Famous Portuguese People: Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa
Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa (1888-1935) was Portugal's most celebrated 20th century poet and also worked as a literary critic and translator.
Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888 but following the early death of his father from TB, the young boy and his mother moved to Durban in South Africa, where his new stepfather was the Portuguese consul. In South Africa Pessoa became fluent in English and developed a love for English literature.
Pessoa's first poems and short stories were published in English during his teenage years in South Africa. In 1905, Pessoa returned to Lisbon and after a short-lived time at university and an unsuccessful attempt to set up a publishing company, the young man found work as a technical translator, utilizing his skills in English, Portuguese and French.
Pessoa's interests and influences were varied, and as well as his work as a translator, Pessoa continued his career as a writer and literary critic, contributing to a number of literary journals in the Portuguese capital. Pessoa's eclectic interests lead him to translate the works of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, C. W. Leadbeater, Aleister Crowley and Annie Besant into Portuguese.
Throughout his literary career, Pessoa adopted a bewildering number of heteronyms or identities. This diverse set of personalities included Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and his most famous literary alter-ego Bernardo Soares. Each heteronym writes in an entirely different style with a different philosophy and background and together this massive outpouring make Pessoa one of the masters of 20th century literature to rival James Joyce and Ezra Pound.
Pessoa's work is inextricably linked to the city of Lisbon and its neighborhoods: Alfama, Baixa and Belem, where the poet spent his evenings in cafes and bars, developing the "lives" and styles of his many personas. His quirky tour guide to Lisbon, written in English, Lisbon: What the Tourist Should See, details the author's favorite haunts in the city.
Pessoa published little during his lifetime with his acknowledged masterpiece Livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet) only appearing in 1982 - the prose work is made up of unordered fragments and is part autobiographical, part philosophical journey. Mensagem (Message) is the other well-known Pessoa work, a symbolist epic made up of 44 short poems structured in three cantos or Cycles. Many of the writer's other works were discovered in an old trunk after his death and are still in the process of being definitively catalogued and published.
Pessoa's tomb is now in the Jeronimos Monastery in Belem.
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