Sailing the Franco-Portuguese Seas in Colonial Macau: A Blue Poetics of Citation in Camilo Pessanha’s Clepsydra

This article examines the twentieth-century Macau-based Portuguese poet Camilo Pessanha’s singular contribution to the Portuguese tradition of maritime literature. I argue that Pessanha seized on fluid citational practices, already latent in  iconic works of maritime literature in Portuguese such as Luís Vaz de Camões’s Os Lusíadas, to revive a genre that had increasingly been identified with the nationally nostalgic poetry of turn-of-the-century Portugal. By rescripting Portuguese maritime literature according to French notions of ennui and ship image, I argue, Pessanha overcame those limits and inaugurated a proverbial sea route for modernists like Fernando Pessoa, who would go on to theorize an aquatically informed poetics and author important maritime works of his own. From Pessanha’s Franco-Portuguese literary confluence, I theorize a blue poetics of citation, which is to say, a poetics that affirms the transnational and fluid intertextualities long cultivated by Portuguese literary seafarers. I conclude that the citational fluidity of Pessanha’s Macau-based poetic output not only undermines his claim that the best literature is ethnopoetically pure; it also outlines notions of post-colonial maritime subjectivity with broad applications to the emerging field of the blue humanities.