Pessoa’s “Triumphal Day” lasted rather more than 24 hours. A lengthy period of several years elapsed as the poet composed, and then revised and revised, the 49 poems known as O Guardador de Rebanhos. His letter telling how, in 8.3.1914, he had written in a few hours more than half of those poems, all of them in fine polished condition, is not a piece of history, but of fiction. A large number of surviving autographs help us to understand what happened instead: most of Guardador poems were drafted from March to May 1914, as the cycle started to take shape; then, several transcriptions coupled with arduous revisions took place during a much longer period, a decade at least. It is fair to concede, however, that the creative thrust that started this snowball of textual revisions can be placed not in one day, not in that day, but by the springtime of 1914.
