De Athena a O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis: Nos bastidores do encontro de Saramago com Pessoa

Abstract

Throughout his dialogue with readers and critics, particularly via interviews and writings aimed at contextualizing his work, José Saramago consistently reaffirmed Fernando Pessoa's place among his fundamental literary influences. Starting in 1984, with the publication of The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, this dialogue increasingly focused on the need to reveal the underlying process that led to the 1984 novel’s creation, wavering between fascination and critical counterpoint to the central philosophical tenets of Ricardo Reis’s work. This paper retraces that journey, centering on two main axes: the significance of the mythical discovery of Reis’s odes in the pages of the magazine Athena (1924) and how the novel of 1984 unpacks the layered reception of Pessoa’s work. This spans from Saramago’s initial encounter with the odes in the early 1940s to later interactions with poems in various anthologies and editions, as well as the mythology inherent in Pessoa’s “drama em gente.”

Keywords

• pessoa, fernando
• reis, ricardo
• athena: revista de arte
• saramago, josé
• intertextuality
• intertextualidade