PESSOA AND HIS HETERONYMS

Even though more than a hundred names feature in his work, three of them had their own physiques, writing styles and biographies.

 JUNE 2020

Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is today Portugal’s main literary connection with the world. His work in verse and prose is as multifaceted as may be imagined, embodying countless interests and representing an authentic collective oeuvre that belongs to the author, to the various authorial figures he invented and to its readers. Pessoa called some of these characters – Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos – his “heteronyms”, reserving for himself the title of “orthonym”. Editor and contributor to several literary journals, author of Livro do Desassossego (Book of Disquiet) and, in his daily life, “foreign correspondent in commercial offices”, Pessoa left a universal oeuvre in three languages which has continued to be published and studied ever since he wrote, shortly before his death, in Lisbon, “I know not what tomorrow will bring”.