Albert Caeiro + Alvaro de Campos + Ricardo Reis + 134 More = 1 Fernando Pessoa
Recently Agnituslife published an article claiming that Lefcadio Hearn was the world’s most unusual man. We believed that to be true until an elderly gent and subscriber to our website wrote us to voice his displeasure at this claim, and instead submitted the name of Fernando Pessoa.
Fernando Antonio Nogueria Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888, and that is where the rational begins and ends.
Fernando lost his father and younger brother at a very early age, forcing his mother to remarry and along with her young son to immigrate to South Africa in 1896. Her second husband, (they were married by proxy) was stationed in Durban for military duty.
In a letter dated 1918 Pessoa wrote the following:
“There is only one event in the past which has both the definiteness and the importance required for rectification by direction; this is my father’s death, which took place on 13 July 1893. My mother’s second marriage (which took place on 30 December 1895) is another date which I can give with preciseness and it is important for me, not in itself, but in one of its results – the circumstance that, my stepfather becoming Portuguese Consul in Durban (Natal), I was educated there, this English education being a factor of supreme importance in my life, and, whatever my fate be, indubitably shaping it.”
The young Pessoa began publishing his poetry and prose somewhere around his fifteenth birthday, and by 16 he was writing for the local magazines and newspapers. Interestingly, his early work was published under the name of David Merrick. Interesting, because before he was done he would write under the ‘heteronyms’, (pen names) as he called them of 137 different writers. All created by him with complete biographies, often criticizing each other, have opposing views on almost everything and putting each other down constantly. Of course these authors were all Fernando Pessoa. The three mentioned at the top plus Bernardo Soares are the most well known. But there over 130 more!
He was not above writing abut himself in the third and even fourth person. In a brief introduction to his master work. The Book of Disquiet he says: about himself:
“Nothing had ever obliged him to do anything. He had spent his childhood alone. He never joined any group. He never pursued a course of study. He never belonged to a crowd. The circumstances of his life were marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon – perhaps, in fact, it’s true for all lives – of being tailored to the image and likeness of his instincts, which tended towards inertia and withdrawal.”
In this short intro to a book of his poems, the following blurb :
“Nearly a century after his wrenching death, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) remains one of our most enigmatic writers. Believing he could do “more in dreams than Napoleon,” yet haunted by the specter of hereditary madness, Pessoa invented dozens of alter egos, or “heteronyms,” under whose names he wrote in Portuguese, English, and French. Unsurprisingly, this “most multifarious of writers” has long eluded a definitive biography.“
Relatively unknown in his lifetime, Pessoa was all but destined for literary oblivion when the arc of his afterlife bent, suddenly and improbably, toward greatness, with the discovery of some 25,000 unpublished papers left in a large, wooden trunk, which was the catalyst for the discovery of one of the literary geniuses of the 20th century.
A solitary man who had only one, ultimately platonic, love affair, Pessoa used his and his heteronyms’ writings to explore questions of sexuality, to obsessively search after spiritual truth, and to try to chart a way forward for a benighted and politically agitated Portugal.
Although he preferred the world of his mind, Pessoa was nonetheless a man of the places he inhabited, including not only Lisbon but also turn-of-the-century Durban, South Africa, where he spent nine years as a child.
Although never a bon-vivant, Pessoa maintained a bohemian circle of friends, including Ophelia Quieroz, with whom he exchanged numerous love letters. Pessoa reveals in equal force his unwavering commitment to defending homosexual writers whose books had been banned, as well as his courageous opposition to Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, toward the end of his life.
His poems are magnificent. His novel(?) The Book of Disquiet, although no less tedious than Finnegan’s Wake is well worth the read. Even within the English translation by Richard Zenith, his brilliance shines through.
An example of his short poems:
Fruits are given by the trees that live
Not by the wishful mind, which adorns
Itself with ashen flowers
From the abyss within
How many kingdoms in the mind, and in things
Your imagination has carved! That many
You’ve lost pre-dethroned
Without ever having them
Against greater opposition you cannot
Create more than doomed intentions!
Abdicate and be
King of yourself
Fernando Pessoa is a true gem. A brilliant writer and certainly (at this exact time) the World’s most unusual man.
