Letters to Ophélia

Fernando Pessoa



Antonio Seguí (illustrations)

15th October 1920

Little Baby,

You have thousands, even millions, of good reasons for being irked, offended, and arky with me. But I’m not the one to blame. It’s Fate that has condemned my brain –if not definitively, then at least to a condition calling for serious treatment, which I’m not so sure I can get. I plan (without yet resorting to the celebrated May 11th decree) to enter a clinic next month, where I’m hoping for a treatment that will help me fend off the black wave that’s falling over my mind. I don’t know what the result of all this will be –I mean, I can’t imagine what it could be. Don’t wait for me. If I come to see you, it will be in the morning, when you’re on your way to the office in Poço Novo. Don’t worry. What happened, you ask? I got switched with Álvaro de Campos!

Always your

Fernando

48 letters and 16 poems bear witness to the secret romance between the Portuguese poet and young Ophélia Queiroz. A correspondence built up during the decisive years of Fernando Pessoa’s literary production.

Antonio Tabucchi’s prologue offers a deep reflection on these collected letters. Antonio Seguí, the great plastic artist, dedicated those letters more than thirty excellent watercolours.

Translation: Alejandro García Schnetzer

140 x 210 mm; 174 pp. Hardback
ISBN: 978-84-92412-47-1

See the author's biography
See the illustrator's biography

Antonio Seguí

Córdoba, Argentina, 1934



His work was awarded the Grand Prix at the Tokyo Print Biennial (1966), the International Prize for painting at Darmstadt, Germany (1967); the Grand Prix at the Krakow Print Biennial (1968); the Grand Prix of the National Arts Fund, Buenos Aires (1990); the Gold Medal of the Triennial of Graphic Arts in Norway (1995). In 2005 the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris organized a successful retrospective of his work.

Títulos publicados:
Parisian Tales
Letters to Ophélia

Parisian Tales

Mario Benedetti



Antonio Seguí (illustrations)

«In the house on Rue Blomet, Madame Benoit greeted us with her usual sharp and distant smile. He held out his hand to her and said in his usual way that he was pleased that Mrs. Méndez [Madame Mandés] had arrived safely. She smiled and stammered out another banal pleasantry inreply. He got her key and they went up to the room.»

The stories in this book talk about exile, love, loneliness, indifference and friendship. They are deep stories, told in a simple way with Paris as their common background. However this is not the Paris that one finds in postcards but rather it is that Paris which marked the life of many generations during the 1960s and 1970s. The main characters are men and women whose way of feeling and thinking moves us and inevitably captivates us.

The illustrations by the great artist Antonio Seguí recreate this raw, poetic and sometimes comical world that beats through in these memorable pages of Mario Benedetti.

160 x 240 mm; 58 pp. Hardback with Jacket | ISBN: 978-84-96509-38-9

See the author's biography
See the illustrator's biography