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Fernando Pessoa

1888–1935
Fernando Pessoa
Cavalão / Public domain

Poet Fernando António Nogueira Pêssoa was born in Lisbon, Portugal. His father died when Pessoa was five years old, and the family moved with his mother’s new husband, a consul, to Durban, South Africa, where Pessoa attended an English school. At thirteen Pessoa returned to Portugal for a year-long visit, and returned there permanently in 1905. He studied briefly at the University of Lisbon, and began to publish criticism, prose, and poetry soon thereafter while working as a commercial translator.

During his life, most of Pessoa’s considerable creative output appeared only in journals, and he published just three collections of poetry in English—Antinous (1918), Sonnets (1918), and English Poems (1921)—and one collection in Portuguese, Mensagem (1933).

In 1914, the year his first poem was published, Pessoa found the three main literary personas, or heteronyms, as he called them, which he would return to throughout his career: Alberto Caeiro, a rural, uneducated poet of great ideas who wrote in free verse; Ricardo Reis, a physician who composed formal odes influenced by Horace; and Álvaro de Campos, an adventurous London-based naval engineer influenced by poet Walt Whitman and the Italian Futurists. Pessoa published under his own name as well, but considered that work the product of an “orthonym,” another literary persona. While other notable writers of his generation used literary personas, such as Pound’s Mauberley and Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge, Pessoa alone gave his heteronyms a full life separate from his own, assigning and adopting in turn each persona’s psychology, aesthetics, and politics. Pessoa’s insistence on identity as a flexible, dynamic construction, and his consequent rejection of traditional notions of authorship and individuality, anticipated the concerns of the post-Modernist movement.

Later in life, Pessoa created the “semi-heteronym” Bernardo Soares, whose expansive, unbound fictional journal written over a period of 20 years (and assembled with little guidance after Pessoa’s death) became The Book of Disquietude, as well as philosopher and sociologist António Mora, essayist Baron of Teive, critic and Caeiro scholar Thomas Crosse and his brother/collaborator I.I. Crosse, poet Coelho Pacheco, astrologer Raphael Baldaya, and many others, for a total of at least 72 heteronyms.

Pessoa died in Lisbon in 1935 of cirrhosis of the liver, and only after his death did his work gain widespread publication and acclaim. In The Western Canon, critic Harold Bloom included Pessoa as one of just 26 writers responsible for establishing the parameters of western literature.

Poems by Fernando Pessoa
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Bibliography

  • Antinous (poetry) 1918.
  • Thirty-Five Sonnets, 1918.
  • English Poems, three volumes, 1921.
  • Mensagem (poetry), 1934.
  • Obras completas de Fernando Pessoa (poetry, criticism, essays, and philosophy), eleven volumes, 1942 —.
  • Selected Poems by Fernando Pessoa, Including Poems by His Heteronyms: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis [and] Alvaro de Campos, as Well as Some of His English Sonnets and Selections from His Letters,translated by Edwin Honig, introduction by Octavio Paz, Swallow Press (Chicago), 1971.
  • Sixty Portuguese Poems, introduction, selection, English translation, and notes by F.E.G. Quintanilha, University of Wales Press (Cardiff), 1971.
  • Selected Poems, edited and translated by Peter Rickard, Edinburgh University Press, 1971, University of Texas Press (Austin), 1972.
  • Fernando Pessoa I-IV, translated by Jonathan Griffin, Carcanet Press (Oxford), 1971.
  • Selected Poems [of] Fernando Pessoa, Penguin (Harmondsworth, England), 1974.
  • By Weight of Reason: Poems and Translations, translated by J.C.R. Green, Aquila (Solihul), 1974.
  • The Tobacconist, translated by J.C.R. Green, Phaethon Press (Breakish), 1975.
  • Stations of the Cross, translated by J.C.R. Green, Aquila (Breakish), 1976.
  • (As Alberto Caeiro) The Keeper of Flocks, translated by J.C.R. Green, Aquila/The Phaethon Press (Breakish), 1976.
  • Selected Poems, translated by Jonathan Griffin, Penguin (New York), 1982.
  • A Galaxy of Poets, 1888-1935, Servico Internacional da Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon), 1985.
  • (As Alberto Caeiro) The Keeper of Sheep, translated by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown, Sheep Meadow Press (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY), 1986.
  • The Surprise of Being: Twenty-Five Poems (dual text), translated by James Greene and Clara de Azevedo Magra, Dufour Editions (Chester Springs, PA), 1986.
  • The Poems of Fernando Pessoa, translated and edited by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown, Ecco Press (New York), 1986.
  • (As Alvaro de Campos) The Tobacconist's [Tabacaria: A Poem], translated by Suzette Macedo, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon), 1987.
  • Always Astonished: Selected Prose, translated, edited, and introduced by Edwin Honig, City Lights Books (San Francisco), 1988.
  • Antologia Poetic. El Poeta es un Fingidor (poetry), edited by Angel Crespo, Elliot's Books, 1991.
  • The Book of Disquiet (poetry), translated by Alfred Mac Adam, Pantheon Books (New York), 1991.
  • The Book of Disquiet (poetry), edited by Maria Jose de Lancastre, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Serpent's Tail (New York), 1991.
  • Message, translated by Jonathan Griffin, introduced by Helder Macedo, Menard Press (London), 1992.
  • (With others) A Centenary Pessoa, edited by Eugenio Lisboa with L. C. Taylor, poetry translated by Keith Bosley, prose translated by Bernard McGuirk, Maria Manuel Lisboa, and Richard Zenith, introduced by Octavio Paz, Carcanet (Manchester, England), in association with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Instituto Camoes, the Instituto da Biblioteca Nacional e do Livro, 1995.
  • Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems, edited and translated by Richard Zenith, Grove Press (New York), 1998.