Fernando Pessoa

Born on June 13, 1888, in Lisbon, Fernando António Nogueira de Seabra Pessoa lost his father to tuberculosis when he was five. His mother remarried the Portuguese consul in Durban, South Africa, and the boy spent nine years in British colonial Natal, becoming so fluent in English that he later composed some of his finest poetry in it. He returned to Lisbon in 1905 to study at the university but dropped out, and for the rest of his life he supported himself modestly as a commercial translator and correspondence clerk for Lisbon trading firms. He lived in rented rooms, frequented the cafés of the Baixa and Chiado, and drank heavily. His outward life was uneventful; his inner life was one of the strangest in literary history. On March 8, 1914, a date he described in detail, he experienced what he called a “triumphal day” on which he invented, in rapid succession, three heteronyms: Alberto Caeiro, a serene pastoral philosopher who wrote free verse; Ricardo Reis, a classicist and monarchist who composed Horatian odes; and Álvaro de Campos, a futurist naval engineer who channeled Whitman. These were not pseudonyms but fully realized literary identities, each with a distinct biography, temperament, and style, and Pessoa wrote as them, and as more than seventy others, for the rest of his life. He published only one book of Portuguese poetry during his lifetime, Mensagem (1934), a mystical meditation on Portugal’s maritime destiny. He died on November 30, 1935, at the age of forty-seven, from hepatic problems likely caused by alcoholism. His last words, written in English, were “I know not what tomorrow will bring.” After his death, over twenty-five thousand manuscript pages were found in a trunk, poems, prose fragments, philosophical treatises, horoscopes, a labyrinth that scholars are still mapping.