"Nós os de Orpheu"

Abstract

This essay considers Fernando Pessoa’s text “Nós os de Orpheu” within its specific context of publication, a magazine that pays tribute to Orpheu, twenty years after its short existence, and to Presença, a dominant magazine in the national literary scene at the time. This collaboration in Sudoeste is Pessoa´s last publication in his lifetime, being these therefore his ultimate and, accordingly, definitive words about Orpheu. This note will be discussed, on the one hand, in relation to other texts in which Pessoa spoke about Orpheu and, on the other hand, considered as a distinguishing act in relation to the Presença movement. The confrontation between Orpheu and Presença, that this number of Sudoeste stages and promotes, has become decisive in reading the Portuguese literary modernism. This essay argues that it is the awareness of this confrontation which underlies this editorial note as well as the choice of the other texts the author decided to publish on the same occasion, the poem “Conselho”, in his own name, and “Nota ao Acaso", from Álvaro de Campos.