Fernando Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935)
(pseudonyms Alberto Caeiro Álvaro de Campus, Ricardo Reis)
Fernando Pessoa is one of the most celebrated Portuguese poets of all times who contributed greatly to the development of modernism in Portuguese literature. His use of "heteronyms", literary alter egos, who support and criticize each other's works, was also unusual. Known also as an author, Pessoa had been referred by Harold Bloom in his work The Western Canon as “the most representative poet of the 20th century” along with Neruda.
Pessoa was born in Lisbon. His father, Joaquim de Seabra Pessoa, died of tuberculosis when Pessoa was five years old. A year later his brother passed away and his mother Maria Madalena Nogueira Pessoa married the Portuguese consul in Durban in South Africa, where the family lived from 1896. During these years Pessoa completed his education in Cape Town, became fluent in English and developed an early love for such authors as William Shakespeare and John Milton. His first collection of poems was written in English.
At the age of seventeen, he went back to Lisbon to continue his further studies at a Portuguese university at the department of literature. A student strike ended his studies, he got unemployed and worked as a business correspondent. In 1914 he formed the literary magazine Orpheu along with other writers and poets.
All his life long Pessoa earned a modest living as a commercial translator, and wrote avant-garde reviews, especially for Orpheu. His career as a writer Pessoa was virtually unknown and he published little of his immense body of work. Most of his life Pessoa lived in a furnished room in Lisbon, where he died in obscurity in 1935.
Selected works:
- O Guardador de Rebanhos (Written In 1914 Under The Name Alberto Caeiro) - Keeper Of Sheep
- 35 Sonnets, 1917
- Antinous, 1918
- Sonnets, 1918
- English Poems, 1921
- Mensagem, 1933 - Message (Trans. By Jonathan Griffin)
- A Memória do Presidente Rei Sidónio Pais, 1940
- Poesias de Fernando Pessoa, 1942
- Obras Completas, 1942-56
- Cartas, 1944
- Poesias de Álvaro De Campos, 1944
- A Nova Poesia Portuguesa, 1944
- Poemas de Alberto Caeiro, 1946
- Odes de Ricardo Reis, 1946 - See Also Jose Saramago's Novel The Year Of The Death Of Ricardo Reis, 1984
- Páginas de Doutrina Estética, 1946
- Poemas Dramáticos, 1952
- Quadras so Gasto Popular, 1955
- Poesias Inéditas: 1919-1930, 1956
- Páginas de Estética e de Teoria e Crítica Literária, 1966
- Páginas Íntimas e de Auto-Interpretacão, 1966
- Textos Filosóficos, 1968 (2 Vols.)
- Selected Poems of Fernendo Pessoa, 1971
- Selected Poems by Fernando Pessoa, 1971
- Novas Poesias Inéditas, 1973
- Cartas de Amor de Fernando Pessoa, 1978
- Sobre Portugal, 1979
- Livro do Dessassogego por Bernardo Soares, 1982 - The Book of Disquiet (trans. by Margaret Jull Costa) - Levottomuuden kirja (suom. Sanna Pernu)
- Always Astonished: Selected Prose, 1988 (trans. by Edwin Honig)
- Fernando Pessoa & Co: Selected Poems, 1998 (ed. by Richard Zenith)
- Poems of Fernando Pessoa, 1998
- The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive, 2002
- The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa, 2002 (ed. by Richard Zenith)