Camilo Pessanha

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Camilo Pessanha.

Camilo Pessanha (September 7, 1867, Coimbra—March 1, 1926, Macau) was born the illegitimate son of a law student and a maid on September 7, 1867 in Coimbra, Portugal. He later followed in his father's footsteps and took a degree in law at the prestigious Universidade de Coimbra. In 1894, after having graduated from Coimbra and suffering from a failed love-affair, Pessanha re-located to the Portuguese colony of Macau were he took a position as a philosophy teacher at the newly formed Macau Lyceum. In 1900 he was nominated as public defender, and later judge. To pass his time, besides composing poetry, he immersed himself in the local culture, collected Chinese art and became a respected China authority in the colony. Pessanha died on March 1, 1926 due to complications aggravated by his chronic opium use. He was survived by a son and a concubine.

Since the poet had the unique talent of re-writing his works from memory and had the habit of giving his poems to close friends, many of his poems had either become lost or inadvertently destroyed. To counter this, Ana de Castro Osório urged Pessanha to place his poems in a single volume. With Pessanha's blessing, João de Castro Osório published Clepsidra (1920). In the years that followed, other poems not included in Clepsidra but attributed to Pessanha appeared in the Portuguese press. Clepsidra eventually came out in a 1945 edition and was radically re-edited in 1956. Gaspar Simőes brought to light several more poems and versions of previously published poems as well as Pessanha's translations of Chinese elegies in his A Obra e o Homem: Camilo Pessanha (1967). In 1994, Paulo Franchetti authored a critical edition of Clepsidra including previously unknown fragments.

At first primarily influenced by Cesário Verde, Pierre Balayet and Paul Verlaine, Pessanha became the most pure of Portuguese Symbolists. His poems greatly influenced the Geração de Orpheu from Mário de Sá-Carneiro to Fernando Pessoa.