One of the most important Poets of the 20th century, FERNANDO PESSOA was born in Lisbon on June 13th, 1888. He was the son of a civil servant and music critic, who died when the Poet was five years old. With his mother, he lived in Durban, South Africa, from 1895 to 1905. His cultural background was primarily English and his first works in Poetry and Prose were directly written in English. He read Shakespeare, Milton, Thackeray and the Romantics.
Back to Lisbon he never really got into the University starting a professional career as translator and commercial writer. He was fluent both in English and French. Throughout his life, Pessoa was to live strictly on the revenues of this professional occupation, but from 1925 until his death, in 1935, he also worked as copywriter for one of the first advertising agencies in Portugal. He started publishing poems in literary magazines when he was 24 and was one of the editors of Orpheu the review that introduced Futurism in Portugal, in 1914. In the beginning of the 1920s Fernando Pessoa created a publishing house, Olisipo, and a few modern Portuguese writers became his authors.
Meanwhile, he continued to write incessantly, both in Portuguese and in English, and the outline of his complex literary life started to be known. From 1914 on he had indeed animated a handful of ‘literary characters', later called heteronyms, each one of them with his own poetic style, ideology and biography. The futuristic Álvaro de Campos, a ‘naval engineer', confronted Pessoa himself not only in poems and prose, but also through interviews and opinions he contributed to contemporary newspapers.
Open to modernism, progress and the beauty of the machines, Campos conceded that his ‘master' was another of the heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro , a fragile and somewhat whitmanesque creature who lived in the countryside and wrote fine, clear, down-to-earth poetry. Another poet, Ricardo Reis, a monarchist who had fled to Brazil after the Republican Revolution of 1910, was devoted to Horatio and classical poetry The last, and perhaps most awkward member of this literary family, was Bernardo Soares, who wrote O Livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet), a collection of scattered writings about everyday life, the city of Lisbon and a certain malaise provoked by a total inadequacy to the patterns and forms of social life.
Fernando Pessoa was known as a solitary who never married and lived in almost complete isolation. He was fond of astrology and devoted a careful attention to everything metaphysical, though he was not a religious man. In 1934 he was refused an official literary prize but the book he then entered to the competition , Mensagem (Message), was later to become a landmark in Portuguese contemporary poetry. He died in 1935 at the age of 47.
He left over 25,000 unclassified documents part of which posthumously published. Poems, essays, short stories, diaries, plays, sociological studies and even articles on commercial and economic issues have been published in dozens of volumes since his death. His poems are widely published in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.
