52 Facts About Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa has been described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language.

Fernando Pessoa wrote in and translated from English and French.

Fernando Pessoa did not define these as pseudonyms because he felt that this did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms, a term he invented.

When Fernando Pessoa was five, his father, Joaquim de Seabra Fernando Pessoa, died of tuberculosis, and less than seven months later his younger brother Jorge, aged one, died.

Fernando Pessoa moved to the Durban High School in April 1899, becoming fluent in English and developing an appreciation for English literature.

Meanwhile, Fernando Pessoa started writing short stories in English, some under the name of David Merrick, many of which he left unfinished.

The young Fernando Pessoa was described by a schoolfellow as follows:.

Fernando Pessoa was pale and thin and appeared physically to be very imperfectly developed.

Fernando Pessoa had a narrow and contracted chest and was inclined to stoop.

Fernando Pessoa had a peculiar walk and some defect in his eyesight gave to his eyes a peculiar appearance, the lids seemed to drop over the eyes.

Fernando Pessoa was regarded as a brilliant clever boy as, in spite of the fact that he had not spoken English in his early years, he had learned it so rapidly and so well that he had a splendid style in that language.

Fernando Pessoa took no part in athletic sports of any kind and I think his spare time was spent on reading.

Fernando Pessoa became an autodidact and a devoted reader who spent much of his time in libraries.

Fernando Pessoa returned to his uncompleted formal studies, complementing his British education with self-directed study of Portuguese culture.

In 1912, Fernando Pessoa entered the literary world with a critical essay, published in the cultural journal A Aguia, which triggered one of the most important literary debates in the Portuguese intellectual world of the 20th century: the polemic regarding a super-Camoes.

Fernando Pessoa adopted the detached perspective of the flaneur Bernardo Soares, one of his heteronyms.

Soares supposedly lived in the same downtown street, a world that Fernando Pessoa knew quite well due to his long career as freelance correspondence translator.

Indeed, from 1907 until his death in 1935, Fernando Pessoa worked in twenty-one firms located in Lisbon's downtown, sometimes in two or three of them simultaneously.

Fernando Pessoa hunched over terribly when sitting down but less so standing up, and he dressed with a carelessness that wasn't entirely careless.

Later on, Fernando Pessoa was a frequent customer at Martinho da Arcada, a centennial coffeehouse in Comercio Square, surrounded by ministries, almost an "office" for his private business and literary concerns, where he used to meet friends in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1925, Fernando Pessoa wrote in English a guidebook to Lisbon but it remained unpublished until 1992.

Fernando Pessoa translated a number of Portuguese books into English such as The Songs of Antonio Botto.

On June 24,1916, Fernando Pessoa wrote an impressive letter to his aunt and godmother, then living in Switzerland with her daughter and son-in-law, in which he describes this "mystery case" that surprised him.

Fernando Pessoa felt "more curiosity than fear", but was respectful towards this phenomenon and asked secrecy, because "there is no advantage, but many disadvantages" in speaking about this.

Fernando Pessoa developed a strong interest in astrology, becoming a competent astrologer.

Fernando Pessoa elaborated hundreds of horoscopes, including well-known people such as William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, Chopin, Robespierre, Napoleon I, Benito Mussolini, Wilhelm II, Leopold II of Belgium, Victor Emmanuel III, Alfonso XIII, or the Kings Sebastian and Charles of Portugal, and Salazar.

Fernando Pessoa established the pricing of his astrological services from 500 to 5,000 reis and made horoscopes of relatives, friends, customers, of himself and astonishingly of the heteronyms and journals as Orpheu.

Fernando Pessoa has declared himself a Pagan, in the sense of an "intellectual mystic of the sad race of the Neoplatonists from Alexandria" and a believer in "the Gods, their agency and their real and materially superior existence".

Fernando Pessoa translated Crowley's poem "Hymn To Pan" into Portuguese, and the catalogue of Fernando Pessoa's library shows that he possessed Crowley's books Magick in Theory and Practice and Confessions.

Fernando Pessoa wrote on Crowley's doctrine of Thelema in several fragments, including Moral.

Fernando Pessoa was importantly influenced by Portuguese poets such as Antero de Quental, Gomes Leal, Cesario Verde, Antonio Nobre, Camilo Pessanha and Teixeira de Pascoaes.

Since the attempt at British publication failed, in 1918 Fernando Pessoa published in Lisbon two slim volumes of English verse: Antinous and 35 Sonnets, received by the British literary press without enthusiasm.

Olisipo closed down in 1923, following the scandal known as "Literatura de Sodoma", which Fernando Pessoa started with his paper "Antonio Botto e o Ideal Estetico em Portugal", published in the journal Contemporanea.

Politically, Fernando Pessoa described himself as "a British-style conservative, that is to say, liberal within conservatism and absolutely anti-reactionary," and adhered closely to the Spencerian individualism of his upbringing.

Fernando Pessoa initially rallied to the First Portuguese Republic but the ensuing instability caused him to reluctantly support the military coups of 1917 and 1926 as a means of restoring order and preparing the transition to a new constitutional normality.

Fernando Pessoa wrote a pamphlet in 1928 supportive of the military dictatorship but after the establishment of the New State, in 1933, Pessoa became disenchanted with the regime and wrote critically of Salazar and fascism in general, maintaining a hostile stance towards its corporatist program, illiberalism, and censorship.

The regime suppressed two articles Fernando Pessoa wrote in which he condemned Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia and fascism as a threat to human liberty everywhere.

In 1985, Fernando Pessoa's remains were moved to the Hieronymites Monastery, in Lisbon, where Vasco da Gama, Luis de Camoes, and Alexandre Herculano are buried.

When Fernando Pessoa was a student at the University of Lisbon, Anon was replaced by Alexander Search.

Search represented a transition heteronym that Fernando Pessoa used while searching to adapt to the Portuguese cultural reality.

Translator and literary critic Richard Zenith notes that Fernando Pessoa eventually established at least seventy-two heteronyms.

Fernando Pessoa's heteronyms differ from pen names, as they possess distinct biographies, temperaments, philosophies, appearances, writing styles, and even signatures.

Alberto Caeiro was the first heteronym which Fernando Pessoa considered to be great or seminal.

Such a philosophy makes Caeiro contrast greatly with his creator, Fernando Pessoa, who was deferential to modernism and thus interrogates the world around him rather than merely experience it.

Fernando Pessoa brings the reader to the present as if he had woken up from a dream of the past, to fall in a dream of the future: he sees King Sebastian returning and still bent on accomplishing a Universal Empire.

Fernando Pessoa represents the capacity of dreaming, and believing that it's possible to achieve dreams.

In 1912, Fernando Pessoa wrote a set of essays for the cultural journal A Aguia, founded in Oporto, in December 1910, and run by the republican association Renascenca Portuguesa.

The philosophical notes of the young Fernando Pessoa, mostly written between 1905 and 1912, illustrate his debt to the history of philosophy more through commentators than through a first-hand protracted reading of the Classics, ancient or modern.

The 2008 film The Night Fernando Pessoa Met Constantine Cavafy, directed by Stelios Haralambopoulos, focuses on a meeting between Constantine P Cavafy and Pessoa on board a transatlantic ship.

Nicolas Barral's 2024 comic book The Disquiet of Senhor Fernando Pessoa is about Fernando Pessoa's last days, from the perspective of a journalist tasked with writing his obituary in advance.

Fernando Pessoa has written and edited several books and other publications.

Fernando Pessoa compared his experiences translating archaic vs contemporary linguistic registers, highly formal poetry vs free verse, and European vs Brazilian Portuguese.