime writers including Lopes, Zurara, and the royal secretary Pero Vaz de Caminha strove linguistically to familiarize foreign waters, even as nautical poetry by their near contemporaries like Camões heralded the novelty of expeditionary ocean voyages.Footnote ⁵ The tension between the purported novelty and innate recursivity of historical seafaring comes into full view in the incipit of Os Lusíadas, which extols da Gama’s voyage across “mares nunca de antes navegados” (“seas never before sailed”; Camões 1.3). In reality, Bartolomeu Dias had reached the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, years before da Gama, and Arab mariners had long patrolled the waters off of East Africa and throughout the Indian Ocean.Footnote ⁶ One could argue that da Gama’s voyage plays only a metonymic role in the poem and that, by referring to famed Portuguese mariners in the plural (“os barões assinalados” [“those noted heroes”; 1.1]), the incipit encompasses Dias’s journey as well. Yet the adjective “assinalados” implies only the historiographic givenness of the poem to come, not that the poet takes da Gama’s voyage as representative of all related seafaring. The fact that the epic’s voyage can be placed in metonymic relation affirms, at any rate, the sense that even the most spectacular and novel articulation of Portuguese seafaring has emerged from past deeds and prior discourse, the product of historiographic intermingling at a temporal crosscurrent.

It is, in fact, the fluidity and miscibility of Camões’s historiographic perspective, temporal scale, and intertextual engagement that cue up one of his epic’s most explicitly anti-imperial moments. Canto 4 of Os Lusíadas famously recounts the old man of Restelo’s warning to Portuguese mariners headed to India. “Excoriating the vanity of fame that drives expansion and the communal ills it causes” (Blackmore, Manifest Perdition 22), the old man enacts a kind of figurative shipwreck on Camões’s frame narrative of Portuguese maritime expansionism, likening it to an imperial cycle of economic rise and retreat. In this cycle, what begins with sightings of the shore inevitably gives way to a crass form of mercantilism that is reproduced in one colonial port city after another. The old man’s harangue mobilizes the assimilatio’s flattening power against an Iberian assimilationist historiographic milieu insofar as it qualifies Portugal’s supposedly unprecedented colonial project as being driven by the timeless and resoundingly human defects of classical epic, including greed and the desire for fame. Alongside the miscibility of his sources and stances, Camões’s ambivalence toward the colonial optic may very well have informed Pessanha’s intrepid—and at times irreverent—reimagining of literary seafaring. A sensitive critic of his national literature, Pessanha likely recognized the Portuguese imperial mode of nautical vision as an analogic snare that just as readily imperiled as empowered the oceanic imagination. This is not to say, however, that he rejected it in the main or disengaged from its generic and perspectival fluidity. Instead Pessanha rescripted the colonial gaze in accordance with French notions of ship image and ennui.

Polysemous though broadly associated with a stylized boredom, the term ennui has hosted numerous associations throughout its documented history. Attested by French lexicographers as early as the sixteenth century, it acquired a sense of psychic intensity under the influence of writers such as Madeleine de Scúdery and Blaise Pascal. Specifically, it had come to signify the feelings of desolation and emptiness that arose as seventeenth-century French society confronted a bevy of social changes, including attempts at secularization and transformed class relations. The precise meaning of ennui was hotly contested in the centuries that followed, and, in the nineteenth century, the mal du siècle (“sickness of the century”) Romantics and later fin de siècle writers “reactivated” those controversies, “exploited [ennui] as a leitmotif,” and “experienced it as an intimate threat to their activity as artists and struggled with that threat in the fabric of their work” (Scholar 139; see 134–39). John D’Amico aptly describes the ennui of French literature as the transformation, “concomitant to an unsayable malaise, … of an external stimulus … into an internal response” (136). Pessanha’s intimate knowledge of the French poetic tradition inevitably put him in contact with this tradition ennuyée, which would turbocharge his interpretation of the Portuguese nautical optic. Pessanha went on to overlay a Portuguese oceanic imagination that had long honed colonial triumphalism and expansionist notions of self with elements of self-critique and psychic inwardness (naval-gazing, so to speak). Ironically, for a poet navigating currents of disaffection at the colonial periphery, the ennui of the French metropole offered a lifeline for restoring the imaginative vigor of literary seafaring.

Pessanha would recast ennui—the creative stultification feared, theorized, and ultimately stylized by fin de siècle French poets—as a quintessentially maritime phenomenon, squarely within the affective field of Portuguese literary seafaring. In an untitled sonnet (sometimes claimed as part of a diptych titled “Vénus”), Pessanha approaches the nautical optic of Portuguese expansionism as imaginatively deadening:

The scene conjured by the first quatrain is at once a vindication and an indictment of Portuguese maritime expansionism. Singrar (“to sail”), a topical verb of the much vaunted voyages of “discovery” and something of an archaism in twentieth-century Portuguese, seldom attested in twentieth-century Portuguese, harks back to Camões and the historiographic tradition of Zurara and Caminha, who in his well-known letter detailed the human and natural landscapes of coastal Brazil. Pessanha’s verb works in tandem with the adjective “peregrina” (“pilgrim” or “peregrine”) to inscribe the octave’s ship within the discursive traditions of early modern Christian seaborne militancy. The description of the ocean’s limpid waters and pale shoals sooner conjures the waters of the Luso-Hispanic Caribbean than it does the waves off Portugal’s coast. Perhaps it also conjured what Pessanha considered the poetically sterilizing “acção depressiva” (“depressive action”; China 123) of its tropical climate. Pessanha renders the New World traced in his octave as a site of imaginative and affective barrenness, brimming with nautical ennui. In the second quatrain, all signs of life drain from the tenuously hued (“tenuemente”) shells, and the frigid waters convey the sun’s harsh rays onto the dead seafloor. Pessanha’s speaker ostensibly exalts the ship on the horizon, whose Camonian mariners would have found in the unencountered landscape affirmation of their prior visions; however, he qualifies that longing as void, noting the untraversable distance that divides him from the self-satisfaction of the colonial optic.

The poem’s first tercet overtly problematizes the analogical streak of ship-bound vision. The mariner-speaker’s comparative gaze reduces the real and wrenching history of maritime tragedy in Portuguese—salient to any ardent admirer of Camões such as Pessanha—to a generic noun class through the construction “Tantos naufrágios, perdições, destroços!” (“So many shipwrecks, devastations, remnants!”). The stanza enacts a semantic saturation that reinterprets shipwreck as an acoustic fixation rather than as a human tragedy by wanly quantifying maritime disasters with the determiner “tantos” and an asyndetic list of shipwreck synonyms. The maritime gaze’s short-lived attempt to reconstruct the vessel (“a vista reconstrui”) further rewrites shipwreck as an imaginative exercise for the listless shore gazer—a salve for pelagic boredom that projects the image of a ship instead of relating a vivid account of nautical suffering. A significant revision of the bulwarked optic as encountered in early modern Portuguese literature, the poem, particularly in its final tercet, vindicates a mode of seeing that is not fully ship-bound and analogical. Pessanha affirms in its place the poetic quiddity of the shipwrecked image. The images in the final stanza disintegrate, sustained in the mind’s eye only on the sonic strength of repeated diminutive suffixes (“unhinhas,” “dentinhos,” “pedrinhas,” “pedacinhos” [“nails,” “pearly teeth,” “bits of shell and rock”]). Audibly incongruous for their preciousness and strenuous dental articulation, the diminutives function as an acoustic allusion to the reductive yet alchemical forces of shipwreck. The subtle erotics of the pulverized teeth and nails at the poem’s close mine the human toll of shipwreck not for its collective staying power but for its winking suggestion of the macabre. Pessanha’s notion of poetically generative maritime tragedy thus owes as much to the morbid sensuality of the Romantics and French decadents (Klobucka 38) as it does to Camões’s famous stanza on shipwreck on the Mekong, in canto 10 of Os Lusíadas, in which, like so many pieces of flotsam, his verses “molhados / Vêm do naufrágio triste e miserando, / Dos procelosos baixos escapados” (“emerge, / Sopping wet, from a piteous wreck, / Having escaped the stormy depths”; Camões 10.128).

Elsewhere Pessanha does not so much posit as passionately invoke the ennui of seafaring and the synesthetic potentiality of shipwreck. In “Enfim, levantou ferro,” as soon as Pessanha’s speaker shoves off, he disavows the view from on deck and stridently voices his will to perdition:

The images the poet glimpses onboard have been completely voided of significance, as even the most cosmopolitan sights are compacted into overbroad referential categories. As if to salvage the Portuguese maritime optic, Pessanha begs these tired, deceptive sights to switch sensory modalities altogether and vocalize (“Dizei-me” [“Tell me”]) in chorus with the “violento fragor” (“thunderous crash”) that he summoned in his poem’s third stanza (omitted above) as part of his shipwreck fantasy.

Meanwhile, in turn-of-the-century France, experiences of seafaring had found expression through the dual lenses of exoticism and ennui. The finest practitioner of the first mode, Victor Segalen, espoused in his posthumous Journey to the Land of the Real (1929) what he elsewhere called “an aesthetics of diversity,” anticipating certain aspects of postcolonial theory. Refusing to assimilate nonnative landscapes in the same fashion as earlier colonial writers, Segalen attempted to reclaim through his work the novelty and sensuality of what European orientalists hailed as the exotic. Opposite Segalen were the symbolists who came before him, particularly Charles Baudelaire, who embraced overseas voyaging not as a mode of encountering the other but rather as a potent metaphor for the vicissitudes of writerly life in general and lyrical inspiration in particular. The symbolists gave onboard vision short shrift, gravitating instead toward the ocean’s perilous music. In “La musique” (“Music”) from his collection Les fleurs du mal (1857; Flowers of Evil), Baudelaire establishes a significant connection between ship distress and poetic voice:

Yet another adumbration of Pessanha’s “Chorai arcadas,” Baudelaire’s poem established a connection between sailing, tedium, and the restorative music of tempest that his descendants would further refine. Mallarmé would voice similar concerns over imaginative stagnation, envisioning shipwreck as a means of stimulating the senses. In his “Brise marine” (“Sea Breeze”), published one year before Pessanha’s birth, in Le Parnasse contemporain, Mallarmé’s speaker embarks on an imaginative voyage:

“Having completed his rupture with the world,” writes Gerald S. Giauque, Mallarmé commences a rhythmically disjointed reverie in which he regards “the masts and … the possibilities of a storm and shipwreck” (11). Mallarmé grafts Baudelaire’s desire for sonorous wreckage onto a preoccupation with poetic vision; he pits a hackneyed mode of seeing (“vieux jardins reflétés” [“old gardens reflected”]) against the emotionally rousing rhythms of sea storms, the shanty-singing oarsmen, and poetic voice as figured by the poem’s titular breeze.

In his shipwreck poems Pessanha sought similar routes out of similar imaginative predicaments—and nowhere more disturbingly than in “Nesgas agudas do areal,” excerpted below:

Here Pessanha offers a poetic reckoning with his previous experiences on the Suez Canal, much like Pessoa’s heteronym (that is, literary alter ego) Álvaro de Campos in the poem “Opiário” (“Opiary”).Footnote ⁸ Pessanha’s poem crystallizes precisely when his imagined vessel runs aground. Ennui is again presented as a poetically rewarding visual disorder—a psychic break triggered by sunstroke and exacerbated by the green-glittering waters of the channel. Curiously, Pessanha here makes no reference to the salvific music of shipwreck. In the poem’s final stanza, the poet offers up an image that appears to be an uncanny rewrite of Mallarmé’s gleaming “vide papier que la blancheur défend” (“empty paper defended by whiteness”). For the French writer, the unblemished page seems to figure the poetic opportunities ahead, due to be filled with the poetic insights gleaned from the journey over the tempestuous waters of the imagination. Pessanha’s poem, by contrast, is lethally constituted, completed only when the speaker washes ashore, a poetic fragment that gives a new, gruesome sense to the phrase “disjecta membra.” Pessanha shared Mallarmé and Baudelaire’s appreciation for the acoustic fracas of shipwreck (a poetically useful counterpoint to the blinding ennui of seafaring), though he appeared to lack faith in its redemptive promise, perhaps owing to the singular emphases of his shipwrecked Portuguese literary inheritance.

Mixed Aesthetic Currents in Turn-of-the-Century Portugal

In reclaiming the sensory primacy and “shipwreckful”Footnote ⁹ poignancy of literary seafaring, Pessanha not only distinguished himself from the fin de siècle French aquatics that informed Clepsydra, he also departed significantly from the nautical imagination on display in the work of his contemporaries. Besides Pessanha, the poet Afonso Lopes Vieira was among Portugal’s most nautically engaged turn-of-the-century writers. The Leiria native’s Náufrago: Versos lusitanos (1898; Castaway: Lusitanian Verses) seeps through with shipwreck metaphor, references to Camões, and irredentist colonial rhetoric. The collection received a glowing write-up in Ave azul (The Azure Bird; see Lemos), one of Portugal’s premier symbolist reviews, to which Pessanha and Eugénio de Castro both contributed their work. Where Pessanha’s poems used maritime ennui and shipwreck as points of departure for sensory-sonic exploration, Lopes Vieira’s collection rarely strays from the sense of ethnonational disaffection that resulted from Portugal’s collapse as a maritime power. His collection’s final poem, “Raça dos náufragos” (“Castaway Race”), reveals its colonial expansionist undertow when it sheepishly asks, “Que havemos todos de fazer agora / Se não temos o Mar p’ra descobrir?” (“What will we all do now / That there’s no Sea to discover?”; 123). Lopes Vieira employed shipwreck as little more than a figure for lost imperial grandeur and the ensuing cultural malaise, giving voice to the revanchist nostalgia that would typify the work of prominent saudosista (“nostalgic”) poets like Teixeira de Pascoaes and Jaime Cortesão.

Though no stranger to nationalist sentiment, Pessanha focalized the sensory dimensions of maritime tragedy and ennui in inventive ways that would capture the imagination of the geração de Orpheu circle headed by the modernists Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, and José de Almada Negreiros. In his letter of 13 July 1914 to the editor of the daily Républica, Sá-Carneiro wrote that Pessanha’s unpublished book (“livro que não está publicado”)—ostensibly the corpus of poems Pessanha published in magazines or was known to have recited at literary salons and dinner parties—was the best of the last thirty years, “pulsating with suggestive images” and “encrust[ed] with magical stones that transmute colors and melodies” (“osciliantes de vagos,” “engastam mágicas pedrarias que transmudam cores e músicas”; qtd. in F. Martins, Modernismo 137). Pessoa, for his part, would write to Pessanha in Macau, in 1915, reminding the Coimbra-born poet of their previous encounters at Lisbon’s Café Suiço and lamenting that his poetry remained relatively unknown in Portugal. Pessoa invited Pessanha to publish his work in the third issue of Orpheu, the iconic modernist magazine he founded alongside Sá-Carneiro, pledging that it would cover the ground from “ultra-simbolismo até ao futurismo” (“ultra-symbolism to futurism”; Páginas 357). Orpheu’s third issue would never be published; Pessanha’s response, if any, to Pessoa’s query has been lost.

Notwithstanding the proverbial wreck of Orpheu volume 3, Pessanha’s poems of maritime ennui either broadly influenced or else show a strong affinity with two of Pessoa’s modernist masterworks, both authored by the heteronym Álvaro de Campos. The heteronym’s “Opiário” recounts, in a decadent key, his imaginative journey to an “Oriente ao Oriente do Oriente” (“an East to the East of the East”; Pessoa, Poesias 135) aboard a ship crossing the Suez. This drug-addled journey immediately preceded de Campos’s “Ode triunfal” (“Triumphal Ode”), also published in the first issue of Orpheu, which in its futuristic exultation of modern technology celebrated, among other disasters, the “naufrágios deliciosos dos grandes transatlânticos” (“the delicious wrecks of great transatlantic ships”; 144). The second poem, de Campos’s “Ode marítima” (“Naval Ode”), is a dockside exploration of the senses in which the poet reflects obliquely on the legacy of Portuguese maritime empire before erupting in ecstasy at the thought of being ravished by seamen. Though the two poets differ drastically in their solutions to imaginative quandaries, both Pessanha and Pessoa drew on a thalassopoetic repertoire that included shipwreck fantasy and the profound openness, already latent in early modern Portuguese maritime literature, to the cosmopolitan interflows of maritime sensation, witnessing, and intertextuality.

Pessanha may have further influenced Pessoa’s oceanic output and Portuguese modernism writ large through Pessoa’s theorization of “paulismo” (“swampism”). Conceptualized during Pessoa’s early phase of modernist experimentation from 1913 to 1915, swampism was the first of three closely linked stages in Pessoa’s literary evolution, followed by “interseccionismo” (“intersectionism”) and “sensacionalismo” (“sensationalism”). All three schools posited the poetic primacy of carefully, albeit spontaneously, imbricated sensations while practicing a self-conscious blurring of the real and the imagined. The term swampism points to the possible Pessanhan—and broadly blue poetic—heritage of the school. The Pessoa biographer Richard Zenith links the term to Pessoa’s similarly titled poem “Pauis” (“Swamps”; written in 1913 and published in 1914), a watershed moment for Pessoa’s poetics of self-fragmentation and possibly an allegory for Portugal’s political stagnation (346). The futurist writer and Orpheu collaborator Almada Negreiros traces paulismo’s origins further back still, to André Gide’s 1895 Paludes (Júdice 354), a philosophically oriented diary not totally dissimilar to the Pessoa heteronym Bernardo Soares’s Livro do desassossego (Book of Disquiet), published posthumously in 1982. I would submit that the term paulismo may sooner remit to Pessanha’s celebrated sonnet “Fonógrafo” (“Phonograph”), which, in his 1915 letter to Pessanha, Pessoa claimed to have previously read and greatly admired. Written in 1896 in Macau and first published in 1889 in the Lisbon-based Tribuna, the poem conjures shifting soundscapes as the titular phonograph skips tracks. In its second stanza Pessanha unfurls an image of considerable interest to a budding swampist:

Pessoa’s use of the term plausibly descends from Pessanha’s composition, which rehearsed in a symbolist tenor the predilect themes and affective saliencies of declared swampist works like Pessoa’s “Chuva oblíqua” (1915; “Slanting Rain”) and certain passages in Soares’s Livro do desassossego. Whether or not the poem provided Pessoa with swampism’s etymon, it mirrors the school’s atmosphere and aquatic orientation. Pessanha’s barcarole, or gondoliers’ song,Footnote ¹⁰ exhibits the liquid flow of sources, modes, jettisoned fragments of subjectivity, and sensations that would define Pessoa’s modernism during its early, amphibious stages of development out of symbolist currents. Pessanha’s Clepsydra was a swamp humming with the imaginative differences between lusophone and francophone turn-of-the-century aesthetics—the creative tensions that, over the following decade, coalesced in Portugal’s finest works of maritime modernism.

Writing on the power of maritime criticism, Iain Chambers has argued for “a more fluid cartography in which the stability of the historical archive, together with the stability of its associated facts … [and] nationalist interpretations, is set afloat: susceptible to drift, unplanned contacts, even shipwreck” (681). Scholars likewise stand to benefit from a new cartography of Portugal’s literary archive that accounts for its transnational—and at turns transhistorical—affective and aesthetic drift: a cartography that accounts for the maritime undercurrent in literary movements like the geração d’Orpheu, unmoored as they were from the strictures of linear historiography, nationalized metrics, barnacled tropes, and unitary poetic voice or subjecthood.

A Blue Poetics of Citation

Marine ennui and shipwreckful sensation were not, of course, the exclusive province of Pessanha, Pessoa, or the Orpheu lot. Nor, for that matter, were poetically potent reckonings with Portuguese maritime expansionism. For instance, Mallarmé drew up an influential poetic cartography of maritime expansionism in his sonnet “Au seul souci de voyager” (“To the One Concern of Voyaging”), which appeared in an album commémoratif commissioned by the queen consort of Portugal Amélia de Orléans for the fourth centenary of da Gama’s voyage to India. It is almost certain that Pessanha had not read Mallarmé’s celebratory sonnet, which had been published in Paris and Lisbon on 20 April 1898, before undersigning his own poem on the quatercentenary, weeks later, with “Macau, 7 de Maio de 1898” (“Macau, 7 May 1898”). A comparative reading of Mallarmé’s and Pessanha’s sonnets reveals significant commonalities in their intellectual approach to the most iconic voyage in Portuguese imperialism.Footnote ¹¹ Mallarmé’s text reads as follows:

For a poem that some have claimed was written in haste and out of financial necessity (Robb 100), Mallarmé’s ill-proportioned sonnet converses extensively and sophisticatedly with the symbolist notions of shipwreck (“Plongeante avec la caravelle” [“Plunging with the caravel”]) and tedium, including those expressed in his own “Brise marine.” Two aspects of the poem merit attention ahead of my descent into Pessanha’s commemorative diptych. The first lies in the polysemy of the poem’s fourth line, in which the verb doubler functions somewhat analogously to the Portuguese dobrar (“to double, round, fold”). The ship not only rounds the Cape of Good Hope but sonically doubles it; several critics have commented on the marked plosiveness and arrhythmia of Mallarmé’s poem. In effect, Mallarmé naturalizes the South African landscape as part of his poem’s jagged soundscape. He thus inverts Camões’s transformation of the rhetorical and literal mythological giant Adamastor into the rocky promontory at the cape in the epic’s fifth canto—and, according to Blackmore, into a geographic embodiment of native African resistance. Second, the poem exemplifies Baudelairean correspondance as understood by Jonathan Culler. For Culler, the doctrine of correspondances, at least as espoused in Baudelaire’s poem of the same name, did not merely channel, as is often asserted, the transcendental universal analogies theorized by the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg. Rather, “Correspondances” glossed Baudelaire’s self-conscious meditation on prior compositions. Culler places

Mallarmé’s poem subversively duplicates certain aspects of his earlier maritime poems and celebrates the raw synesthetic power of life at sea in much the same way that Vasco’s poop deck surreptitiously doubles the cape and the sailors’ song reflects Vasco’s wan smile. The poet uses Portuguese maritime expansionism—and, implicitly, Portuguese literary attempts at historical revision—as a pretext to comment half ironically on the ceaseless churn and tempestuous fluxes of poetic making writ large.

When it came time for Pessanha to write his own commemorative poem on da Gama’s journey, he no doubt reflected on the ineluctable if untraceable literary discourse from which his poem emerged—both Camões’s poems and his own previous compositions. Conditioned by nearly four centuries of maritime tragedy, epic, and lyric, Pessanha would bring to his verse meditation a nautical single-mindedness that Mallarmé’s sonnet does not purport to share. His two-poem sequence “San Gabriel” begins with a plea to begin in medias res, in much the same way as Camões’s epic, and proceeds as follows:

Many critics have read the poem as a straightforward exercise in literary and national nostalgia (Braga 74–79). Yet Pessanha’s suite for Camões is more convolutedly reverential than appears. In the first sonnet’s opening salvo, Pessanha admits bluntly that the spirit of maritime expansionism long ago dissipated. Though the poet laments what he considers the sorry state of the Portuguese national character and Portuguese literature, he does not simply glorify the old voyages of discovery. Like Camões’s epic, his poem only ambiguously celebrates the seafaring life that had birthed Portuguese maritime epic: the rowers are mute; the winds are not absent, but misleading; the waves are not necessarily silent, but soporific. What exactly does Pessanha hope to recover? The obvious answer would be the “Light and Truth” cited in the second tercet, which he may have hoped to snatch up in the fashion of a conquistador. And yet Pessanha immediately qualifies the intellectual and aesthetic renewal of maritime discoveries as an illusory flash, mildly pleasing in its unattainability. The fact that, in the second poem, Pessanha’s poetic vessel shoves off with little trouble leads one to suspect he was not after colonial “enlightenment” in the first place. He was simply looking for the fastest sea route out of his octave’s ennui. Like Vasco’s pale smile, then, the poetic constellation that the first sonnet spots in the night, and toward which the second poem navigates, is anything but transcendental.

The first sonnet stages an imaginative block—the by-now familiar symbolist trope of ennui—that the second poem attempts to solve intratextually, issuing from the first half of “San Gabriel” in much the same way that “Au seul souci de voyager” springs from “Brise marine.” Pessanha’s “moon spell” (“feeiria / do luar”) is a Gallicism, both etymologically (through féerie) and tropologically (see the “fée allumer” or arsonist fairy in Baudelaire’s moonstruck nocturne “L’irréparable” [“The Irreparable”; 69]), which has come to replace the fading winds of Portuguese maritime literature. The poet directs his gaze away from the water and toward the Southern Cross—a constellation that Portuguese astronomers claimed to have first identified, and which he rescripts as a glittering pantheon of admired elders. Pessanha’s catalog is as iconoclastic as it is reverential, placing soldiers and saints earlier in his list so that beloved poets—the French symbolists surely among them—may have the final word. Pessanha looks to the stars to confirm not a “divinely sanctioned relation but rather a metonymical exfoliation,” as Culler puts it (286), affirming his place within an intertextual, multilingual network of maritime writers.Footnote ¹² The poet reclaims not the colonial analogic optic, but rather the ceaseless ability of Camões the sonneteerFootnote ¹³ to notice feelingly, and reanimate winningly, maritime themes. Pessanha harnesses all the language at his disposal (the first sonnet, his prior poems, his readings of both Camões and the French symbolists) to break through the tedium that had engulfed maritime literature by stylizing tedium itself. Once he has regained wind in his sails, like his idolized national bard, Pessanha is free to traverse the supposedly virgin waters of well-traveled themes. Through this Camonian correspondance—that is, through a Franco-Portuguese literary confluence—Pessanha earns his place in the Portuguese maritime pantheon. If the constellation overhead figures Pessanha’s personal configuration of the Portuguese maritime canon, then one may read “San Gabriel” in conjunction with his other oceanic poems as a partial denationalization of that very tradition. Instead of fixing its maritime orientation solely within the confines of nationalist sentiment, Pessanha’s output instantiates a blue poetics of citation—which is to say, a poetics that affirms the sea as a locus of discursive, tropological, and historiographic mixing; of complex ethnopoetic encounter and transnational intertextuality (here Franco-Portuguese); of immense and varied sensation; and of fluid subjectivities that support protean and even contradictory self-citation across a maritime oeuvre.

Toward a Postcolonial Maritime Subjectivity

Pessanha’s blue poetics of citation required an openness to the foreign—or at least to the transnational—even as it worked in service to Portugal’s preeminent literary tradition. It was only by importing French maritime motifs, after all, that Pessanha could produce his memorable homage to Camões, that most Portuguese of writers. Toward the end of his life, however, Pessanha asserted that the best poets were merely conduits for national feeling. In the 1924 essay “Macau e a gruta de Camões,” writing on Camões’s legacy and on composing poetry in Macau, Pessanha says:

Presented as dispassionate cultural criticism, these lines may very well encapsulate the poet’s ambivalent feelings about his colonial—and, by most objective measures, exiguous—published poetic output. They also comprise the author’s most significant commentary on the art of poetry and the Portuguese literary tradition. As an investment in a Portuguese poetics of ethnic purity, nationalist sentiment, and provincialist expression, the essay appears to be a contradiction in terms with Pessanha’s demonstrably transnational poetics. For his Clepsydra embraces the turbid historiographies, liquid intertextualities, and transoceanic motifs and affects of the most distinguished maritime literature in Portuguese, starting with Camões, and also in French.

Pessanha’s personal life and relationship to Macau’s Chinese and multiracial populations have been the subject of much intrigue and distortion, and, as Serafina Martins argues, they have profoundly influenced contemporary Portuguese writers’ vision of Macau (98–100). Though he authored essays detailing what he considered the cultural backwardness of everyday life in Macau, elsewhere Pessanha expressed great admiration for the Chinese language and the literary traditions of Ming China. In a comparative study of the poetry of Pessanha and Dai Wangshu (1905–50), Liu Jinyan charts Pessanha’s marked preference for linguistic reduplicates (for instance, “lengalenga” in “Viola chinesa” [“Chinese Guitar”]Footnote ¹⁴) and his uses of assonance and alliteration that are more suggestive of Chinese than Portuguese prosody broadly conceived (80–83). Liu characterizes classical Chinese poetics and Pessanha’s unique strain of symbolism as mutually affirming in their delicate acoustic patterning and strategies of evocation (122), although, like Paulo Franchetti in his edition of Clepsidra, she does not argue for the direct influence of Chinese poetry on Pessanha’s literary output. I have written previously on how Pessanha’s poetic allusions to the city of Macau rely on a sort of apophasis; Clepsydra’s Macanese elements show up only by way of negative formulations.Footnote ¹⁵ The stealth cosmopolitanism of maritime literature and blue citational practices was, on closer inspection, of a piece with Pessanha’s reticence to discuss East Asia in his poetic works. For the literary sea’s tendency to engage disparate sources and voicings worked against its chroniclers’ ethnonationalist mandates. Might a blue poetics of citation enable scholars to recover the minoritized perspectives submerged within Pessanha’s poems about China in ways that fundamentally challenge imperialist discourses of power and Portuguese notions of canonicity?

Pessanha builds out one of Clepsydra’s many innovative aquatic scenes in his poem “Ao longe os barcos de flores” (“Flower-Decked Boats in the Offing”), the title of which alludes to floating brothels on the Pearl River (Clepsydra 141). Signed and dated “Cantão, Hotel em Ilha Min, 1899” (“Canton [or Guangzhou], Hotel on Shamian Island, 1899”; Clepsydra 141), the poem would have readers listen as “Só, incessante um som de flauta chora, / Viúva, grácil, na esuridão tranquila, / —PerdidaFootnote ¹⁶ voz que de entre as mais se exila” (“A lone flute ceaselessly cries / Its widowed tune in the still darkness / —Lost voice, exiled in the crowd”; Clepsydra 74; 75). The speaker goes on to describe the flute’s solitary music against a backdrop of licentiousness as the poem plots a complication of poetic voice with strong Camonian precedents. The endlessly weeping flute calls to mind the invocation of the muses in Os Lusíadas, in which Camões asks to channel their

These lines have been widely interpreted as a declaration of generic mode in which Camões abandons the lyrical mode of pastoral eclogues and amatory poems for his epic endeavor. Yet the invocation is seriously undercut by the epic that follows.

Blackmore has shown that Camões, perhaps more so than other European epic writers, mixed lyric and epic registers in Os Lusíadas. His epic fused both modes nowhere more memorably than at the Isle of Love in cantos 9 and 10. Described as flower-adorned on multiple occasions, the Isle of Love is where the poet reveals “the interdependencies between empire, gender, desire, and the poetic logic of aquatics that pervades almost every line of the poem” (Blackmore, Inner Sea 85). And it is here that the sea goddess Tethys “proclaims a unity of the world’s seas, an acknowledgement of the conquista do mar” (89), or conquest of the seas, immediately after the Portuguese mariners have partaken in a shoreside orgy with racialized—because exoticized—nymphs. A site of political, poetic, and intercultural consummation, the Isle of Love accommodates a poetics of aquatic dominion that would haunt Pessanha’s poem as an antitype. One of his least nautical ship poems (only the title marks it as such), Pessanha’s sonnet plausibly logs his retreat from the Portuguese maritime tradition’s pretensions to cultural triumphalism. Pessanha makes a rhetorical move where Camões’s battle horn is permanently retired, the flute is taken back up on dry land, and the poetic voice that issues from it has emerged as if from the Pearl River’s brackish waters, wrecked or else adrift in voluntary exile (“Perdida voz que se exila entre as mais” [“Lost voice, exiled in the crowd”]). Pessanha’s flower-boat poem laments the postcolonial future as reflected in the poem’s dramatic present: the Portuguese poet-mariner gazes shoreside not at the Portuguese fleet but at a flotilla of pleasure parlors located within the British sphere of influence throughout the South China Sea. If, as Rogério Miguel Puga has argued, Pessanha’s flower-boat poem is derived in part from anglophone travel writing about the hua ting (花艇; “flower boats” or “floating brothels”) of Hong Kong (100–05), his poem brings Portugal’s diminished colonial standing into even starker relief. For the maritime literary culture of colonial Portugal had been effectively pirated by that of imperial Britain, which only ten years before the poem’s composition issued an ultimatum establishing British sovereignty over long-standing Portuguese outposts in Africa and irreparably damaged Portuguese colonial self-confidence in the process. The incursion of anglophone travelogue motifs on Pessanha’s poetry would register yet another subversion of the Portuguese maritime canon as conventionally configured.

In short, the promise of cultural dominion made at the Isle of Love unravels precisely where currents of desire intermix. Yet, as Pessanha has shown in his francophile ship poems, the reality of oceanic miscegenation occasions a poem of imaginative depth and affective resonance. Pessanha’s literary sea, like Camões’s before it, had become a site of constant reclamation, infinite renewal, and endless mixing. It is as if the flute—a sort of free-floating lyrical voice, and a Chinese-inflected one at thatFootnote ¹⁷—emanates directly from the distant waters, affirming a maritime speaking subject over and above the mariner-speaker that had typified the maritime literature in Portuguese that Pessanha most admired. Consistently privileging the sonic over the visual, Pessanha’s oceans of onomatopoeia accommodated, perhaps against the poet’s own best wishes, a mixed lyrical presence. This is in part because aural modes of perception do not as readily erect or reify essential categories of difference.Footnote ¹⁸ As the colonial project in Macau and throughout the Portuguese empire failed, what remained for settler poets, perhaps, was the lyrical primacy of the seascapes and trade routes themselves. Harboring no aspirations to the conquista do mar or else no faith in it, Pessanha’s maritime output voices the sea, lapped by waves of palatal consonants, while it also gave voice to virtual oceans of intertextual reference and polyvocal engagement.Footnote ¹⁹ One of the key affordances of Pessanha’s less strictly nationalized, and arguably re-empiricized, maritime literature lay in its openness to oceanic discourse beyond the reach of literary citation—in its openness to the acoustic patterns of oceangoing, in what may exemplify Pessanha’s precocious awareness of maritime voice.

Pessanha’s flower-boat poem and the broader project of Clepsydra offered later Portuguese writers a glimpse at postimperial and decolonial maritime subjectivity. His literary seas would reverberate throughout the work of Pessoa and Sophia de Mello Breyener Andresen, who in very different ways reasserted the ocean’s primary status as a site of poetic, rather than imperial, expansion. Calls for the broader decoupling of aquatic and colonial imaginations have issued through the work of scholars such as Kevin Dawson and J. T. Roane, who examine how minoritized populations engaged the seascapes that “colonists did not culturally conquer” in a joint making (Dawson 4) and developed “a reciprocal and intimate relationship with the water cultivated at the edges of settler corporate interests” (Roane 229). In viewing the ocean as interlocutory rather than already spoken for, Pessanha enters into an unwitting sympathy with this more expansive aquatics and the work of anticolonial writers in Portuguese, such as the East Timorese poet Fernando Sylvan. Throughout his career, Sylvan reflected on decolonial movements and postrevolutionary reforms in lusophone Africa and Asia, as well as on the identitarian (and nonidentitarian) possibilities that inhered in the Portuguese language. Glittering in its austerity, Sylvan’s “Rota” (“Route”) charts an adolescent speaker’s voyage into the oceanic imagination:

In this antirutter from his 7 poemas de Timor (1965; Seven Poems of Timor), Sylvan expresses with breathtaking economy what Pessanha and Camões, by dint of their colonial-settler positionalities, conveyed only tacitly: for the maritime poet, the sea does much of the speaking. Pessanha’s great innovation as a maritime modernist was to record that blue speech in whatever cadence felt to him as true and bellowing as those infinitely renavigable seas—Portuguese, French, Macanese.