Personal Infinitive: Inflecting Fernando Pessoa

Certain expectations may be confirmed whenever a new title on Fernando Pessoa appears... yet one might make a similar claim in respect of, say, Franz Kafka or Jorge Luis Borges. For the pantheon of celebrated modern writers is entered at a cost. Acolytes abound, bringing with them their literary proclivities: some biographists, others indispensable archival detectives, dedicated geneticists, or committed textualists determined to offer close readings including those, but few, who do so with recourse to the instrumentalities of complex critical theories. Rui Gonçalves Miranda, undoubtedly a pioneer of the latter approach, has guaranteed, in Personal Infinitive: Inflecting Fernando Pessoa, that it will be primarily those with an already deep awareness of Pessoa’s textuality, and an open-mindedness and readiness to deploy the most appropriate analytical tools, who will rise to the challenge of this ground-breaking study. Miranda’s engagement with the thinking of Mallarm e, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Barthes, Derrida, Eco, Barbara Johnson, and Terry Eagleton is never incidental and, in each case, the insights drawn upon are applied the better to explicate—never to explain away—the toughest nodal tropes exploited, inexhaustibly in Pessoa’s poetry and, judiciously explored here, his numerous other writings. As Roberto Vecchi observes in the “Foreword”: