Fernando Pessoa

"The magical world of Fernando Pessoa" by Gary Lachman
Nth Position

Until relatively recently, the work of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa was little known, but in the last few years he's been rediscovered by several critics, mostly on the strength of various translations of his Livro do Desassossego or Book of Disquiet, a collection of unfinished angst-ridden texts found in a trunk after Pessoa's death. The fragmentary nature of these writings - jotted on scraps of paper, the backs of envelopes, the reverse side of other manuscripts and other odd places - makes Pessoa a prime postmodern figure, and the trunk, whose contents are still being catalogued (it contained some 25,000 items) has taken on the same mythical character as the valise Walter Benjamin carried on his fateful escape from Vichy France. [1] Pessoa's posthumous celebrity, like Benjamin's, is founded in many ways as much upon his life as upon his work. In Benjamin's case, his life embodies the myth of the Jewish intellectual on the run from the Nazis. In Pessoa's the story is less political; he embodies the disjointed, fractured postmodern ethos not only in his work, but in his very psyche.

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"Everything is what we are, and everything will be, for those who come after us in the diversity of time, what we will have intensely imagined--what we, that is, by embodying our imagination, will have actually been. The Grand, tarnished panorama of History amounts, as I see it, to a flow of interpretations, a confused consensus of unreliable accounts. The novelist is all of us, and we narrate whenever we see, because seeing is complex like everything."
--Fernando Pessoa, "The Book of Disquiet" (Ch. 27)

Fernando Pessoa