Remarkably, no one seems to think Pessoa was in anything but his right mind. Pessoa, the organizer of many phantom cricket matches at the nonexistent Cato Lodge Cricket Club in Durban, South Africa. GaudГЄncio Nabos, both of whom belonged to a literary society founded by their friend F.A.N. Perhaps you pore over a single lovelorn document by the kyphotic teenager Maria JosГ©, dying from tuberculosis in a Lisbon apartment, while I chuckle at the satires of Sidney Parkinson Stool and Dr.

Or perhaps youвЂ™re partial to the high school Latin teacher Ricardo Reis and his classical odes, and baffled by my enthusiasm for The Book of Disquiet, an autobiography of someone who never existed that was begun in 1914 by Vicente Guedes but finished by Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper who took up the project after Guedes disappeared in the 1920s. ItвЂ™s I having survived myself like a spent match. What I am today is their having sold the house, What I am today (and the house of those who loved me trembles through my tears). The person I am today is like the damp in the hall at the back of the house I might prefer CaeiroвЂ™s austere lucidity while you are knocked flat by CamposвЂ™s devastating self-assessments, evident in his manic hymns to the big city or the aching, elegiac вЂњBirthdayвЂќ:Д«ack when they used to celebrate my birthday Liking Alberto Caeiro by no means guarantees liking ГЃlvaro de Campos, and this too makes it hard to speak of Pessoa in unitary terms. WhatвЂ™s notable about the heteronyms, besides their number, is that each one writes so differently from the others. A few good things came out posthumously, but Pessoa hit his highest notes as the man behind the curtain. Some English-language sonnets published in 1918 are at once bizarre and profoundly conventional, their labored Shakespearian posturing (вЂњAs a bad orator, badly oвЂ™er-book-skilled,/Doth overflow his purpose with made heatвЂќ) more caricature than successful impersonation. Mensagem ( Message, 1934), a sequence of fantastical poems on PortugalвЂ™s past and future, got a nod of approval from the Salazar regime but has even less to recommend it than the endorsement suggests.

LetвЂ™s not mince words: when he wrote as himself, Pessoa wrote badly. This all raises a question: What does it mean to be a fan of Fernando Pessoa, or simply to read him? To whom did his language, and his life, belong? He did, however, leave 25,000 manuscript sheets of poems, essays, short stories, plays, literary criticism, philosophical and political treatises, horoscopes, and disaggregated bits of a work in prose called The Book of Disquiet-almost none of it вЂњhis.вЂќ The writer MГЎrio de Carvalho, contemplating the vastness of PessoaвЂ™s oeuvre, said, вЂњTanto Pessoa jaМЃ enjoaвЂќ (So much Pessoa youвЂ™ll puke). When Pessoa died in 1935, he left behind only a smattering of writing bearing his signature. He gave them distinct literary styles and cast their birth charts. But Pessoa-a self-described medium and amateur astrologer-treated his alter egos as actually existing contemporaries, past lives he was living in real time. ThereвЂ™s nothing unusual about publishing under a name thatвЂ™s not your own. The architect of Portuguese modernism, Pessoa invented as many as 136 independent aliases, or, to use his word, heteronyms, to which he attributed much of his work. Fernando Pessoa painting by Anna Bak-KvapilД®ven among the eccentric annals of poets who talked to God, angels, tutelary spirits, and disincorporated souls, Fernando Pessoa is a special case.

A History Of Modern Britain Torrent