Fernando Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) is today Portugal’s principal literary link with the world. His work in verse and prose is the most multifarious imaginable, for it has multiple facets, materializes innumerable interests, and represents an authentic collective patrimony: of the author, of the diverse authorial figures invented by him, and of the readers. Some of those personae—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos—Pessoa called “heteronyms,” reserving the designation “orthonym” for himself. The director, of and a collaborator on, various literary magazines and the author of The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa was, in everyday life, a “foreign correspondent in commercial houses.” Pessoa left a universal oeuvre in three languages, one that has been edited and studied ever since he wrote, before dying in Lisbon, “I know not what tomorrow will bring.”
