Athena
The short lifespan of Athena, a monthly Magazine of Art, was comprised between October 1924 and June 1925. Only 5 issues came out, but they were enough to eternalize in the Portuguese Modernist panorama a project that first brought to light the Alberto Caeiro and Ricardo Reis heteronyms, nine years after Álvaro de Campos’ debut as an engineer and sensationist poet in the first issue of Orpheu.
Directed in “cohabitation” by Fernando Pessoa, who was responsible for the literary part, and Ruy Vaz, who directed the section dedicated to visual arts and architecture, it included reproductions of drawings, pictures, and prints by past and contemporary artists such as Tiepolo, Lino António, Mily Possoz, and Manuel Maria Bordallo Pinheiro.
Athena featured the writings of some old Orphic members such as Luiz de Montalvor, Almada Negreiros, Raul Leal, Mário de Sá-Carneiro (issue 2 is dedicated to him), in addition to other poets and intellectuals with strong friendship and affective bonds with Fernando Pessoa: António Botto, Augusto Ferreira Gomes, Mario Saa, Castello de Moraes, and Henrique Rosa, his stepfather's brother and mentor in the early years.
However, it is thanks to the abundant unpublished contributions produced by Pessoa himself, both as author and translator, and by his three heteronyms, that the magazine elicited great interest.
In fact, Ricardo Reis signs 22 odes in Athena 1, while Álvaro de Campos confirms his qualities – already exhibited in the 1917 Ultimatum – as a poignant prose writer with three articles: “O que é a Metafísica?” in issue 2, where the author starts a discussion with the periodical’s editorial line and "Apontamentos para uma Estética Não-Aristotélica", "Apontamentos para uma Estética Não-Aristotélica II", published in issues 3 and 4, respectively. Alberto Caeiro reveals himself to the world in Athena 4 with 22 poems from O Guardador de Rebanhos and in Athena 5 he writes 16 “inconjunto” poems.
In an interview with Diário de Lisboa, on November 3, 1924, Fernando Pessoa explained that the purpose of the publication was:
"To give the Portuguese public, as much as possible, a pure art magazine, that is, neither occasional and incipient, as Orpheu, nor almost purely decorative as the admirable Contemporânea."
This concise paragraph suggests between the lines that Athena, born as a neoclassical alternative to the literary magazines of its time, was not intended to be appreciated only from a formal perspective, but rather should become a medium for theoretical reflection, for considering the route travelled since Orpheu, and for presenting the new and increasingly eclectic aesthetic currents found within the first Portuguese Modernism.
The commitment that Pessoa felt and wanted to assume as director was tied to the need to evaluate the vanguard started in the previous decade and to the goal of turning the magazine into the promotional organ of Portuguese neo-paganism, according to a plan outlined 4-5 years earlier: his dedication to explaining heteronomy as a labyrinthine system of poets tasked with making “superior” or “supreme” art, each in his own way.
Regarding the first assumption, the self-titled editorial opening Athena's issue 1 serves as a preamble to the type of cultural and artistic model that the magazine intends to reclaim. With a nod to Ricardo Reis' Apollonian and Horatian classicism, on the one hand it formalizes a radical departure from the Orphic phase’s “Dionysianism”, while on the other it seeks to demonstrate the intrinsic relations of art with metaphysics, taking the latter as science:
“If one can accept that the soul is divided into two parts — one as material, the other pure spirit — we will say of any civilized group or man today, that the first is owed to the nation it is or in which he was born, the second to Ancient Greece. Except for the blind forces of Nature, Sumner Maine said, everything that moves in this world is Greek in origin. These Greeks represented the union of art and science in the goddess Athena, in whose effect art (as well as science) originates as perfection (...) it is therefore at the level of abstraction that art and science, both rising, come together, like two paths on the crest they travel toward. This is Athena's empire, whose action is harmony. One doesn’t learn to be an artist; one does learn, however, to know how to be one. (…) Everyone has the Apollo they seek and will have the Athena they pursue.”
As for the role and function of “superior art” within a culture, the following brief fragment, entitled Athena and most likely contemporary with the magazine, is paradigmatic. In it, Pessoa ranks three types of art, describing each of their purposes:
“The purpose of inferior art is to please, the purpose of average art is to uplift, the purpose of superior art is to liberate. But while the main aim of average art is to elevate, it must also please as much as it can; and while the aim of superior art is to liberate, it must also please and elevate as much as it can [...]. Elevating and liberating are not the same thing. When we are elevated, we feel superior to ourselves, because of our self-distance. By liberating ourselves, we feel superior to ourselves, now as masters and not emigrants of our self. Liberation is an inward elevation, as if we were growing instead of rising.”1
In the previous excerpts, Pessoa is evidently dialoguing with himself and with the opening essay in Athena's first issue where he asserts that art constitutes a self-improvement of the individual, whereas, indirectly, science constitutes the improvement of his conception and knowledge of the world. And he is also and above all ideally interacting with T. S. Eliot’s authority: to recover and bring together, integrating them in current contexts, contents of ethical, moral, religious, and aesthetic thought that belong to the heritage of Tradition, almost always mistakenly understood as something static, outdated, and obsolete or as the opposite path to what is new and original, and that instead represents the platform from which one starts to reach for the unknown. As Eliot does in fact state in two capital essays, “our problem being to form the future, we can only form it on the materials of the past; we must use our heredity, instead of denying it”2, because “by losing tradition, we lose our hold on the present”3.
Antonio Cardiello
Fernando Pessoa, Páginas de Estética e de Teoria e Crítica Literárias, ed. Georg Rudolf Lind and Jacinto do Prado Coelho, Lisboa, Ática, 1967, p. 30.↩︎
Thomas Stearns Eliot, “The humanism of Irving Babbitt”, in Essays ancient and modern, London, Faber and Faber, 1936, p. 80.↩︎
Thomas Stearns Eliot, “The possibility of a poetic drama”, in The sacred wood. Essays on poetry and criticism, New York, Barnes and Noble, 1928, p. 62.↩︎
