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

Abstract This article examines the twentieth-century Macau-based poet Camilo Pessanha’s contribution to the Portuguese tradition of maritime literature, an inheritance that writers increasingly mobilized in service of the nationalist project in turn-of-the-century Portugal. Pessanha seized on fluid citational practices that were already latent in iconic lusophone maritime works like Luís de Camões’s Os Lusíadas to awaken the tradition from its late-imperial slumber and recover its sensory primacy. Pessanha’s creative metabolization of works by authors such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Charles Baudelaire overlaid French notions of ennui and ship image onto his nautical lyric, opening up a proverbial sea route for later Portuguese modernists, including Fernando Pessoa. From Pessanha’s Franco-Portuguese literary confluence emerges a blue poetics of citation—a poetics that affirms, in a postcolonial key, the fluid and transnational intertextualities inherent to literary seafaring.