Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was born in Lisbon. His father, Joaquim de Seabra Pessoa, died of tuberculosis when Pessoa was young. Maria Madalena Nogueira Pessoa, his mother, married the Portuguese consul in Durban in South Africa, where the family lived from 1896. During these years Pessoa became fluent in English and developed an early love for such authors as William Shakespeare and John Milton. He also wrote his poems in English.
Pessoa was educated in Cape Town. At the age of seventeen he returned to Lisbon to continue his studies at the university. When a student strike interrupted classes, he gave up his studies, and got employment as a business correspondent. In 1919 Pessoa met Ophelia Queiroz, a nineteen years old secretary; they exchanged letters but in November 1920 Pessoa broke off with her. With his mother, and his half sister Henriquetta, he rented an apartment on the Rua Coelho de Rocha, 16, where he lived until his death. Pessoa never married. .
Pessoa earned a modest living as a commercial translator, and wrote avant-garde reviews, especially for Orpheu, which was a forum for new aesthetic views. His articles in praise of the saudosismo (nostalgia) movement provoked polemics because of their extravagant language. Pessoa's first book, ANTINOUS, appeared in 1918, and was followed by two other collection of poems, all written in English. It was not until 1933 that he published his first book, the slim, prize-winning MENSAGEM, in Portuguese. However, it did not attract much attention.
The bulk of Pessoa's work appeared in literary magazines, especially in his own Athena. Before creating his literary personalities from his inner discordant voices, Pessoa had long had doubts about his own sanity. Under his own name Pessoa wrote poems that are marked by their innovative language, although he used traditional stanza and metric patterns. The poetical technique for which Pessoa has become especially noted is the use of heteronyms, or alternative literary personae. Pessoa's own name means both person and persona. At the age of five or six the poet had began to address letters to an imaginary companion, named Le Chevalier de Pas.
Much of his best work Pessoa attributed later to his heteronyms, de Campos, Reis, and Caeiro, who were partly born as a prank on Mário Sá-Carneiro (1890-1916), an avant-garde poet from Orpheu. Álvaro de Campos, an engineer, represents the ecstasy of experience; he writes in free verse. Ricardo Reis is an epicurean doctor with a classical education; he writes in meters and stanzas that recall Horace. (See also Jose Saramago's novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, 1984.) Alberto Caeiro, who called himself a shepherd, is against all sentimentality, and writes in colloquial free verse. Caeiro had two disciples, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos, who says melancholically in 'The Tobacconist's' (1928): "I am nothing. / I shall always be nothing." According to Reis, "The life of Caeiro cannot be told for there is nothing in it to tell." Pessoa once informed that Caeiro died from tuberculosis in 1915. After meeting him on March 8, 1914, Pessoa began to write poetry. In 'I never kept sheep' Caeiro said: "I've no ambitions or desires. / My being a poet isn't an ambition. / It's my way of being alone." Each persona has a distinct philosophy of life. Pessoa even created literary discussions among them.
Pessoa died on November 30, 1935, in Lisbon.
Pessoa left behind some 25,000 unpublished text and fragments. From the 1940s, his poetry started to gain a wider audience in Portugal and later Brazil. Several of his collections have been published posthumously and translated in Spanish, French, English, German, Swedish, Finnish, and other languages. Among the most important works are POESIAS DE FERNANDO PESSOA (1942), POESIAS DE ÁLVARO DE CAMPOS (1944), POEMAS DE ALBERTO CAEIRO (1946), and ODES DE RICARDO REIS (1946).
"Quando vim a ter espenranças, já não sabia ter esperanças.
Quando vim a olhar para a vida, perdera o sentido da vida."
(from 'Aniveresario')
Known above all as a poet, Pessoa also wrote short essays, several of which were briefly sketched or unfinished. His LIVRO DO DESSOSSOGEGO (The Book of Disquiet), the "factless autobiography", written under the name Bernardo Soares, appeared for the first time in 1982, almost 50 years after the author's death. The Book of Disquiet is a collection of prose manuscripts, written in the style of an intimate diary. Soares praises the literary magazine to which Pessoa contributes, he loves and hates his city, but cannot break out of his monotonous life.
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