Fernando Pessoa(1888–1935)

About him:On June 13, 1888, Fernando António Nogueira Pessôa was born in Lisbon, Portugal.He attended an English school in Durban, South Africa.

In 1905, he returned to Portugal for good

In 1906,he began studying at the University of Lisbon.

During the following years he stayed with relatives, making his living by translating, writing in avant-garde reviews, and drafting business letters in English and French. He began publishing criticism in 1912, creative prose in 1913, and poetry in 1914. This was also the year when the alter egos he called heteronymsAlberto Caeiro, Ricardo �Reis, and Álvaro de Camposcame into �existence.

He published his first book of English poems, Antinous in 1918, followed bySonnets (1918) and English Poems (1921), but released only a single book of Portuguese poems, Mensagem, in 1933.He died November 30, 1935, in Lisbon from cirrhosis of the liver.Pessoa avoided the literary world and most social contact; it wasn’t until years after his death that his work garnered a wide readership.

Literary alter egos were popular among early twentieth-century writers: Pound had Mauberley, Rilke had Malte Laurids Brigge, and Valery had Monsieur Teste.Pessoa gave up his own life to confer quasi-real substance on the poets he designated at heteronyms, giving each a personal biography, psychology, politics, aesthetics, religion, and physique.

In 1914, he found the three main literary personas, as he called them; Alberto Caeiro was an ingenuous, unlettered, unemployed man of the country. Ricardo Reis was a doctor and classicist who wrote Horace-like odes. Álvaro de Campos, a naval engineer, was a bisexual dandy who studied in Glasgow, traveled to the Orient, and lived outrageously in London.

In an English text, Pessoa wrote, “Caeiro has one discipline: things must be felt as they are. Ricardo Reis has another kind of discipline: things must be felt, not only as they are, but also so as to fall in with a certain ideal of classic measure and rule. In Álvaro de Campos things must simply be felt.”

In later years, Pessoa also gave birth to Bernardo Soares, a “semiheteronym” who authored the sprawling fictional diary known as The Book of Disquietude; António Mora, a prolific philosopher and sociologist; the Baron of Teive, an essayist; Thomas Crosse, whose critical writings in English promoted Portuguese literature in general and Alberto Caeiro’s work in particular; I. I. Crosse, Thomas’s brother and collaborator; Coelho Pacheco, poet; Raphael Baldaya, astrologer; Maria José, a nineteen-year-old hunchback consumptive who wrote a desperate, unmailed love letter to a handsome metalworker who passed under her window on his way to work each day; and so on.

Although Pessoa also published some works pseudonymically, he distinguished this from the “heteronymic” project: “A pseudonymic work is, except for the name with which it is signed, the work of an author writing as himself; a heteronymic work is by an author writing outside his own personality: it is the work of a complete individuality made up by him, just as the utterances of some character in a drama would be.”

If, After I DieBy: Fernando Pessoa

If, after I die, they should want to write my biography,

There's nothing simpler.I've just two dates - of my birth, and of my death.

In between the one thing and the other all the days are

mine.

I am easy to describe.I lived like mad.

I loved things without any sentimentality.I never had a desire I could not fulfil, because

I never went blind.

Even hearing was to me never more than anaccompaniment of seeing.

I understood that things are real and all different from

each other;I understood it with the eyes, never with thinking.

To understand it with thinking would be to find themall equal.

One day I felt sleepy like a child.I closed my eyes and slept.

And by the way, I was only Nature poet.

Presented by: Mary Ann Mission

THANK YOU …