Portugal Holds on to Words Few Can Grasp

LISBON — The latest brouhaha involving cultural property is unfolding here — and not, for a change, over stolen vases or precious war booty, but a poet’s correspondence. As usual, it’s a window onto a nation’s character. The elderly heirs of Fernando Pessoa, the exalted Portuguese writer, plan this fall to auction Pessoa’s correspondence with Aleister Crowley, the early-20th-century British mystic, mountaineer, writer and practitioner of black magic. Portugal’s culture minister is among those who have shown distress in recent days about the letters’ leaving the country.
Full story at the New York Times online.