Pessoa Route

It is legitimate to say that Pessoa would never have existed without Lisbon, or that Lisbon would not be the same without Pessoa. 

A lyric poet and a nationalist, he cultivated a form of poetry that focused on traditional Portuguese themes and its yearning and nostalgic lyricism, expressing thoughts about his “inner self”, his anxieties, the solitude that assailed him and the states of tediousness he suffered. 

He was born in 1888, on the fourth floor of no. 4, Largo de São Carlos, Chiado – the area where, along with Baixa and Campo de Ourique, he would spend the most important moments in his life, a fact which would be repeatedly evidenced throughout his huge oeuvre. 

Pessoa did not like travelling. The exception to the rule were the nine years he spent as a child in Durban, South Africa, where his stepfather was consul. The fact that he travelled little meant that he maintained an intimate relationship with his home city. Pessoa loved Lisbon and insisted that others saw it through the same eyes as he did. 

He had no interest in a university degree, having attended only two years of the Faculty of Letters. As an autodidact, he turned the National Library into his second home, absorbing books on philosophy, religion, sociology and literature. 

A self-confessed loner, he devoted his life to words. He was a translator, advertising agent, editor, philosopher, playwright, essayist, astrologer... He founded Orpheu, with Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Raul Leal, Luís de Montalvor, Almada-Negreiros and the Brazilian Ronald de Carvalho. 

He wandered the streets of Lisbon between offices and cafés. In one of these offices he met Ophelia, the one and only love of his life. From the café A Brasileira, where he attended long soirées, he would walk down to Praça do Comércio to dine at Martinho da Arcada. 

Restlessness was a constant feature of the 47 years of Pessoa’s life. But if that were not the case, he would never have written. Fernando Pessoa and his multiple characters are more than a legacy. Rather, let us call them souls who lived and strived, but unsuccessfully, to understand the real meaning of life. 

If we were to summarise Fernando Pessoa’s life in a single word, it would be “disquiet”. Anguish, restlessness and other synonyms would describe the daily life of the poet who found, in Lisbon’s nooks and crannies, the places of refuge for his strange way of life. Between cafés and offices he invented room to create the parallel life which made most sense to him.

We play at living

“Playing at living life” was the poet’s most striking achievement. The literary world called the characters he created heteronyms but of the more than 70 he invented, only four would stand out: Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos and the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares.

The reasons for creating these heteronyms were various (and the writer’s genius was only the most obvious). Some regard the death of his father and his brother Jorge as the catalysts. It is argued that he needed to create imaginary families due to the unravelling of his own. Besides the question of family, it is clear that he felt an intense need to see the world through the eyes of others.

A non-book written by a man who never lived

“These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it’s because I have nothing to say” – so writes Pessoa under the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares in his introduction to The Book of Disquiet.

Pessoa began writing this book when he was 25 and would continue to do so for the rest of his life. It was a kind of maze where he sought to answer questions like “Who am I?” and “How can I explain reality?” It consists of over 500 texts without a beginning, middle or an end, just existential doubts, questions awaiting an answer and the latent disquiet of someone who never managed to understand the world. 

Fernando Pessoa was not one genius but several. Often confused with the word pseudonym – where different texts are written by the same writer under different names – Pessoa’s heteronyms are very different. They reveal his great mystery and are his greatest invention.

Even though around 70 names feature in his work, only Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campo are considered heteronyms. The fourth name, Bernardo Soares, is regarded as a semi-heteronym, since his personality contains very similar characteristics to those of the author.

Who, then, are Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms? What and how do they think? That is what we shall now look at.