Who is fernando pessoa

His surname means "person" in Portuguese. He was five when his father, the music critic Joaquim de Seabra Pessoa, died of tuberculosis. Six months later, Fernando's baby brother, Jorge, died. His paternal grandmother suffered from bouts of insanity and was in and out of mental hospitals for the last twelve years of her life.

By that time, the precocious Pessoa could already read and write. He had produced what is believed to be his first poem in the summer of , when he was seven years old, in response to learning that the family would be moving to South Africa.

However much I love them, I love you even more. He attended a primary school run by Irish and French nuns and became fluent in French and English.

And at Durban High School he was a brilliant student. Clifford Geerdts, a former classmate, recalled a boy who was morbid, as well as "meek and inoffensive and inclined to avoid association with his schoolfellows.

His first pseudonyms were Charles Robert Anon, also known as C. Anon, and Alexander Search, for whom he printed calling cards. Then there was Jean Seul, who wrote only in French. The shy boy created poems and stories, and even "edited" fake newspapers—a bit like an early-twentieth-century version of The Onion —with news, spoofs, editorials, riddles, and poems, all written by a staff of "journalists" who'd sprung from his imagination and whose biographies he'd made up.

Later, in recalling his childhood, Pessoa wrote that "[a]ny nostalgia I feel is literary. I remember my childhood with tears, but they're rhythmic tears, in which prose is already being formed. Real life was beside the point. He would never again leave the city. Though he dropped out after two years, he got a fine education on his own by sequestering himself in the National Library to read literature, history, religion, and philosophy.

He began writing short stories, some of them under the name "David Merrick," as well as poems and essays, occasionally in Portuguese but more often in French and English. Pessoa, who had very poor vision and wore glasses, lived with relatives or in rented rooms, chain-smoking, reading, writing, and earning a modest salary as a translator for firms that conducted business abroad.

Later he worked as a bookkeeper. He had few friends. As a boy, he'd invented the Chevalier de Pas, a faithful "playmate" who sent letters to him. In , at the age of twenty-two, he admitted that "[t]he whole constitution of my spirit is one of hesitancy and doubt.

Nothing is or can be positive to me; all things oscillate round me, and I with them, an uncertainty unto myself. But then my happiness consists in that too. Rather than being distressing, this notion of endless expansiveness offered tremendous comfort.

I've no idea of myself, not even one that consists of a nonidea of myself. I am a nomadic wanderer through my consciousness. It is crucial to make the distinction that Pessoa's "others" were heteronyms rather than pseudonyms. He insisted that they were separate from him. In Pessoa country, unification was not possible or even desired. He was a breeder of beings, and always in pursuit of another. Pessoa led a timid and introspective life, yet he was no hermit. Nor did he attempt to hide his heteronyms—he was quite transparent about the fact of their separate existence.

Unlike many pseudonymous authors, Pessoa seems not to be secretive but the opposite: utterly guileless, psychologically honest, earnest rather than serving up ironic posturing. His heteronymic conceit didn't spring from a desire to fool anyone or attract attention. This was a private matter. In his writings, Pessoa went so far as to analyze the genesis of his heteronyms; he understood that readers would be curious.

He suggested that the identities derived from "an aspect of hysteria that exists within me," and diagnosed himself as either "simply a hysteric" or a "neurasthenic hysteric," but leaned toward the latter. Also, he noted, "The self-division of the I is a common phenomenon in cases of masturbation. Was this the result of talent or sickness?

He stopped short of calling himself crazy. Shortly after his seventeenth birthday, he returned to Lisbon to enrol in the university-level course of Arts and Letters but dropped out after two years without having sat for any exams.

He preferred to study on his own at the National Library, where he systematically read major works of philosophy, history, sociology and literature especially Portuguese in order to complement and extend the traditional English education he had received in South Africa.

His production of poetry and prose in English during this period was intense, and by he was also writing extensively in Portuguese. He published his first essay in literary criticism in , his first piece of creative prose a passage from The Book of Disquiet in , and his first poems as an adult in Again and again, in both poetry and prose, Pessoa denied that he existed as any kind of distinctive individual.

This might sound like an unpromising basis for a body of creative work that is now considered one of the greatest of the twentieth century. If a writer is nothing, does nothing, and has nothing to say, what can he write about?

Indeed, he belongs to a distinguished line of European writers, from Giacomo Leopardi, in the early nineteenth century, to Samuel Beckett, in the twentieth, for whom nullity was a muse. Born in Lisbon in , he moved to South Africa at the age of seven, when his stepfather was appointed Portuguese consul in Durban. He excelled at English, winning prizes for his school essays, and wrote English verse throughout his life.

In , he moved back to Lisbon to study at the university there. After two years, however, a student strike shut down the campus, and Pessoa dropped out. For the rest of his life, he devoted himself to reading and writing while supporting himself as a freelance translator of business correspondence. He was involved in several literary enterprises, including a famous magazine, Orpheu , which, though it ran for only two issues, is considered responsible for introducing modernism to Portugal.

Nothing can prevent it. In addition to the size and the disorder of the Pessoa archive, there is another confounding level of complexity: it is, in a sense, the work of many writers. His love of invented names began early: at the age of six, he wrote letters under the French name Chevalier de Pas, and soon moved on to English personae such as Alexander Search and Charles Robert Anon. But the major heteronyms he used in his mature work were more than jokey code names.

They were fully fledged characters, endowed with their own biographies, philosophies, and literary styles. If he was empty, as he liked to claim, it was not the emptiness of a void but of a stage, where these selves could meet and interact. When five, Pessoa moved to Durban, South Africa with his mother after the demise of his father.

It was in Durban, where he received his early education in an English school, that Pessoa developed profound appreciation for English literature. Young Pessoa received his first recognition at the age of 15 when he was awarded Queen Victoria Memorial Prize for the best paper in English. In Pessoa returned to his homeland Portugal never to leave again. Here he started making his living as a commercial translator and by drafting business letters in English and French.

By Pessoa had started publishing criticism in prose and poetry.