It’s I having survived myself like a spent match. What I am today is their having sold the house,

What I am today (and the house of those who loved me trembles through my tears). The person I am today is like the damp in the hall at the back of the house I might prefer Caeiro’s austere lucidity while you are knocked flat by Campos’s devastating self-assessments, evident in his manic hymns to the big city or the aching, elegiac “Birthday”:īack when they used to celebrate my birthday Liking Alberto Caeiro by no means guarantees liking Álvaro de Campos, and this too makes it hard to speak of Pessoa in unitary terms. What’s notable about the heteronyms, besides their number, is that each one writes so differently from the others. A few good things came out posthumously, but Pessoa hit his highest notes as the man behind the curtain. Some English-language sonnets published in 1918 are at once bizarre and profoundly conventional, their labored Shakespearian posturing (“As a bad orator, badly o’er-book-skilled,/Doth overflow his purpose with made heat”) more caricature than successful impersonation.

Mensagem ( Message, 1934), a sequence of fantastical poems on Portugal’s past and future, got a nod of approval from the Salazar regime but has even less to recommend it than the endorsement suggests. Let’s not mince words: when he wrote as himself, Pessoa wrote badly. This all raises a question: What does it mean to be a fan of Fernando Pessoa, or simply to read him? To whom did his language, and his life, belong? He did, however, leave 25,000 manuscript sheets of poems, essays, short stories, plays, literary criticism, philosophical and political treatises, horoscopes, and disaggregated bits of a work in prose called The Book of Disquiet-almost none of it “his.” The writer Mário de Carvalho, contemplating the vastness of Pessoa’s oeuvre, said, “Tanto Pessoa já enjoa” (So much Pessoa you’ll puke).

When Pessoa died in 1935, he left behind only a smattering of writing bearing his signature. He gave them distinct literary styles and cast their birth charts. But Pessoa-a self-described medium and amateur astrologer-treated his alter egos as actually existing contemporaries, past lives he was living in real time. There’s nothing unusual about publishing under a name that’s not your own. The architect of Portuguese modernism, Pessoa invented as many as 136 independent aliases, or, to use his word, heteronyms, to which he attributed much of his work. Fernando Pessoa painting by Anna Bak-KvapilĮven among the eccentric annals of poets who talked to God, angels, tutelary spirits, and disincorporated souls, Fernando Pessoa is a special case.

Sandra model all sets torrent