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 The
most celebrated Portuguese poet, who had a major role in the development
of modernism in his country. Pessoa was a member of the Modernist
group Orpheu; he was its greatest representative. He wrote
under several "heteronyms", literary alter egos, who supported and
criticized each other's works. During his lifetime Pessoa was virtually
unknown and he published little of his vast body of work. He lived
most of his life in a furnished room in Lisboa, and died in obscurity
there.
"Quando vim a ter espenranças, já não sabia ter esperanças.
Quando vim a olhar para a vida, perdera o sentido da vida."
(from Aniveresario)
Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon. His father died when Fernando
was young. His mother married the Portuguese consul in Durban in
South Africa, where he lived from 1896 to 195l. During these years
Pessoa became fluent in English and developed an early love for
such authors as William Shakespeare and John Milton. He also used
English in his first collections of poems. Pessoa was educated in
Cape Town and in Lisbon. Soon after 1905 he gave up his studies,
and got a job as a business correspondent.
Pessoa earned a modest living as a commercial translator, and wrote
to avant-garde reviews, especially to Orpheu, which was a
forum for new aesthetic views. His praising articles of the saudosismo
(nostalgia) movement provoked polemics because of their extravagant
terms. Pessoa's first book, ANTINOUS, appeared in 1918, and was
followed by two other collections of poems, all written in English.
It was not until 1933 that he published his first book, MENSAGEM,
in Portuguese. However, it did not attract attention.
 The
bulk of Pessoa's work was published in literary magazines, especially
in his own Athena. Under his own name Pessoa wrote poems
that are marked by their innovations of language, although he used
traditional stanza and metrical patterns. The poetical technique
for which Pessoa has become especially noted is the use of heteronyms,
or alternative literary personae, resembling the verse personae
of Ezra Pound. Ricardo Reis is an epicurean doctor with a classical
education, Álvaro Campos, an engineer, represents the ecstasy of
experience in the spirit of Walt Whitman, and Alberto Caeiro, a
shepard, is against all sentimentality. Each persona has a distinct
philosophy of life. Pessoa even wrote literary discussions among
them.
In 'Toward Explaining Heteronomity' Pessoa criticized distinction
of three generic types or classes of poetry - epic or narrative,
in which the narrator speaks in the first person, drama,
in which the characters do all the talking, and lyric, uttered
through the first person. "Like all well conceived classifications,
this one is useful and clear; like all classifications, it is false.
The genres do not separate out with essential facility, and, if
we closely analyse what they are made of, we shall find that from
lyric poetry to dramatic there is one continuous gradation. In effect,
and going right to the origins of dramatic poetry - Aeschylus, for
instance - it will be nearer the truth to say that what we encounter
is lyric poetry put into the mouths of different characters."
Pessoa died on November 30th, 1935 in Lisbon. He had avoided social
life and the literary world, but his poetry started to gain wider
audience in the 1940s. Several of his collections have been published
posthumously and translated into Spanish, French, English, German,
Swedish, Finnish, and other languages. Among the most important
works are POESIAS DE FERNANDO PESSOA (1942), POESIAS DE ÁLVARO DE
CAMPOS (1944), POEMAS DE ALBERTO CAEIRO (1946), and ODES DE RICARDO
REIS (1946).
 Known
above all as a poet, Pessoa also wrote short essays, several of
which were briefly sketched or unfinished. His LIVRO DO DESSOSSOGEGO
(The Book of Disquiet), the "factless autobiography", written under
the name Bernardo Soares, appeared for the first time in 1982, almost
50 years after the author's death. The Book of Disquiet is
a collection of prose manuscripts, written in the style of an intimate
diary. Its protagonist is troubled by alienation and the absence
of meaning: "And I, truly, I am the centre that doesn't exist
except as a convention in the geometry of the abyss; I am the nothingness
around which this movement spins..."
For further reading: Man Who Never Was by George Monteiro
(1982); Poesia e matafísica by Eduardo Lourenço (1983); The Presence
of Pessoa by George Monteiro (1998); Modern Art in Portugal 1910-1940,
ed by Joao B. Serra (1998); Fernando Pessoa: Self-Analysis and
Thirty Other Poems, ed. by George Monteiro (1989); Fernando Pessoa:
Voices of Nomadic Soul by Zbigniew Kotowich (1996); An Introduction
to Fernando Pessoa by Darlene J. Sadlier (1998) - Note:
Pessoa's statue is in front of the café Brasileira in Lisbon.
- Quote: "What in me feels is now thinking."
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