Mar 05, 2024 08:00:00

What is the life of Fernando Pessoa, a writer with 70 pen names?

Fernando Pessoa , famous as Portugal's national writer and whose portrait was featured on Portuguese currency in 1988, is known to have gained attention after a trunk full of his manuscripts was discovered after his death. . Pessoa's amazing writing methods and life are featured on TED-Ed, a YouTube channel that uses animation to explain science and culture.

These 70 writers are actually all the same person - Ilan Stavans - YouTube


When Pessoa died in 1935, a trunk full of unpublished manuscripts was discovered in his apartment in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. What was surprising was that the trunk contained works in a variety of genres by dozens of authors from various backgrounds and origins. All of the dozens of writers were fictional characters created by Pessoa, and his posthumous manuscripts were created as works of fictional characters.

It is not uncommon for writers to use pen names. For example,

Agatha Christie , known as the Queen of Mysteries, published six romance novels under the alias Mary Westmacott. Mark Twain , famous for ` `The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ,'' is known to have been named by Samuel Langhorne Clemens from the steamboat sign ``by the mark, twain.''

However, Pessoa's pen name is a little unusual. Pessoa himself calls it ``

HETERONYMS ,'' and writes as ``another person that he has created,'' rather than an alias for himself. Therefore, he did not just use a different name, but also considered the person's life and habits when choosing a new name, so that he could create a unique literary expression.

Pessoa says that sometimes the fictional writers he created interacted with each other and criticized each other's works. Pessoa describes himself as ``a nomad through his own consciousness'' and says he is ``a kind of intermediary'' between many divided beings.

Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888 and began writing at the age of six, but by then he was already writing as a different person. The letter written by six-year-old Pessoa was signed by a fictional Frenchman, the Chevalier de Pas.

Pessoa immigrated to South Africa with his family in 1895 and learned several new languages. Later, when he was in high school, he published a booklet of poems under several different names.

In 1905 Pessoa returned to Lisbon, where he spent the rest of his life. Pessoa founded a publishing company that published art and literary magazines, but these ventures were unsuccessful, and he was in debt and moving frequently.

As he moved from place to place, Pessoa's literary experiments continued behind closed doors. Pessoa composes love letters as María José, a teenage girl with a spinal cord disorder, scribbling in various languages on envelopes, book covers, and simple notes. He also used various names for different genres, such as writing detective novels under the name Horace James Faber and writing astrological horoscope analysis under the name Rafael Bardaya.

Among them, Pessoa frequently used three characters: Alberto Caiero, a shepherd poet, Ricardo Reis, a doctor who preferred the style of classical poetry, and Álvaro de Campos, a bisexual naval engineer and nomad. Man. De Campos wrote in his notes that ``Fernando Pessoa is a fictional character who does not actually exist.''

Pessoa published poems, letters, essays, and literary criticism, but the only work he wrote in Portuguese was

Message , a collection of poems on the history of myths in Portugal, which brought him attention in Portugal. Ta. However, what really brought attention to Pessoa's creative work was the discovery of approximately 30,000 pages of unpublished manuscripts in his trunk when he died one year after the publication of ``The Message.''

A work called ``

The Book of Disquiet ' ', edited by critics from unpublished manuscripts found, is written as ``the autobiography of a person who never existed'' by a person named Bernardo Soares. In it, Pessoa described Soares as 'a small part of himself.' Pessoa is constantly confronting his own identity, saying, ``My soul is an invisible orchestra. 'I know myself only as a symphony,' he wrote in 'The Book of Anxiety.'