Fernando Pessoa 1888-1935. Pessoa = “person” Born Lisbon, lived in Durban, South Africa (stepfather was Portuguese consul) produced fake newspapers written.

Fernando Pessoa

1888-1935

Pessoa = “person”

• Born Lisbon, lived in Durban, South Africa (stepfather was Portuguese consul)

• produced fake newspapers written by different “reporters,” included poems and criticism and fake news

• Early fascination with British Romantic Poets + Edgar Allen Poe – created English-speaking “romantic” “Alexander Search”

• Returned to Lisbon in 1905 and “hardly ever left” for rest of his life

• 1910 First Portuguese Republic declared after seven centuries of rule by monarch

Heteronym

“various characters… symptomatic of modernist literary technique in general; they have something in common with Yeats’s ‘masks’ and Pound’s ‘personae,’ and are a logical outgrowth of modernism’s attempt to make poetry seem impersonal or purely dramatic.”

--- An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa

“You’re never truly yourself until you wear a mask.”

--- Oscar Wilde

“The good Portuguese is various persons… Never do I feel so Portuguese as when I feel that I am different from me – Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, Fernando Pessoa, and as many more as have been or will be.”

-- Fernando Pessoa

David Bowie – Ziggy Stardust

Marilyn Manson (“Marilyn Monroe” + “Charlie Manson”)

Eminem – plays with “persona” of white rapper – albums The Eminem Show /

The Marshall Mathers LP / The Slim Shady LP

Alias

Everyday Roles

• Student

Everyday Roles

• Student

• Husband/wife/daughter/son

Everyday Roles

• Student


• Friend

Everyday Roles

• Student


• Friend

• Teammate

Everyday Roles

• Student


• Friend

• Teammate

• Employee

Everyday Roles

• Student


• Friend

• Teammate

• Employee

• Customer

“For temperamental reasons that I do not propose to analyze, nor is it important that I analyze, I constructed within me various characters distinct among themselves and from me – characters to whom I attributed various poems that, in terms of feelings and ideas, are not like those that I would write.”

-- Fernando Pessoa

Pessoa’s people

• Alberto Caeiro – pagan “master”

Pessoa’s people


• Álvaro de Campos – “Whitmanesque futurist”

Pessoa’s people


• Álvaro de Campos – “Whitmanesque futurist”

• Ricardo Reis – “Neo-classicist”

Additional “heteronyms”

• Bernando Soares – prose writer, Book of Disquietude

Additional “heteronyms”

• Bernando Soares – prose writer, Book of Disquietude

• Fernando Pessoa -- “orthonym” – “impure and artless” short, lyric poems

“I put in Caiero all my power of dramatic depersonalization, I put in Ricardo Reis all my mental discipline, dressed in the music that is appropriate to him, I put in Álvaro de Campos all the emotion that I give neither to myself nor to life.”

-- Fernando Pessoa

Autopsychography

Portuguese: psicografia – refers to “the occult practice of writing through the suggestion or action of a spirit medium”

“Self-directed” Chevy Tahoe Ads



Fernando Pessoa 1888-1935. Pessoa = “person” Born Lisbon, lived in Durban, South Africa (stepfather was Portuguese consul) produced fake newspapers written.

Documents