Fernando Pessoa
1888-1935
Pessoa = “person”
• Born Lisbon, lived in Durban, South Africa
(stepfather was Portuguese consul)
• produced fake newspapers written by
different “reporters,” included poems and
criticism and fake news
• Early fascination with British Romantic
Poets + Edgar Allen Poe – created Englishspeaking “romantic” “Alexander Search”
• Returned to Lisbon in 1905 and “hardly
ever left” for rest of his life
• 1910 First Portuguese Republic declared
after seven centuries of rule by monarch
Heteronym
“various characters… symptomatic of
modernist literary technique in general; they
have something in common with Yeats’s
‘masks’ and Pound’s ‘personae,’ and are a
logical outgrowth of modernism’s attempt
to make poetry seem impersonal or purely
dramatic.”
--- An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa
“You’re never truly yourself until
you wear a mask.”
--- Oscar Wilde
“The good Portuguese is various persons…
Never do I feel so Portuguese as when I feel
that I am different from me – Alberto
Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos,
Fernando Pessoa, and as many more as have
been or will be.”
-- Fernando Pessoa
David Bowie – Ziggy Stardust
Marilyn Manson
(“Marilyn Monroe” + “Charlie Manson”)
Eminem – plays with “persona” of white
rapper – albums The Eminem Show /
The Marshall Mathers LP / The Slim Shady LP
Alias
Everyday Roles
• Student
Everyday Roles
• Student
• Husband/wife/daughter/son
Everyday Roles
• Student
• Husband/wife/daughter/son
• Friend
Everyday Roles
•
•
•
•
Student
Husband/wife/daughter/son
Friend
Teammate
Everyday Roles
•
•
•
•
•
Student
Husband/wife/daughter/son
Friend
Teammate
Employee
Everyday Roles
•
•
•
•
•
•
Student
Husband/wife/daughter/son
Friend
Teammate
Employee
Customer
“For temperamental reasons that I do not
propose to analyze, nor is it important that I
analyze, I constructed within me various
characters distinct among themselves and
from me – characters to whom I attributed
various poems that, in terms of feelings and
ideas, are not like those that I would write.”
-- Fernando Pessoa
Pessoa’s people
• Alberto Caeiro – pagan “master”
Pessoa’s people
• Alberto Caeiro – pagan “master”
• Álvaro de Campos – “Whitmanesque
futurist”
Pessoa’s people
• Alberto Caeiro – pagan “master”
• Álvaro de Campos – “Whitmanesque
futurist”
• Ricardo Reis – “Neo-classicist”
Additional “heteronyms”
• Bernando Soares – prose writer,
Book of Disquietude
Additional “heteronyms”
• Bernando Soares – prose writer,
Book of Disquietude
• Fernando Pessoa -- “orthonym” – “impure
and artless” short, lyric poems
“I put in Caiero all my power of dramatic
depersonalization, I put in Ricardo Reis all
my mental discipline, dressed in the music
that is appropriate to him, I put in Álvaro de
Campos all the emotion that I give neither
to myself nor to life.”
-- Fernando Pessoa
Autopsychography
Portuguese: psicografia – refers to “the occult
practice of writing through the suggestion
or action of a spirit medium”
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