Excerpt of essay read in the course Identity of Europe (IUC, Dubrovnik, 2023)
(…) Their “national feeling” bounded them, ambivalently, to three notions of nation: Portuguese, Jewish, Portuguese-Jewish. It was a polysemic nation. The poet Fernando Pessoa wrote of his heteronym Álvaro de Campos, a naval engineer: the “most hysterically hysteric of myself,” somehow “between white and brown (moreno), tipo vagamente de judeu português,” a vague type of Portuguese-Jew. With a fragmented, drifting identity (“I don’t know how many souls I have (…) I become them, and not myself”), he sang the embarked (Ode Marítima), “O wandering and unstable soul of people who walk on the board… O continual escapes, goings, drunkenness of the Diverse!”, seeking to wake up in “days more direct than European days.” In History of Portuguese-Jews, Carsten L. Wilke recalled Pessoa to speculate on the Jewish factor of a Portuguese temperament of “melancholy, feeling of exile, messianic spirit and longing,” saudade. (…)
Rafael Kasper 