BESANT, Annie; PESSOA, Fernando (trans.).

£1,750 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Os Ideaes da Theosophia. Rare first edition translated by Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese poet and a student of mysticism. Pessoa knew nothing of theosophy before accepting the commission and quickly became persuaded by the "notion of power, of dominion, of higher and extra-human knowledge" (cited in Zenith, p. 491) of the work he was translating.Pessoa also translated Leadbeater and Blavatsky from 1915 to 1916. However, "the seductive spell of Theosophy on Pessoa wore off quickly... The occult traditions of Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry held far more purchase on Pessoa's imagination than did Theosophy" (Zenith, p. 491). Of his own works, Pessoa only published Mensagem (1934) in Portuguese during his lifetime, writing his others in English. His "command of not just the English language but of its varied poetic traditions injects even more complexity into a body of work that was already one of the most complex in all of Modernist literature" (Ferrari, p. 16). This first Portuguese edition is untraced in auction records. WorldCat records three institutional locations, at the Gulbenkian Art Library in Lisbon, the Getty, and Yale. The Ideals of Theosophy was first published in English in 1912 at the Theosophist Office in India.

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