Fernando Pessoa

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa is a writer and a poet Portuguese, born the June 13rd 1888 with Lisbon, city where he dies the November 30th 1935. Its family name was spelled Pessôa on its birth certificate (circumflex accent removed by itself after a later reform of the Portuguese orthography).

Prolific and protean, Pessoa is a major author of the literature of Portuguese language and world literature (it is translated in a great number of languages). It in addition creates a multiple and complex work under different hétéronymes to its own name: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Alvaro de Campos, etc Bernardo Soares, author of the Livre of the intranquillity are regarded by him as its semi-hétéronyme, nearer to the orthonyme author.

Of alive sound it regularly published in Portuguese literary reviews and created one, with another poet, Mário de Sá Carneiro, celebrates it of them Orpheu , it also published two English texts and, notable exception, only one important book: the collection of poems " Message". With his death, one discovered 27543 texts hidden in a trunk which one exhumed little by little. The " Deliver of Intranquilllité" was published only in 1982 and its " Faust" in 1988. All these manuscripts are from now on at the National library of Lisbon. It with the characteristic to be also anglophone to have passed a good part of her childhood with Durban (Natal, South Africa) where his/her father-in-law had been appointed consul of Portugal. It there had made brilliant studies in High School de Durban and had made a success of Intermediate Examination in Arts (the examination of entry) with the Université of the Cape of Good Hope in 1904, right before returning at his place to Lisbon, city which it will not leave any more until its death. Portuguese will become, however, the language of his great creativity. He will affirm with force " my fatherland is the language portugaise".

In 1985, for the fiftieth anniversary of its death, its remainders are transferred to the birthday day from its birth to the Monastère from Hiéronymites ( Mosteiro back Jerónimos ) to Lisbon. Since this official national homage, it rests with a few meters of the cenotaphs of Luís de Camões and Vasco de Gama, and in 1986 it was represented on the Banknotes Portuguese of 100 escudos (see low).

The triumphal day

Letter with Adolfo Put Monteiro of the January 13rd 1935 on the birth of the Hétéronyme S:

“One day when I had finally given up - it was on March 8th 1914 - I approached high convenient and, taking a sheet of paper, I put to write, upright, as I make it each time I can. And I wrote thirty and some poems of at a stretch, in a kind of extase of which I will not be able to seize nature. It was the triumphal day of my life and I will not be able to know others like that one of them. I begin with a title: O Guardador de Rebanhos (the Herdsman). And what followed was the appearance in me somebody, to which I immediately gave the name of Alberto Caeiro. Excuse the nonsense of the sentence: my Master had emerged in me” (letter reproduced in Pessoa in person , Jose Blanco ED., the Difference, 1986, p. 302).

Extract

“If it is a strange and unexplainable fact, it is although a gifted creature of intelligence and sensitivity remains always sitted on the same opinion, always coherent with itself. All changes continuously, in our body also and consequently in our brain. Then, how, if not due to disease, to fall and fall down into this anomaly to want to think the same thing today as yesterday, whereas not only the brain of today is not already any more that of yesterday but what even the day of today is not that of yesterday? To be coherent is a disease, an atavism perhaps; that goes back to animal ancestors, at a stage of their evolution where this disgrace was natural.

a being equipped with nerves modern, of an intelligence without blinkers, a sensitivity in awakening, has the cerebral duty to change opinion and of certainty several times per day.

the disciplined and cultivated man makes of its intelligence the mirrors of the transitory ambient conditions; it is republican the morning, monarchist in the twilight; atheist under a sun bursting and catholic transmontain at certain hours of shade and silence; and swearing only by Mallarmé at these times of fallen the night on the city where the lights hatch, it must feel that all symbolism is an invention of insane when, recluse in front of the sea, it knows nothing any more but the Odyssée.

Of the deep convictions, only has the surface beings of them. Those which do not pay attention to the things, hardly see them that not to knock itself there, these are always of the same opinion, they are very of a part and coherent. They are wood of which the policy and the religion are useful, this is why they burn so badly in front of the Truth and the Life.

Quand will we wake up with the right concept that policy, religion and life in society are only lower and plebeian degrees esthetics - the esthetics of those which are not able to have one of them? It is only when one released humanity of the prejudices of sincerity and coherence accustoms her feelings to live independent, that one will be able to reach, in the life, a pretense of beauty, elegance and sincerity. ” (drawn from Chronique of the life which passes , April 5th, 1915)

Works

De Fernando Pessoa, orthonyme

  • Message (the only work published in Portuguese of alive sound)
  • Poems paulists, sensationnists and intersectionnists
  • For a “Cancioneiro”
  • Sonnets - Quatrains - Rubayat
  • political Poems
  • Poems esoteric and metaphysics
  • Praça da Figueira - One evening in Lima

De Bernardo Soares, semi-hétéronyme

D' Alberto Caiero, hétéronyme

  • the Herdsman
  • the Shepherd in love
  • not assembled Poems

De Ricardo Reis, hétéronyme

  • Odes, delivers first
  • Odes published in the review Presença
  • scattered Odes

D' Alvaro de Campos, hétéronyme

  • First poems
  • the Great Odes
  • Around the Great Odes
  • Last poems

English poetry

  • Epithalamium
  • Antinoüs
  • Thirty-five Sonnets
  • Inscriptions
  • the insane Fiddler
  • Poems of Alexander Search - scattered Poems

Published in collection

  • Notes in remembering my Master Chronic Caeiro
  • of the life which passes (works in prose apart from the Livre of the intranquillity )
  • the anarchistic Banker (continuation of the precedent)
  • maritime Ode and other poems (1915)
  • the herdsman and the other poems of Alberto Caeiro with Poésies of Alvaro de Campos (1914)
  • Erostratus (Erostrate)
  • Lisbon
  • the Sailor
  • Selected Poems by Jonathan Griffin - Penguin Poetry ISBN 0-14-018845-2

  • Shop tobacconist's , 1990 - final edition

  • On the hétéronymes , 1993 - final edition
  • the herdsman , 1986. E.O
  • Opium on board , 1993 - new edition
  • the book of the intranquillity , 1987. E.O
  • complete Quatrains , 1988. E.O
  • Ultimatum , 1993 - transl. by Michel Chandeigne and Jean-François Vargas E.O
  • A hundred and fifty four quatrains , 1986

Published in the collection “Pleiad” (Gallimard), under the title poetic Works , foreword by Robert Bréchon.

Translations

Its work was abundantly translated, in particular into German, Croatian, Greek, Dutch, Arab, Danish, Hindi, Norwegian, Bulgare, Castillan, Slovenien, English (its many texts written directly in English have in their turn translated in other languages), Rumanian, Catalan, Russian, Italian, Estonian, Finnois, Japanese, Czech, Chinese, Latin French, , Ourdou, Galician, Latvian and Konkani (spoken Indo-Aryan language with Goa). cf.

Others

In 1985, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of its death, it was represented on the Banknotes Portuguese of 100 escudos (approximately 50 hundreds of Euro S)

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