The great event that marks the year 1924, in the life and work of Fernando Pessoa, is the founding and beginning of the publication of the magazine Athena, an art magazine, co-directed by Pessoa himself. This is, in fact, the most important “pessoan” event of that period, both from a biographical, intellectual and aesthetic point of view. Before we address, in an introductory and succinct way, the beginning of the Athena magazine, it is appropriate to provide some more biographical data: firstly, remembering that, in that year of 1924, Pessoa had already been living for some time at Rua Coelho da Rocha no. 16, where Casa Fernando Pessoa is today; Furthermore, it is equally important to remember that, in the immediately preceding years, Pessoa had been committed to the creation and development of the Olisipo publishing house.

Athena magazine

Co-directed by Fernando Pessoa (literary director) and graphic artist Luiz Vaz (artistic director), Athena, revista de arte, was a periodical publication that ran between 1924 and 1925, with five issues published. It was the second magazine (co)directed by Pessoa, after Orpheu in 1915. Both magazines are fundamental publications in the history of Modernism in Portugal, of which Pessoa is one of the main protagonists. Both have names inspired by Greek mythology, with Athens (Athena), in this context, considered the “divinity” of wisdom and strategy (for this reason, also of war). It is undoubtedly the first sense that most attracted Pessoa, who throughout his life consistently considered Greek culture to be the true essence and the cradle of the highest culture on a universal level.

It’s very important to note that it was in Athena magazine that Pessoa debuted two of his three heteronyms (or “main” heteronyms), Ricardo Reis and Alberto Caeiro. This happened around nine years after the publication of Álvaro de Campos‘ first poems, in the aforementioned Orpheu magazine. It wasn’t until 1929, another five years later, that the semi-heteronymous Bernardo Soares made his public debut, as the author of extracts from the Livro do Desassossego (in A Revista). For this reason alone, among others, Athena deserves special mention among Fernando Pessoa’s editorial endeavours, as this magazine played a decisive role in the public development of what the Lisbon author called “heteronymism”, that is, his heteronymy. In this respect, it should also be noted that several writings by the orthonymous Pessoa himself were also published in Athena.

As Pessoan academic Fernando Cabral Martins notes, the idea of Athena existed in Pessoa’s projects since the late 1910s, and this magazine, in its initial plan, represented an organ of one of the aspects of Pessoa’s thought and cultural action, that is, Neopaganism. By this word, Pessoa generally means a cultural project to re-found ancient Greek paganism (or rather, pagan mentality) in modern times. This project occupied Pessoa for years, involving the works of the orthonymous Pessoa, the three “main” heteronyms and the fictional author António Mora.

As well as having a very high literary value, Athena also had an important component linked to the visual arts and architecture, under the (co)direction of the aforementioned Ruy Vaz. The collaboration of another great writer and artist from Orpheu, Almada Negreiros, should be noted.

The debut of Ricardo Reis

In October 1924, the neo-pagan and classicist heteronym Ricardo Reis made his public debut in the first issue of Athena, publishing a set of twenty “Odes”. Here’s one of them, No. 9 (p. 21), written by Pessoa more than ten years earlier, on 12 June 1924:

«Crown me with roses,
Crown me in truth
        With roses —
Roses that wither
On a brow that withers
        So soon!
Crown me with roses
And fleeting leaves.
        That’s all. »


Álvaro de Campos and Athena

It was in December 1924 that Pessoa published, in the second issue of Athena, the text by the modernist heteronym Álvaro de Campos entitled “O que é a Metafísica” [What is Metaphysics] (pp. 59-62). This is a paradigmatic text of the more critical, ironic and plural dimensions of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronymy, since, in this prose, Álvaro de Campos disagrees with the orthonym Pessoa himself. This is evident right from the beginning of the text:

«In Fernando Pessoa’s opinion, expressed in the essay “Athena“, philosophy – that is, metaphysics – is not a science, but an art. I don’t think so. It seems to me that Fernando Pessoa is confusing what art is with what science is not. What is not science is not necessarily art: it is simply non-science. Fernando Pessoa naturally thinks that since metaphysics doesn’t reach, and apparently can’t reach, a verifiable conclusion, it isn’t a science. He forgets that what defines an activity is its end; and the end of metaphysics is identical to that of science – to know facts, and not to that of art – to replace facts.»

Here is Álvaro de Campos dialoguing directly with orthonymous Pessoa, who, in the first issue of the magazine, in the programmatic and introductory text entitled Athena (pp. 5-8), had written:

«What we call culture has two forms, or modes. Culture is nothing other than the subjective improvement of life. This improvement is either direct or indirect; the former is called art, the latter science. Through art we perfect ourselves; through science we perfect in ourselves our concept, or illusion, of the world. […]

[…]The arts that by their very nature provide such training are the higher abstract arts – music and literature, as well as philosophy, which is abusively placed among the sciences, as if it were nothing more than the exercise of the mind in imagining impossible worlds.»

The philosophical and aesthetic dimension of the Athena magazine thus reveals Fernando Pessoa’s “double” nature – literary and philosophical – which he himself referred to in a 1931 poem, when he said “I am a poet and a thinker! ».

Fabrizio Boscaglia

Texts quoted and not related to a link already provided:
Fernando Pessoa, Poemas de Fernando Pessoa 1931-1933, Edition of Ivo Castro, Critical Edition of Fernando Pessoa, Série Maior, vol. I, t. IV, Lisboa, Imprensa Nacional-Casa Da Moeda, 2004, p. 184.

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