Osvaldo Manuel Silvestre (Coimbra University, Portugal) Constructing a digital archive of Fernando Pessoa’s Livro do Desassossego [LdoD]: an impossible project?

1. The LdoD Archive
Advanced Studies in the Materialities of Literature
Osvaldo Manuel Silvestre (School of Arts and Humanities, Coimbra
University)

2. The Materialities of Literature
• Ph. D. Program ‘Advanced Studies in the The Materialities of Literature’
• MATLIT
• Digital Literary Studies. International Conference. Coimbra 2015
• Vox Media. Sound in Literature
• Project LdoD

3. Fernando Pessoa
1888-1935 (Lisbon)
1895-1905: lives in South
Africa (Durban)
March 8, 1914: Pessoa’s “day of
triumph” (the day the
heteronyms appeared before
him)
1915: Orpheu (2 issues)
1934: Mensagem, nationalist
poem, only book published
during his life
January 13, 1935: letter to
Adolfo Casais Monteiro, on the
“genesis of the heteronyms”

4. The Book of
Disquiet
• An unfinished book project (or a
project without an end?)
• Written between 1913 and 1934
• More than 500 pieces of text
• Some of the pieces are several
pages long but most fragments
are brief texts consisting of a
few paragraphs
• Pieces typed or handwritten on
loose sheets and also scattered
across various notebooks
• Pessoa drafted a preface for the
book and left several
fragmentary plans for
organizing the work
• However, there is no final
authorial revision, selection, or
ordering of the pieces

5. Publishing The Book of Disquiet
• 1982: Jacinto do Prado Coelho, with
Maria Aliete Galhoz and Teresa
Sobral Cunha, publishes the editio
princeps.
• 520 numbered pieces in 2 volumes
• The edition is organized according to
thematic clusters
• Respects Pessoa’s ortography
• The book is attibuted to Pessoa’s
semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares

6. • 1990-1991: Teresa Sobral Cunha
publishes the second edition
• 724 unnumbered texts in 2 volumes
• Modernizes Pessoa’s ortography
• Texts arranged chronologically
• Texts attributed to heteronyms
Vicente Guedes and Bernardo Soares

7. • 1998: Richard Zenith publishes the
third edition
• 533 numbered pieces
• Modernizes Pessoa’s ortography
• Texts organized according to a
combination of thematic and
chronological criteria
• Texts attributed to Bernardo Soares

8. • 2010: Jerónimo Pizarro publishes the
fourth edition
• Critical and genetic edition
• Respects Pessoa’s ortography
• 586 chronologically arranged and
numbered texts and fragments
• Book assigned to Fernando Pessoa

9. Re-publishing The Book of Disquiet
• With the exception of the first edition (reprinted without changes in 1997, after Jacinto do
Prado Coelho’s death), the remaining three editions have not yet stabilized.
• Teresa Sobral Cunha published 4 editions (1990-91, 1997, 2008, 2013).
• Richard Zenith published 12 editions, between 1998 and 2015.
• Jerónimo Pizarro published 3 editions (2010, 2013, 2014).
• For the past 25 years, critical editors have not managed to publish the work twice under
the same textual form.
• Every reprint becomes an opportunity for introducing further changes and revisions: new
readings of particular passages, additional fragments included (and others excluded),
fragments are fused or divided, and a few pieces change place.

10. The path to the LdoD Archive:
Pessoa = Trunk [Treasure Chest] = Archive = Digital

11. The LdoD Project
Abstract (cf. application, February 23, 2011)
“No Problem Has a Solution: A Digital Archive of the Book of Disquiet” aims to produce a
hypermedia digital edition and archive dedicated to the Livro do Desassossego (LdoD), by Bernardo
Soares/Fernando Pessoa. This archive will aggregate digital facsimiles of all the documentary
material of LdoD, diplomatic transcriptions of these materials, a concordance table of the major
Portuguese editions published between 1982 and 2010, and also tools for search and textual
analysis. Our goal is to combine a genetic edition with a social edition of LdoD, showing LdoD both
as a network of potential authorial intentions and as a conjectural construction of its successive
editors. This digital edition and archive will attempt to represent the dynamics of the acts of
writing and editing in the production and reproduction of LdoD. The three main objectives of the
digital edition/archive are:
(a) representing the dynamics of the acts of writing and editing in the production of LdoD;
(b) exploring the potential of digital media to recreate the history of that dynamic; and
(c) creating a space for virtualizing the LdoD that encourages new dynamics of reading, editing,
and researching in the encounter between readers and this corpus of fragmentary written
materials.

12. The second component of the project, “No Problem Has a Solution: Concepts and Forms of
Writing and the Book in the Modernist Imagination”, aims to analyse historical and
theoretical concepts and forms of writing and the book in modernist practices.
It will take as its starting point ideas about writing and the book in the LdoD itself. The
possibility and impossibility of the book will be examined in modernist discourses and
practices, and throughout the twentieth century, within a transcultural and translinguistic
context.
On the one hand, we will analyse works that take the typographic materiality of the book as
the horizon for acts of writing; on the other hand, we will analyse works in which writing calls
into question the discursive and conceptual limits of the book, focusing instead on an open
processuality of the act of writing which results in dispersal, fragmentariness, and
incompleteness.

13. The LdoD Digital Archive today
The construction of the LdoD Digital Archive attempts to answer the following reserch
questions:
1) Can we use a Web 2.0 environment to produce a digital archive that integrates a genetic
with a social editing approach?
2) Is it possible to structure and encode genetic and editorial witnesses for dynamic
interactions that feedback into the contents and structure of the archive itself?
3) As we remediate and simulate writing and bibliographic processes in the construction of
LdoD, can we rethink the relations between acts of writing and forms of the book as
they are imagined and performed in our writing and editing practices?
4) By virtualizing editing and witing operations, can we remodel the archive as a space por
autopoiesis and allopoiesis, i.e. as an exploratory space for multiple remakings rather
than a fixed, immutable, and authorized repository?

14. LdoDArchive
facsimiles [document]
transcriptions [text]
editions[book]
JPC
edition
TSC
edition
RZ
edition
JP
edition
LdoD
edition
Virtual
edition
n

15. virtual dimension: the
construction of LdoD
by readers
reader
-
functi
on
editor-
functi
on
book-
functi
on
author
-
functi
on

16. The LdoD Archive