Pessoa is the Portuguese word for “person,” and there is nothing he less wanted to be. The one who dies is simply no longer there. After two years, however, a student strike shut down the campus, and Pessoa dropped out. Indeed, with his shabby rented room and his boring, repetitive job, Soares is as ordinary as can be—the kind of person an aesthete would recoil from, or simply not notice. Report abuse. 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. Period.”, In his magnum opus, “The Book of Disquiet”—a collage of aphorisms and reflections couched in the form of a fictional diary, which he worked on for years but never finished, much less published—Pessoa returns to the same theme: “Through these deliberately unconnected impressions I am the indifferent narrator of my autobiography without events, of my history without a life. . — Fernando Pessoa Picture Quotes The supreme empire is that of the Emperor who renounces all normal life, that of other men, and in who the care of supremacy doesn't weigh like a load of jewels. Now it was to be the work of Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper in a Lisbon fabric company. “I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made of me. For many readers, the heteronyms, with their complicated mythology, are a large part of Pessoa’s appeal; other readers might consider them an unnecessary and cumbersome apparatus. 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. Fernando Pessoa’s poetic style depends on this –heavy verb-reliant synesthesia is a regular stylistic device used by those significant enough to be studied in Portugal’s high-school classrooms. This kind of solipsism was a great temptation for Pessoa, as “The Book of Disquiet” reveals. In Álvaro de Campos things must simply be felt." This is partly because it opens with the weakest material, which dates from when Pessoa was a twenty-five-year-old heavily under the influence of French Symbolism and the Decadent Movement, of the eighteen-nineties. But the subdivision of his selves allowed Pessoa to have at least four such styles at once. A philosophy of life based on discretion. When he was scarcely five years old, his father died. Again and again, in both poetry and prose, Pessoa denied that he existed as any kind of distinctive individual. Abstract Pessoa’s Antinous follows a tradition of poems on mythological dying-god figures mourned by their divine lovers, transferring the tropes of that tradition to the Roman emperor Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa was born in Lisbon. Thus, when Pessoa describes “The Book of Disquiet” as “the autobiography of someone who never existed,” he is simultaneously telling a factual truth (there was no such person as Guedes) and making a poetic confession: he himself never lived what the world considers a full life. In addition to the size and the disorder of the Pessoa archive, there is another confounding level of complexity: it is, in a sense, the work of many writers. In his manuscripts, and even in personal correspondence, Pessoa attributed much of his best writing to various fictional alter egos, which he called “heteronyms.” Scholars have tabulated as many as seventy-two of these. Ricardo Reis was a doctor and classicist who wrote Horace-like odes. For Pessoa, however, the ultimate paradox is that it is precisely this living death that offers the best vantage point on human existence. He published just one book during his lifetime—“Message,” a collection of poems inspired by Portuguese history, which appeared in 1934. Ad Choices. 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. Helpful. Pessoa avoided the literary world and most social contact; it wasn't until years after his death that his work garnered a wide readership. by Gary Lachman. It might well have seemed that he had had “a history without a life.”, But Pessoa was to have an extraordinary afterlife, as he prophesied in his poem “If I Die Young”: “roots may be hidden in the ground / But their flowers flower in the open air for all to see. Decadence was founded on an impertinent reversal of the values of the time: in place of hard work and moral earnestness, writers like Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysmans elevated imaginative indolence and provocative paradox. Remains:Buried, Jeronimos Monastery, Lisbon, Portugal. Indeed, the Penguin Classics edition of “The Book of Disquiet,” edited by Richard Zenith, places a number of these passages near the beginning, smoothing the reader’s entry with a kind of miniature narrative. The dead body doesn’t represent that person any more. Revered by the other heteronyms as their “Master,” he wrote plainspoken poems that eschew abstract thought and cleave to the natural world, in an almost Zen spirit of wisdom: I thank God I’m not goodBut have the natural egoism of flowersAnd rivers that follow their pathUnwittingly preoccupiedWith only their flowering and their flowing. Roberto Bolaño and his fractured masterpiece. But the major heteronyms he used in his mature work were more than jokey code names. His father died of tuberculosis when he was only 2 years old and his mother remarried. Gender:Male. As Richard Zenith, one of his leading English translators, has written, Pessoa composed “on loose sheets, in notebooks, on stationery from the firms where he worked, on the backs of letters, on envelopes, or on whatever scrap of paper happened to be in reach.”. The Magical World of Fernando Pessoa. It is often his and Caeiro’s verb play that create the most evocative pictures of their meaning. Campos, at the opposite extreme, is an excitable futurist, glorying in the power and the speed of the modern: Pantheistic rage of awesomely feelingWith all my senses fizzing and all my pores fumingThat everything is but one speed, one energy, one divine lineFrom and to itself, arrested and murmuring furies of mad speed. “The Book of Disquiet” was found, in fragments, only after Pessoa’s death. Reis, meanwhile, sounds like Horace or Catullus, dwelling on the fleetingness of life and love in disciplined stanzas: As if each kissWere a kiss of farewell,Let us lovingly kiss, my Chloe. Pessoa’s family returned to Lisbon from Pretoria after the death of his stepfather and they lived in fifteen different places around the city, moving from one rented room to another due to their financial troubles, from 1905 to 1921. He developed various personas to write under, and this collection from City Lights Books in … The majority of Pessoa's poems, heteronymic or otherwise, appeared in literary journals and magazines. “I’m beginning to know myself. Why do things when you can imagine them? It has only two dates, the one of my birth and the one of my death. Pessoa avoided the literary world and most social contact; it wasn't until years after his death that his work garnered a wide readership. He began publishing criticism in 1912, creative prose in 1913, and poetry in 1914. The creator of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” on her television fantasy: “Because after you look at a boob talking for, like, five seconds, you’re like, click.”, © 2021 Condé Nast. Still, it was from the late-nineteenth-century cult of decadence that the first seeds of modernism germinated; and in Pessoa the transition from the nineteenth century to the twentieth is fascinatingly visible. Williams, W.S. On June 13, 1888, Fernando António Nogueira Pessôa was born in Lisbon, Portugal. Among the things that fail to impress him in “The Book of Disquiet” are travel (“The idea of travelling makes me feel physically sick”), politics (“All revolutionaries are as stupid as all reformers”), and love (“I’ve had neither the patience nor the concentration of mind to want to make that effort”). All rights reserved. Poet Fernando António Nogueira Pêssoa was born in Lisbon, Portugal. 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. I don’t exist,” he writes in one poem. seems to me the goal towards which all human effort should be directed.”, In its alternations between self-loathing and self-exaltation, “The Book of Disquiet” can seem like a quintessentially manic-depressive epic. Rachel Bloom Pitches a Claymation Show About Her Boobs. “Fortune, if it so wishes, may come and find me. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (in Portuguese: O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis) is a 1984 novel by the Portuguese novelist José Saramago, the winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature.The book chronicles the final year in the life of the title character, Ricardo Reis, one of the many heteronyms used by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. He makes observations about his neighborhood of Baixa, his workplace in the Rua dos Douradores, and his boss, Vasques, in a way that gives the second phase of the book a more novelistic feeling. If after I die they would like to write my biography, nothing is simpler. Pessoa, however, went beyond masking to a kind of deliberate dissociation. The ultimate futility of all accomplishment, the fascination of loneliness, the way sorrow colors our perception of the world: Pessoa’s insight into his favorite themes was purchased at a high price, but he wouldn’t have had it any other way. Soares, too, is spiritually akin to Pessoa: indeed, Pessoa wrote that he was only a “semi-heteronym,” because “his personality, though not my own, doesn’t differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it.” Soares is a more fully imagined character than his predecessor, Guedes. He died November 30, 1935, in Lisbon from cirrhosis of the liver. The first publication of the book was in 1982, nearly fifty years after Pessoa’s death. Alberto Caeiro was an ingenuous, unlettered, unemployed man of the country. But no one took their alter ego as far as Pessoa, who 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. This indifferentism is hard to reconcile with the effort and the artistry that Pessoa devoted to his work. If thinking is considered the mere absence of activity, then it might well look like a repudiation of life, and “The Book of Disquiet” is shot through with expressions of boredom, regret, and despair. 3. Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa was born in Lisbon. Until relatively recently, the work of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa was little known, but in the last few years he's been rediscovered by several critics, mostly on the strength of various translations of his Livro do Desassossego or Book of Disquiet, a collection of unfinished angst-ridden texts found in a trunk after Pessoa's death. Birthplace:Lisbon, Portugal. 1 talking about this. 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