Cartas de Amor

Sao Paolo: Tinta-da-China Brasil, 2025. First edition thus (stated). Small octavo in white wraps illus in black; 205p; numerous b&w illus throughout. Minor edge edge; else near fine thus. Paperback. ISBN: 9786584835405

In Portuguese. This edition uncommon in the US. Fernando Pessoa's *Cartas de Amor* are about fifty letters he wrote to Ofélia Queiroz in two bursts: March 1 to November 29, 1920, and September 11, 1929, to January 11, 1930. Their courtship began when she was 19 and he was 31. The letters first appeared in full from Ática in Lisbon in 1978. That edition included an afterword and notes by David Mourão-Ferreira, plus Ofélia's own testimony, gathered by her grandniece Maria da Graça Queiroz, who also established the text. Readers were surprised to find the elusive poet of the heteronyms writing with an adolescent's infatuation, in pet names and baby talk. In 1978 Mourão-Ferreira asserted that this was the only romantic episode in Pessoa's life, a claim later challenged. The letters also blur the line between life and fiction. On September 25, 1929, Pessoa wrote an entire letter in the voice of the heteronym Álvaro de Campos, a separate literary persona Pessoa wrote under, advising Ofélia to throw her mental image of the "rascal" Pessoa down the sink. Critics have read this as Pessoa using the heteronym to retreat from the relationship. His 1920 farewell letter explains that his destiny belongs to "outra Lei" ("another Law") that she knows nothing of. The poem by Campos that opens *Todas as cartas de amor são ridículas* ("All love letters are ridiculous") serves as the correspondence's own ironic gloss. Manuela Parreira da Silva's joint edition (Assírio & Alvim) adds Ofélia's side, interleaving 185 documents, and shows erotic allusions in the exchange that Mourão-Ferreira's reading had missed.