Fernando Pessoa, poet-translator, 'overwriting' Poe and Whitman

This study aims to contribute to the understanding of Pessoa's incorporation of English language and literature in his own writing, looking specifically at his relationship with the American poets Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman. The focus will be on the Portuguese poet's borrowings from models derived from both, namely a sort of translation of prosody and tropes - what I call 'overwriting' - that fuelled his 'oceanic' impetus. This impetus surfaces in a few related modernist concepts that Pessoa sought to poeticise - sensacionismo, vertiginismo, dynamismo, atlantismo - for which the wave stood as metaphor and prosodic unit. Starting from the observation that poets engage in translational operations in order to assert and/or project themselves, I follow Nikolaou's assumption of 'autobiographical arcs' in 'instances of literary ventriloquism' (2006, 23) to explore Pessoa's repeated return to compositions such as Poe's The Bells' or Whitman's 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry'.