Chapter Visioni di Salomè. L’orrore del sogno in un frammento teatrale di Pessoa

Abstract

Fernando Pessoa's "static dramas" - fourteen are currently known, all of them unfinished and fragmentary, except The Sailor - mirror the heteronymism that characterises, in a broad sense, his entire work. A theatre of words, of situation rather than of action, which is realised in a dialectical superimposition of the inner level with the outer one and in a mechanism that through recourse to dreams, as an active instrument of poetic creation, generates mystery and horror. The fragments of Salome, a drama probably composed in the period 1917-1918, are a highly significant example not only of Pessoa's static/estatic tendency, but also of the need to represent in various declinations the 'subtle intellectual terror' that constitutes his dramatic vocation.