The Duke of Parma at ESTS 2026
Dr. Carlotta Defenu gave a talk on the Duke of Parma at the annual conference in Lublin.
Carlotta Defenu, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Parma and researcher on the project The Unveiling of Fernando Pessoa's Literary Legacy: The Duke of Parma (THEDUKE), presented the paper "Interpreting and Editing the Imperfect: A Case Study from The Duke of Parma by Fernando Pessoa" at the 21st Annual Conference of the European Society for Textual Scholarship, held at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, from 28 to 30 May 2026.
The paper examined one of the most challenging issues in philological and editorial scholarship: how to interpret and produce a critical edition of a work left unfinished by its author. Using Fernando Pessoa's The Duke of Parma as a case study, it explored the theoretical and practical difficulties posed by a manuscript corpus that is fragmentary, unfinished, and highly disordered. The challenge is compounded by the fact that the documents are largely undated and often impossible to date with certainty, requiring the study of the work's genesis to proceed without the guidance of a published or more polished version.
The paper argued that the interpretive instability of an unfinished work should not be viewed merely as a methodological obstacle, but rather as a productive condition that opens new perspectives on the nature of the work itself.
Drawing on two examples from the manuscript archive, the paper demonstrated how the analysis of textual variants can significantly influence editorial decision-making. The examination of Pessoa's planning documents suggested that the organisation of the play's narrative was likely a late-stage attempt to reorder pre-existing material rather than an early phase of composition. Moreover, the genetic analysis of the work indicates that the performative and theatrical dimensions of the text were of secondary importance to Pessoa.
These findings led to a broader editorial proposal: instead of being approached as a conventional dramatic text intended for performance, The Duke of Parma may be more fruitfully understood as a collection of dispersed philosophical monologues and dialogues, closer in spirit to Pessoa's Book of Disquiet than to a play intended to be staged. The paper concluded with a reflection on the existence of texts that fundamentally resist organisation into definitive, closed editions, and on the implications of this resistance for editors and scholars working with such materials.
