PersonaMetamorfoses. Edição do Centenário de Jorge de Sena by Gilda Santos

Abstract

Portuguese Studies vol. 36 no. 2 (2020), 283–301© Modern Humanities Research Association 2020 Reviews Persona. Facsimile edition. 12 volumes in 11 + 1 (Lisbon: Tinta-da-china & Casa Fernando Pessoa, 2019). Print. Metamorfoses. Edição do Centenário de Jorge de Sena, ed. by Gilda Santos (Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte: Cátedra Jorge de Sena para Estudos Literários Luso-Afro-Brasileiros, UFRJ, & Editora Moinhos, 2019). 252 pages + images. Print. Reviewed by Paulo de Medeiros (University of Warwick) In her introduction to this number of Metamorfoses, celebrating the centenary of the birth of Jorge de Sena, Luci Ruas, its general editor, announces it as a doubly special issue, as it both fulfils the original purpose for which it was started, as the official publication of the Chair of Luso-Afro-Brazilian Studies named after Sena at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in 1999, and also represents a unique achievement, managing to include just over a hundred short articles on Jorge de Sena and his works from most distinguished scholars and critics who work in Portuguese Studies, as well as a large number of younger ones, demonstrating not only the sheer vibrancy of the discipline but also myriad connections through the generations. Sena, of course, as controversial as some of his work will always be, not only is indisputably one of the major authors of the twentieth century, but his erudition, sharp critical acumen, and enormous scholarly production make him a key figure to represent the discipline transnationally, as he liked to see himself as at once a Portuguese author, a Brazilian (naturalized) citizen, and a US academic, having held chairs both in Brazil and later in the United States, after he went into self-exile. In her own introductory piece, ‘Jorge de Sena entre nós’ [Jorge de Sena among us], Gilda Santos, the organizer of this special issue, focuses at once on Sena’s period in Brazil and on the way he remains among all who read him now and into the future. It is a Sena both permanently displaced and yet always belonging, always creating possibilities for belonging across national divides, that Santos offers us in this special issue that itself transcends the normal boundaries of a scholarly journal in the multitude of perspectives offered and in the variety of modes of writing it includes, from the analytical to the fictional, from the theoretical to a more traditional close reading, and never forgetting the poetical. Special as the Sena issue of Metamorfoses is, the facsimile edition of the legendary journal of Pessoa studies, Persona, under the general editorship of Jerónimo Pizarro, in collaboration with the original editor, Arnaldo Saraiva, is nothing short of a milestone. The first striking feature of this edition is its overall Reviews 284 high quality, from the paper stock to the high definition images, the sober yet striking use of Pessoa’s effigy throughout, down to the detail of the half-cassette that holds the slim volumes together. But the possibility of once again having access to the articles and documents first published in Persona from 1977 to 1985 would have been sufficient cause for rejoicing. Not only are many of those essays pioneering in the study of Fernando Pessoa, but the publication across eight years serves as privileged window on the development of the field, and in particular as the Livro do Desassossego [Book of Disquiet], arguably Pessoa’s masterpiece, was published for the first time in 1982 in what would begin an editing and publication saga almost as plural as the poet himself. Jorge de Sena, of course, was one of the central figures involved in the development of Pessoa studies and one of the first to recognize the importance and complexity of that most posthumous of all posthumous works, that has caused Alain Badiou to reflect that we might still not have learned to be contemporaries of Pessoa. The sheer number of senior scholars and highly regarded poets signing individual small articles in Metamorfoses cuts across a number of divides. To name just a few, in order of inclusion, we have: Nuno Júdice, Rosa Martelo, Maria Alzira Seixo, Eugénio Lisboa, Ida Alves, Helder Macedo, Fernando...