Website review: Fernando Pessoa Biography and Bibli...
AlokeKumar discovered this in Biographies
•2 reviews since May 9, 2008
biographies
•litweb.net/biography/107/Fernando_Pessoa.html
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AlokeKumar discovered 8 weeks ago- FERNANDO PESSOA (1888 - 1935) When Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa passed away, he left a trunk containing some 25,426 items -- a vast collection of poems, fragments, letters, journals. These pieces were ascribed to a variety of writers -- Bernardo Soares, Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos among them -- for Pessoa had created a number of assumed identities over the course of his literary career. If Pessoa had never existed the Internet would have invented him -- for this fluid, hyper textual medium is so suitable to multiple images and different Avatars , expressing through a variety of personalities. He is larger than life `Internet Character". When Pessoa was five years old, his father died of tuberculosis. A year later, his brother also died and his widowed mother was remarried to the Portuguese consul in Durban, South Africa; the family moved to the city in 1896. The young Pessoa received his early education in Durban and Cape Town, becoming fluent in the English language and developing an appreciation for English poets such as William Shakespeare and John Milton. He then went back to Lisbon, at the age of seventeen, attending a "Curso Superior de Letras" in a Portuguese university. A student strike soon put an end to his studies, however, and Pessoa chose to study privately at home for a year. His term of study ended and Pessoa found a job working as an assistant for a businessman, where he was charged with writing correspondence and translating documents. It is sometimes said that the four greatest Portuguese poets of modern times are Fernando Pessoa. The statement is possible since Pessoa, whose name means `person' in Portuguese, had three alter egos who wrote in styles completely different from his own. In fact Pessoa wrote under dozens of names, but Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos were - their creator claimed - full-fledged individuals who wrote things that he himself would never or could never write. He dubbed them `heteronyms' rather than pseudonyms, since they were not false names but "other names", belonging to distinct literary personalities. Not only were their styles different; they thought differently, they had different religious and political views, different aesthetic sensibilities, different social temperaments. And each produced a large body of poetry. Pessoa died in 1935, almost unknown to the public with only one book published: "Mensagem" (Message). He became known in the 1940s, when the first large-scale edition of his works was issued. It was not until the 1980s, however, with the publication of the Livro de Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet) that, the poet of many masks began to be widely translated and appreciated in the rest of the world. This spot is for José from Lisbon, Portugal, who likes the poetry of Pessoa. For more on him visit : http://joserocha.stumbleupon
- JoseRocha rated 8 weeks ago
- I sincerely accept your dedication of your spot about Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa was not only a Portuguese poet, I think that his work is part of the Universal Culture. After all he was also a citizen of the world. Much more about him waits to be said and shown to everyone who loves poetry and also to go deep in the soul of a great human being.
