In 1924 you pick up a little po-zine in Portugal called Athena. Among the poets you like: Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, and one of the editors, Fernando Pessoa. Their thumbnails reveal four very different bios, the poems reveal four distinct styles. Only if you penetrate the avant garde scene in Lisbon will you find that three of these poets are heteronyms, imaginary brother poets, of the fourth.
When you discover Fernando Pessoa you don’t walk into a new room of poetry, but into another wing. Hop over to another planet. In solar system Po, he’s Planet X, orbiting just outside, shadowing everything going on in our busyness. More than any other human, he lived life solely in his poems, his life a shell for the literary movement that was himself. Relatively unknown in the US, the publication of a new book of translations brings him to center stage, a poet who eschewed life to create life, a poet for whom “living poetry” was not sprawly boho sensuality, but as Constant Writer.
The facts are easy enough. Born Lisbon 13 June 1888, bourgeois family. Father and only brother die before he’s six; recalls inventing first heteronyms (imaginary friends) at this time. Mother marries consul to South Africa; family lives in Durban till he’s 17, speaking English. Returns to Lisbon; never leaves again. Survives as commercial translator/clerk. Involved with Modernist and avant garde literary movements in youth, he publishes sporadically. Meanwhile, his imaginary friends grow up into a pantheon of poets, with the four major heteronyms listed above, various other semiheteronyms, and some poets appearing only once or twice. As far as is known, he died a virgin; he did take up with one Ophelia Queiroz when he was 31 and she 19 — she also wrote to some of the heteronyms. After six months Pessoa broke it off, saying that he was not like other humans, followed a different Law. They reconnected, briefly, nine years later. Ophelia recalls that once he kissed her on a bus.
When Pessoa died in 1935, he left behind a steamer trunk brimful of manuscripts — 27,543, to be exact, written by some 86 different poets, male, female, young, old. Some of his heteronyms inspired others, wrote criticism of others; a few preceded Pessoa in death, and then, occasionally, some new poems would be found posthumously; the heteronyms founded many schools of poetry; they traveled the world, with many adventures, homosexual, polysexual; they wrote scholarly theses; they had lives and loves. The papers in the trunk are studied like an archaeological dig.
A new book of Pessoa translations, with brilliant introductions to the book and each heteronym by Richard Zenith, was published in 1998: Fernando Pessoa & Co. (Grove Press). Fernando Pessoa was the true poet performer. He never left his room. He created word worlds.
~Bob Holman
- For more insight into this fascinating poet, read his poem “Autopsychography” in one of its many, many English translations.
- If you get hooked and want to read more of Pessoa’s work in English translation, use the links on the next page.
