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The New Portuguese Poetry Sociologically Considered Excerpt Pt. Ed. - Martins The New Portuguese Poetry Sociologically Considered En. Ed. - Balden Fernando Pessoa I [7] To the literary movement representative and peculiar of the nascent portuguese generation, there has been made, by public opinion, the favor of not being comprehended. And this movement, that, above all in poetry, with growing neatness, accuses its representative individuality, has not been comprehended, because, a part of the public, which is older than thirty years of age, is inadaptilizable, by being already old, to this movement, and rumor, before it, of innate uncomprehending ones; because another part, either for circumstances of a baccalaureate educative species, or for carelessness in the spiritual maintenance of the sentiment of race, or yet for sentiments of devious and sterile enthusiasm generated by absorption in the intense and petty life of our politics, is placed in a state of pseudo-soul, describable as being of uncomprehending ones of occasion; and because the other, remainder, belonging to which are the new poets and literary ones and the ones that accompany them in the obscure racial sentiment that guides them, they do not yet take conscientiousness of itself as what it really is, whereas the actual poetic movement is yet an embryo as to its tendencies, nebulous as to its ideas that it may have of itself or of other things. It urges that — setting it apart from mysticisms of thought and of expression, useful only for awakening by the ridiculous, that its obscurity for the profane {ones/things} causes, the happy interest of the social enemy — with reasonings and hawkish analyses one penetrates into the comprehension of the actual portuguese poetic movement, one asks to the national soul, in its {reflected/ mirrored/polished/shining,} what it intends and to what it tends, and whether it may put in terms of logical comprehensibility the value and the signification, in presence of sociology, of this literary and artistic movement. II In the first place, it is evident[granted] that that by which one calls a literary current ought in some mode to be presentative of the social state of the epoch and of the country in which it appears. Because a literary current is not, not unless the writers {of/to} a determined period have in common a special tone, and that it represents, with the inevitable individual peculiarities being pushed aside, a For Educational and Research Purposes Only 1 Pt. Ed. - Martins The New Portuguese Poetry Sociologically Considered En. Ed. - Balden Fernando Pessoa general concept of the world and of life, and a mode of expressing this concept, that, by being common to these writers, forcibly ought to have root in what they have in common, and this is the epoch and the country in which they live or in which they are integrated. And if the literature is fatefully the expression of the social state of a political period, a fortiori ought it to be, within the literature, the literary genre that most closely fastens and most transparently collects the express sentiment and the express idea — and this literary genre is poetry. This is not, however, at the moment important. To know by literature the ideas of an epoch can only have interest for posterity, which does not have another means of becoming present to its reasonings. What occupies us is to know whether the literature will be able to be a sociological indicator for us, whether it can be an index for us for indicating in what hours of civilization that we are, or, to speak with clarity, for informing us of the state of vitality and exuberance of life in what a nation or epoch encounters, so that, by literature simply, we may be able to foresee or conclude what the country hopes {insofar as/wherein} this literature is actual. And it is precisely this that a priori cannot be imagined. Let us refer ourselves, therefore, to the analyzed evidence of the facts. Let us domesticate, however, the terrain, clarifying some essential terms, and simplifying, in order that we not be long-winded, the conditions of the projected analysis. By vitality of a nation can be understood neither its military force nor its commercial prosperity, secondary things and so to speak physical things in the nations; what has to be understood is its exuberance of soul, that is, its capacity of creating, not even simply science, which is restricted and mechanical, but new molds, new general ideas, for the civilizational movement to which it belongs. It is by this that no one compares the clamorous greatness of Rome to the super greatness of Greece. Greece created a civilization, that Rome simply spread, distributed. We have Roman ruins and Greek ideas. Rome is, save what surdied1 in the invited formulas of the codes, a memory of a glory; Greece is survived in our ideas and in our sentiments. 1 En. Ed. - sobremorrer is a pun on sobreviver, to survive. For Educational and Research Purposes Only 2 Pt. Ed. - Martins The New Portuguese Poetry Sociologically Considered En. Ed. - Balden Fernando Pessoa To avail ourselves of the material for the analysis of only two nations — England and France; and this because, these having a national unity, a continuity of life and an accentuated civilizational influence, the problem is limited simply to the analysis that we desire to make, without imposing, as would impose the study of any nation either more complex, or more detached in time, a previous differential analysis. The scarcity of material, however, is important only when it is superficial to analysis; because, if pour expliquer un brin de pail il fat demoter tout le system de l’univers,2 to the ideal reasoner it would suffice, seeing that the system of the universe is found logically contained in the brin de pail, it/he analyzes it well, to him brin de paille, for deducing the system of the universe.3 We shall take England and France for material of analysis. And we shall take {neat/pronounced} periods, for the space does not permit the co-analysis of literarily or politically embryonic periods. III [. .] 2 En. Ed. — The quotation comes from the essais “Le Chemin de velours. Nouvelles dissociations d’idées” (The Path of velvet. New dissociations of ideas” (1902) by Remy de Gourmont (1858-1915,) a poet, playwright, but legalist by training. The quotation reads if “in order to explain a strand of straw it is necessary to demonstrate the whole system of the universe.” Balden has not tracked down the context of this quotation. 3 En. Ed. — Pessoa seems to be making an orthographic point, as he does in his use of aunados and unidos in O Problema Ortográfico II. For Educational and Research Purposes Only 3.
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