Fernando Pessoa

Fernando António Nogueira de Seabra Pessoa (13 June 1888 – 30 November 1935) was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, and publisher. He is widely regarded as one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century and a major poet in Portuguese literature. He also wrote and translated in English and French. Pessoa was highly prolific, writing under his own name and roughly seventy-five others. Three of these stand out: Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. He called them heteronyms rather than pseudonyms, a term he invented, because he felt pseudonyms did not capture their independent intellectual lives. These imaginary figures sometimes held unpopular or extreme views. Pessoa was born in Lisbon on 13 June 1888. When he was five, his father died of tuberculosis, and less than seven months later his one-year-old brother also died. After his mother remarried by proxy, Pessoa sailed with her to South Africa in early 1896 to join his stepfather, a military officer appointed Portuguese consul in Durban. He began his education at a Roman Catholic grammar school run by Irish and French nuns. In April 1899 he moved to Durban High School, where he became fluent in English and developed a love for English literature. In November 1903, during the Matriculation Examination held by the University of the Cape of Good Hope, he won the Queen Victoria Memorial Prize for best paper in English. While preparing for university, he also attended night classes at Durban Commercial High School for a year. As a young writer, Pessoa wrote short stories in English, some under the name David Merrick, many unfinished. At sixteen, his satirical poem "Hillier did first usurp the realms of rhyme ..." appeared in *The Natal Mercury* under the name C. R. Anon. In December 1904, *The Durban High School Magazine* published his essay "Macaulay." From February to June 1905, the same newspaper published at least four of his sonnets, often under humorous versions of Anon. He began using pen names as a child, the first being Chevalier de Pas, supposedly a French noble. Other early names included Charles Robert Anon, David Merrick, Horace James Faber, and others. Ten years after arriving in South Africa, at age seventeen, Pessoa sailed for Lisbon through the Suez Canal on the ship "Herzog," leaving Durban for good. This journey inspired the poems "Opiário" (dedicated to his friend Mário de Sá-Carneiro) and "Ode Marítima" (dedicated to the futurist painter Santa-Rita), both published in 1915 in the literary journal *Orpheu* under his heteronym Álvaro de Campos. Back in Lisbon in 1905, while his family stayed in South Africa, Pessoa began studying diplomacy. After a period of illness and two years of poor results, a student strike against the dictatorship of Prime Minister João Franco ended his formal studies. He became an autodidact and devoted reader. In August 1907, he started work at an American mercantile information agency. His grandmother died in September, leaving him a small inheritance, which he used to start his own publishing house, "Empreza Ibis." The venture failed and closed in 1910, but the ibis—the sacred bird of Ancient Egypt and inventor of the alphabet in Greek mythology—remained an important symbol for him. Pessoa returned to his incomplete studies, supplementing his British education with self-directed study of Portuguese culture. The pre-revolutionary atmosphere surrounding the assassination of King Charles I and Crown Prince Luís Filipe in 1908, and the patriotic fervor after the republican revolution in 1910, influenced his development, as did his step-uncle, a poet and retired soldier who introduced him to Portuguese poetry, especially the romantics and symbolists of the 19th century. In 1912, Pessoa entered the literary world with a critical essay in the cultural journal *A Águia*, sparking one of the most important literary debates in 20th-century Portuguese intellectual life: the polemic about a "super-Camões," his term for a future poet who would surpass Luís de Camões as Portugal's greatest national poet.