Unexceptional words are the best specimens for observation. They go unnoticed until you stare at them long enough to realize their endless ramifications. The word feedback is a case in point.

Being the product of a laid-back environment created by musicians and sound engineers, feedback has never had the smug undertones of other imported words that crumple the fabric of the Portuguese language. Lacking a quality that would secure it a place in the circles of cosmopolitan jargon, feedback originally became a commonplace word conveying a specific, unpleasant noise. 

A verse from a poem by Fernando Pessoa, if regarded autonomously, would appear to be a proposition that could have been taken from a philosophical work or a reflection that takes on the form of an aphorism that produces false evidence. Here, poet and professor of Literature Amândio Reis comments on the verse quoted above.

This chronicle by Fernando Pessoa about celebrity is both a philosophical meditation and a code of ethics. In his essay, whose title Vanitas is taken from Ecclesiastes, the poet Manuel de Freitas uses Pessoa’s text to make a claim about our age: ‘We live in a time when celebrity is almost invariably based on aesthetic misconceptions or crass promotional campaigns.’ ‘As for myself,’ he asserts, ‘now that I am a bit older than Fernando Pessoa, I am quite happy with the one or two hundred readers that closely follow my every book.’

The writer, translator, critic and researcher Richard Zenith was born in the USA and has lived in Portugal for more than three decades. His exhaustive work on the writings of Fernando Pessoa has made him one of the world’s leading authorities on the great poet of heteronyms.

When he won the Pessoa Prize in 2012, Zenith said, ‘The most complicated part about writing a biography of Fernando Pessoa is finding a narrative thread. The essence of his life doesn’t consist of facts or events. It’s hard to write about a life that was spent above all in his head. Pessoa lived between this world and the next.’

The biography that Zenith has written is due for publication later this year. His work draws on long years of study dedicated to the legacy of this poetic genius, and on everything that he has discovered about him. As a book both about Pessoa and by Zenith, this monumental biography is eagerly awaited.

The pre-publication chapter presented in this issue of Electra anticipates and reveals the nature of Pessoa: A Biography. It combines meticulous sources with a knowledgeably subtle interpretation to create a narrative with a strong, fluid and fascinating thread that echoes the poet’s multiple voices and captures the movements of this magnificent machine of melancholy created by the person who once asked: ‘Why did I make my only life / A life made only of dreams?’

The pages here present a synthetic image of Pessoa: his physical appearance (‘the always well-dressed poet’), sources of income, family ties, social, intellectual and literary bonds, the clear enigma of his sexuality, the real and mythical Lisbon, and the complex relationship between his life and work.

Almost a decade ago, Zenith said of the future: ‘Only after finishing the biography of Pessoa, if it doesn’t finish with me first…’

The biography was eventually written, and its writer has survived. This triumph over death is also a victory for Fernando Pessoa. The poet lives on and will continue to do so; his life deserves to be told with inspiration, rigour and care, and this is precisely what Richard Zenith has done.

This ‘Register’ recounts the story of the famous Hanuman book collection, created by publisher Raymond Foye and painter Francesco Clemente. Considered a cult collection of high bibliophilic value, it is ‘a portal on late twentieth century cultural life in New York City and San Francisco’, as well as ‘a remarkable example of bookmaking practices honed in the Indian village of Adyar, overlooking the Bay of Bengal.’ Thomas Dylan Eaton, the author of this essay, is a writer and curator. He has written for the most prestigious art and culture magazines such as Artforum, Afterall Journal, Bookforum, The White Review and Parkett, and has collaborated with the Tate Modern and the Imperial War Museum London.

Author of a PhD thesis, at the University of São Paulo, on the election of João Havelange as FIFA president, in 1974, Luiz Guilherme Burlamaqui knows this institution well. In this article, he traces a brief history of the transformations the institution has seen throughout its history.

In the Museu da Cidade in Lisbon, there is a meticulous model of Lisbon prior to the 1755 earthquake, made by Ticiano Violante under the guidance of Gustavo de Matos Sequeira, a specialist in Lisbon’s history. The power of this reconstruction of a mythical past is outweighed only by the force that cast us into the chasm of the irretrievable. It epitomises the ambivalence inherent to many representations of cities: on the one hand, a salvaging of historical facts designed to reconstitute a particular point among the different sedimentations of the urban space, thus facilitating future investigations; on the other hand, the dark presence of destructive forces.

Two centuries after his birth, Gustave Flaubert is still questioning both literature and his readers. It is as if the passage of time has made sense of these questions, bringing them up to date and making them more incisive. In her analysis of a central episode in the novel Madame Bovary, Ana Rocha projects what she reads onto a screen and, in the end, the image that we see is that of Flaubert.

There are countless discourses today about food and everything that revolves around it. A quintessential anthropological object enshrined in the expression ‘we are what we eat’, food has become a matter of great cultural and social importance that is studied at the highest level and given prominence in the media and publishing industry.

We are what we eat. This premise, which establishes a relationship of equivalence between identity and food, is the essential starting point for Christopher Kissane’s historical, cultural and anthropological research. Kissane, author of Food, Religion & Communities in Early Modern Europe, was named as a ‘New Generation Thinker’ by the BBC in 2016. In this article, he examines the history of food in Europe and how it intertwines with its political history.