Fernando Pessoa was born on June 13, 1888, in the city of Lisbon, Portugal. He led an anonymous and solitary life and died in 1935 of cirrhosis of the liver.
When we talk about this ingenious artist, it is necessary to make a distinction between all the poems that he signed with his real name (orthonym poetry) and all the others, attributed to his heteronyms: Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis.
THE heteronym issue it results from personal characteristics related to Fernando Pessoa's personality: the unfolding of the “I”, the multiplication of identities and the sincerity of the pretense, a condition that patented his literary creation and that gave rise to the poem that Follow:
autopsychography
The poet is a pretender.
pretend so completely
Who even pretends it's pain
The pain that he really feels.
And those who read what he writes,
In pain they feel good,
Not the two he had,
But only the one they don't have.
And so on the wheel rails
It turns, to entertain the reason,
that rope train
which is called heart
Person, Fernando. Lyrical and dramatic, In: Works by Fernando Pessoa
See too: The best poems by Fernando Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms
Alberto Caeiro
It is an apparently simple poetry, but it actually hides an immense philosophical complexity, which addresses the issue of perception of the world and man's tendency to transform what he sees into symbols, being unable to understand his true meaning.
The child
The child who thinks in fairies and believes in fairies
Acts like a sick god, but like a god.
Because although I claim that there is what does not exist
You know how things exist, that they exist,
It knows that it exists and it doesn't explain,
You know there's no reason for anything to exist,
Know that to be is to be at a point
He just doesn't know that thought is not just any point.
Ricardo Reis
Physician Ricardo Reis is Fernando Pessoa's “classic” heteronym, as the influence of the Greek and Latin classics based on the ideology of the "Carpe Diem", given the brevity of life and the need to enjoy the moment.
angels or gods
Angels or gods, we always had,
The disturbed view that above
from us and compelling us
Other presences act.
As above the cattle in the fields
Our effort, which they don't understand,
coerce and force them
And they don't notice us,
our will and our thinking
It's the hands that others guide us by
Where they want And we don't.
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Álvaro de Campos
Futuristic heteronym of Fernando Pessoa, he is also known for the expression of an intense anguish that followed his enthusiasm for the achievements of modernity. In the bitter phase, the poet wrote long poems in which he reveals a great existential disenchantment. As we can see in Tobacco Shop:
tobacco shop
I'm nothing.
I will never be anything.
I can't want to be anything.
Apart from that, I have all the dreams in the world in me.
windows in my room,
From my quarter of one of the millions in the world that no one knows who it is
(And if they knew who it is, what would they know?),
You go into the mystery of a street constantly crossed by people,
For a street inaccessible to all thoughts,
Real, impossibly real, right, unknown right,
With the mystery of things under stones and beings,
With death by dampness on the walls and white hair in men,
With Destiny driving the cart of everything along the road of nothing. (...).
Read too: Five poems from Portuguese Literature
Modernism in Portugal
When talking about Fernando Pessoa, it is of paramount importance that we first recall Modernism in Portugal.
As all literary aesthetics come from a historical and political context, Portuguese Modernism emerged under a climate of great internal instability, with successive strikes and the difficulties brought by the outbreak of First World War.
The assassination of King Charles X, in 1908, was the starting point for the proclamation of the Republic. With that, the need arose to defend the overseas colonies, which is why the Portuguese people manifested all their nostalgia in an accentuated manner.
The memory of the old maritime glories and the lament for the confusion that dominated the country after the disappearance of Dom Sebastião served as the cradle for the birth of a magazine that would represent Modernism itself, the magazine "Orpheus", published in 1915. To learn more, read: Orphism: the first phase of modernism in Portugal.
Part of it were very important artistic figures, such as Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Luís Montalvor, José de Almada-Negreiros and Fernando Pessoa.
Its content was based on questioning the values established aesthetically and literarily, on the euphoria faced with the inventions arising from the Industrial Revolution and in the liberation of all the rules and conventions referring to the artistic production of the time.
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*Image credits: Georgios Kollides / shutterstock
By Vânia Duarte
Graduated in Letters
