fernando pessoa 1888-1935. pessoa = “person” born lisbon, lived in durban, south africa...
TRANSCRIPT
Fernando Pessoa
1888-1935
Pessoa = “person”
• Born Lisbon, lived in Durban, South Africa (stepfather was Portuguese consul)
• produced fake newspapers written by different “reporters,” included poems and criticism and fake news
• Early fascination with British Romantic Poets + Edgar Allen Poe – created English-speaking “romantic” “Alexander Search”
• Returned to Lisbon in 1905 and “hardly ever left” for rest of his life
• 1910 First Portuguese Republic declared after seven centuries of rule by monarch
Heteronym
“various characters… symptomatic of modernist literary technique in general; they have something in common with Yeats’s ‘masks’ and Pound’s ‘personae,’ and are a logical outgrowth of modernism’s attempt to make poetry seem impersonal or purely dramatic.”
--- An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa
“You’re never truly yourself until you wear a mask.”
--- Oscar Wilde
“The good Portuguese is various persons… Never do I feel so Portuguese as when I feel that I am different from me – Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, Fernando Pessoa, and as many more as have been or will be.”
-- Fernando Pessoa
David Bowie – Ziggy Stardust
Marilyn Manson (“Marilyn Monroe” + “Charlie Manson”)
Eminem – plays with “persona” of white rapper – albums The Eminem Show /
The Marshall Mathers LP / The Slim Shady LP
Alias
Everyday Roles
• Student
Everyday Roles
• Student
• Husband/wife/daughter/son
Everyday Roles
• Student
• Husband/wife/daughter/son
• Friend
Everyday Roles
• Student
• Husband/wife/daughter/son
• Friend
• Teammate
Everyday Roles
• Student
• Husband/wife/daughter/son
• Friend
• Teammate
• Employee
Everyday Roles
• Student
• Husband/wife/daughter/son
• Friend
• Teammate
• Employee
• Customer
“For temperamental reasons that I do not propose to analyze, nor is it important that I analyze, I constructed within me various characters distinct among themselves and from me – characters to whom I attributed various poems that, in terms of feelings and ideas, are not like those that I would write.”
-- Fernando Pessoa
Pessoa’s people
• Alberto Caeiro – pagan “master”
Pessoa’s people
• Alberto Caeiro – pagan “master”
• Álvaro de Campos – “Whitmanesque futurist”
Pessoa’s people
• Alberto Caeiro – pagan “master”
• Álvaro de Campos – “Whitmanesque futurist”
• Ricardo Reis – “Neo-classicist”
Additional “heteronyms”
• Bernando Soares – prose writer, Book of Disquietude
Additional “heteronyms”
• Bernando Soares – prose writer, Book of Disquietude
• Fernando Pessoa -- “orthonym” – “impure and artless” short, lyric poems
“I put in Caiero all my power of dramatic depersonalization, I put in Ricardo Reis all my mental discipline, dressed in the music that is appropriate to him, I put in Álvaro de Campos all the emotion that I give neither to myself nor to life.”
-- Fernando Pessoa
Autopsychography
Portuguese: psicografia – refers to “the occult practice of writing through the suggestion or action of a spirit medium”
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