Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa (born June 13, 1888, Lisbon, Port.—died Nov. 30, 1935, Lisbon) was one of the greatest Portuguese poets, whose Modernist work gave Portuguese literature European significance.

From the age of seven Pessoa lived in Durban, S.Af., where his stepfather was Portuguese consul. He became a fluent reader and writer of English. With the hope of becoming a great poet in that language, Pessoa wrote his early verse in English. In 1905 he returned to Lisbon, where he remained, working as a commercial translator while contributing to avant-garde reviews, especially Orpheu (1915), the organ of the Modernist movement. Meanwhile he read widely not only in poetry but in philosophy and aesthetics. He published his first book of poetry in English, Antinous, in 1918 and subsequently published two others. Yet it was not until 1934 that his first book in Portuguese, Mensagem (Message), appeared. It attracted little attention, and Pessoa died the next year a virtual unknown.

Fame came to Pessoa posthumously, when his extraordinarily imaginative poems first attracted attention in both Portugal and Brazil in the 1940s. His oeuvre is remarkable for the innovation of what Pessoa called heteronyms, or alternative personae. Rather than alter egos—alternative identities that serve as counterparts to or foils for an author’s own ideas—Pessoa’s heteronyms were presented as distinct authors, each of whom differed from the others in terms of poetic style, aesthetic, philosophy, personality, and even gender and language (Pessoa wrote in Portuguese, English, and French). Under their names were published not only poems but also criticism on the poetry of some of the others, essays on the state of Portuguese literature, and philosophical writings.

Although he also published poems under his own name, Pessoa employed more than 70 heteronyms, some of which were only discovered in the early 21st century. Four particular heteronyms stand out. Three were “masters” of modern poetics and participated in lively dialogue through publications in critical journals about each other’s work: Alberto Caeiro, whose poems celebrate the creative process of nature; Álvaro de Campos, whose work was similar in both style and substance to the work of the American poet Walt Whitman; and Ricardo Reis, a Greek and Roman Classicist concerned with fate and destiny. Another heteronym, Bernardo Soares, was the reputed author of Livro do desassossego (The Book of Disquiet), a diary-like work of poetic fragments that Pessoa worked on through the last two decades of his life and that remained unfinished at his death. It was published together for the first time in 1982 and brought him worldwide attention; a full English translation appeared in 2001.

Pessoa’s most important works in addition to Livro do desassossego are posthumously edited collections including Poesias de Fernando Pessoa (1942), Poesias de Álvaro de Campos (1944), Poemas de Alberto Caeiro (1946), Odes de Ricardo Reis (1946), Poesia, Alexander Search (1999), Quadras (2002), Poesia, 1918–1930 (2005), and Poesia, 1930–1935 (2006). Collections of his work in English translation include The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (2001) and A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems (2006), both edited and translated by Richard Zenith, and A Centenary Pessoa (1995).