HECTIC ETHICS
by Francisco Hinojosa, translated by Kurt Hollander

(City Lights Books) $9.95

Mexican author Francisco Hinojosa has a lot of great ideas for stories. One can almost hear him sketching them out to excited friends in a bar: "How about a pointless war between residents of two different apartment towers? I'll draw on Buñuel, Donald Barthelme, and J.G. Ballard for that one. Or how about a creation myth from God's point of view? Or a condensed life story with numbered paragraphs like something out of Cortázar? Or how about an artist who creates the perfect object? Where does he go from there?" Where, indeed, for when Hinojosa actually sets down these plot lines, they come across as little more than proclamations that he once had a cool idea, with little else to sustain them as stories. This is not as bad as it sounds, though. There are a number of brilliant turns of phrase, and the collection is barely 100 pages long, so Hinojosa doesn't have much time to wither from exposure. "Kids" is about a band of neglected youngsters who come into possession of a gun. In "What You Need To Do Is Read Kant," the "narration" is really one side of an argument presaging the dissolution of a relationship, and you get the feeling that the narrator, unbeknownst to himself, is the one doing most of the dissolving. In "People Are Strange," a grandfather and his grandson share the same women, and the same bizarre disease, which is never quite spelled out but involves lots of prostheses. Finally, there are two meandering first-person life stories which have an appealing strangeness but are otherwise not all that interesting. The stories in this volume are drawn from the last 10 years of Hinojosa's published work, and one can't help wondering if a different editor might not have chosen weirdness as the unifying theme of the collection, and in so doing revealed that different dimensions of his work exist. Until more of his stories are translated, we can only guess. Dan Tenenbaum


FERNANDO PESSOA
by Fernando Pessoa & Company, translated by Richard Zenith

(Grove Press) $25

Pessoa (1888-1935), the Portuguese poet, grew up in South Africa and returned to Lisbon as a teenager. He spent most of his life in the same furnished hotel room, now a historic site, and wrote a huge body of poetry under many different names, giving each a distinct personality, philosophy, style, work history, horoscope, physique--he even drew pictures of these "heteronyms" and confused his friends when he slipped into one or other of these multiple personalities. Fortunately, the reader doesn't have to deal with the real-life Pessoa. Zenith has assembled a number of poems by his alter-egos Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Alvaro de Campos, as well as Pessoa "himself," providing elegant translations that glide through many stylistic registers. Caeiro's modernist pastoral is limpid and elegant, and Ricardo Reis' lugubrious "Odes" are interesting, but my favorite is the decadent, bisexual naval engineer de Campos, author of the ghostly "Tobacco Shop":

Today, I'm defeated, as if I'd learned the truth.
Today, I'm lucid, as if I were about to die
And had no greater kinship with things
Than to say farewell, this build- ing and this side of the street becoming
A row of train cars, with the whis- tle of departure
Blowing in my head
And my nerves jolting and bones creaking as we pull out.

De Campos is often compared to Whitman, whom Pessoa admired and imitated. But De Campos writes with a masochistic intensity Whitman never dreamed of, especially in the great "Ode Maritime," not included in this collection (Edward Honig's translation has been reissued by City Lights Books). Can you imagine Whitman writing a line like, "Eat, dirty little girl, eat!/If only I could eat chocolates with the same truth as you!" Harold Bloom's recent The Western Canon constantly harps on this Whitman connection. He has included Pessoa in his list of the 26 all time "must-reads" of the W.C., but rumor has it that his remarks are a rehash of his student Susan Margaret Brown's Ph.D. dissertation. Whatever--first read the poems. Then if you want to get close to the real Pessoa, you can go to Brasileira Café in the Chiado in Lisbon, where you can have your picture taken with a life-size bronze replica of the poet, sitting at a table in the café. David Wise


ALWAYS ASTONISHED
by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Edward Honig

(City Lights Books) $12.95

Forecasted in Pessoa's poetry and prose are all of our so-called contemporary dilemmas of identity: the urbane banality of everyday pretending, the violence endured in the deathly pressure of boredom-cum-bureaucratic marshland, the quasi-heroic irony in the solitude of experience. To be ourselves we must pretend to be what we are, even to ourselves. Pessoa is a master pretender, writing under a myriad of assumed names and styles and disowning them all. He eschews identity for multi-personality, and in the chorus of voices, he admits to none.

Unpublished until his death in 1935, a literal trunkful of Pessoa's writings has slowly been released and translated over this century. Pessoa is considered the most important Portuguese modernist, and we should be grateful for these snippets of his genius. Go to his poems first--but when you're ready for his self-explication, Always Astonished fits the bill. We learn here of the ecstatic possession which prompted his first binge of trance writing. He spills secrets on artistic production, his many heteronyms, the nature of genius and fame. He also delivers his programmatic "Sensationism"-- the theory that art must imitate the pagan rawness of the senses. This he maintains despite his certainty that he genuinely feels nothing at all. Pessoa's blasé angst rides this paradox of sensibility and insensitivity. Self-discovery and self-effacement belong to the same tortuous gesture.

Reaching just past Nietzsche's shadow, Pessoa in 1930 writes: "Like the sun breaking through clouds, I see my former life, noting with a metaphysical jolt that all my positive gestures, clearest ideas, most logical purposes are finally nothing more than born drunkenness, unadulterated madness, monumental ignorance. I wasn't even acting. I was enacted by them. I wasn't the act but the actor's gestures." Pessoa recognizes self as an effect of forces beyond his control, but he nevertheless must act. His "pantheistic affirmation" is the spiritual corollary to a soul inhabited by mutually exclusive and inscrutable voices. For us modern spirits, in every nook of our soul burns an offering to a different God. In the age of the commodity, multi-personality may be the only reasonable accommodation. Gregg Miller