Teresa Rita Lopes. She was not another widow, but a lover of Pessoa

When Teresa Rita Lopes published her first book of poems, Os Dedos os Dias as Palavras, in 1987, she had already been in close contact with Fernando Pessoa, an absorbing poet who made several appearances in the writer's highly populated poetic universe, playing a role in it. While there are poems in which Pessoa appears imprisoned in a parenthesis or a portrait, serving as a mere hiding place for a lizard, in others he becomes a kind of moving target for her merciless irony. This is what happens in a poem from the book Afectos, 'Bencinha meus padrinhos brasileiros', an important text for containing the literary genealogy that Teresa Rita Lopes implicitly chooses for herself: «You could have Brazilianized our Fernando Pessoa a little, to whom our godfather Drummond dedicated a sonnet./ That is: you could have taken away that/ black suit/ (laugh as much as you want, because I know you say/ 'suit' …) […] Maybe/ he would have gotten rid of all those clothes/ with which – too much! – he wore: suit, waistcoat,/ tie, hat – even leggings! […] but enough of Pessoa!».

Teresa Rita Lopes, from Faro in the Algarve, a well-known multifaceted personality in our literary scene and a name that resonates strongly with all those interested in the figure and work of Fernando Pessoa, whose long and posthumous publishing life is largely due to her, as well as some of the best essays that have been produced on his work, died last Saturday at the age of 87. An essayist, poet and playwright, who has won several awards, she was always concerned with giving us a literary image of Pessoa that was as close as possible to reality, far removed from that interesting cultural export product that Pessoa also is, from the mythical image that continues to fuel the domestic consumption of Pessoa. The two volumes of Pessoa Por Conhecer, published in 1990 by Estampa, highlighted Pessoa as a living person, a multifaceted man. Teresa Rita Lopes always steered clear of the temptation to place Pessoa on an anatomy table, dissect him, fragment him. Quite the opposite. «What is essential – he stressed – if we are not content with just isolated publications of unpublished works to feed a superficial desire for novelty, is to listen to the pulse of Pessoa's work in its entirety».

Contrary to the tendency of its successive editors to expand the Livro do Desassossego, he removed texts that, in his opinion, had been placed there inappropriately. Furthermore, he excluded incomplete drafts, fragments of texts, notes of sudden ideas to be developed later. His edition of Livro(s) do Desassossego (in the plural), published in 2015, rebelled against the idea, defended in particular by Richard Zenith, that we are in the presence of an anti-book, without the structure or completeness to which it aspired. He worked on Pessoa, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by teams of researchers who, under his guidance, dedicated themselves to the unpublished work of the poet of heteronyms. It should be noted that the teacher began to visit the estate and to construct/reconstitute this “novel-drama-in-people” while still at the home of the Poet’s sister, Mrs. D. Henriqueta Madalena, in 1969.

A strong witness to the dictatorship who lived in Portugal until 1963, the year in which, persecuted by it, she went into exile in Paris, where she taught, first at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University and then at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, in the foundation of which she helped to establish it. Teresa Rita Lopes harmoniously combined essay writing and literary criticism, building a solid body of work, with a clear communicability that became a scarce commodity in academic circles. She called herself a woman of the inner left, a militant citizen of the Portuguese-speaking homeland – the same one that Pessoa dreamed of. Her entire life dedicated to study and culture would speak volumes about her orientation, with public interventions of a diverse nature, the Order of Disquiet with which she was awarded by Casa Fernando Pessoa in 2013, but also her literary work, with areas where an interventionist stance stands out, expressed sometimes through a feminine gaze open to the possibility of an improved rebirth (A Proibida Azul Distância, 1991, theatre), sometimes through a deceptive assessment of time, whose face she did not hesitate to expose: “The rancid face of the present world”.