ABSTRACT
Soren Kierkegaard's Immediate Erotic Stages is a play by the Portuguese author Agustina Bessa-Luis, first published in 1992, and translated into Danish in 1994. Every character in the play lives within a complex web, where fiction, myth, and reality are entangled; the dialogues move without warning from quasi-literal translations to original text by the author, who was probably familiar with Spanish and French translations that circulated in Portuguese intellectual milieus from the 1940s onwards, since she is self-taught by intense and extensive reading. The novelty of the play lies precisely in its being a play, a dramatic literary work, written to be performed, needing actors and sceneries to become actual. In a play, the form in communication is what really allows the author to show something, to make an idea visible, manifest. By writing a play and by recreating Soren Kierkegaard as its central character, Bessa Luis suggests a new perspective from which to consider the philosopher's life and work.
