Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa wrote under more than seventy invented identities, gave each of the main ones a biography and a style, and left most of his work in a trunk. He grew up in Durban, where his stepfather was consul, and was educated entirely in English, which is why he wrote poetry in both languages and always slightly outside Portuguese. He returned to Lisbon at seventeen and spent his life as a commercial translator writing foreign correspondence for import-export firms, which left him time. The heteronyms are not pseudonyms: Alberto Caeiro is a shepherd with no education and no metaphysics, Ricardo Reis a classicist doctor writing odes, Alvaro de Campos a naval engineer who begins as a Futurist and ends exhausted, and they disagree with each other in print. The Book of Disquiet, attributed to a bookkeeper called Bernardo Soares, is a diary of a life deliberately unlived. He published one book of Portuguese verse in his lifetime, Mensagem, a nationalist sequence on Portuguese history that won a consolation prize in a competition run by the Salazar regime, whose corporatism he had supported and then turned against, writing against censorship and against the suppression of freemasonry in his last years. He died of cirrhosis at forty-seven. The trunk held some 25,000 items, and editing it has taken longer than his life. He is buried in the Jeronimos monastery in Lisbon beside Vasco da Gama and Camoes, which would have surprised him. Almost nothing of his was published in book form while he lived. The Book of Disquiet did not appear until 1982, and every edition of it orders the fragments differently because he left no instructions.

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