In 1906, Young Fernando Pessoa At the age of sixteen, he read Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” for the first time. He was still in Durban, South Africa, where he had lived since he had to leave Lisbon with his mother when he was 7 and a half years old. … Her second husband was the Portuguese consul for the region. Those lines, “I have come to give myself to all and to exalt all… It is all within me, I do not know what it is, but I know it is within me,” moved him so much that he finally understood what he had felt since he was a child, that within him there were no limits, but possibilities and powers and rage, and that in his master plan he was going to write not with one voice, but from all of them.
he Writer and editor Richard Zenith introduces Pessoa. Biography, Cliff. A massive reconstruction of the incomprehensible personality of the creator of up to 72 aliases. In nearly 1,500 pages, Zenith reconstructs the life of a reserved, deeply introverted and individualistic author step by step, and attempts to separate him from the myth of the alcoholic genius locked in his ivory tower. From his early childhood, until his death at the age of 47 from cirrhosis, Zenith was able to articulate his real life, his struggles, his projects and his relationships, beyond his characters and his imagined literary worlds. “In the original English version, the biography is titled An Experimental Life, because that was Pessoa’s life, another experiment within his literary creativity,” the biographer said in statements to the ABC newspaper.
The poet’s life began with the death of his father from tuberculosis when he was five years old. Six months later, his one-year-old brother died of the same disease. Concluding himself and his readings will serve as a conduit to staying in a house where he also lives with his grandmother, who has dementia and suddenly explodes into fits of rage. “He always lived surrounded by elderly people. He had no friends his age.. His biggest influence would be his great uncle who would encourage him to use his imagination and create imaginary characters and friends. “This would be the beginning of their nicknames,” says Zenith.
Richard Zenith, Pessoa’s biographer
The biography stops at the next episode in Pessoa’s life, his stay there Durban, South Africa. He lived there for nine years, and that would mark his entire emotional education. He studies in English and his mind is saturated with that music that can be seen in his Portuguese. “His poems in English do not have the ease or brilliance of his works in Portuguese, but they cannot be understood without his Anglo-Saxon education,” says Zenith. In South Africa you will become aware for the first time of the inequalities of life and the privileges of gender, race and class. “He lived with the white Englishmen, with the Indians who went there to work and with the native Zulu, and he soon saw how hierarchical society was to protect white privilege. “His thinking, always quite contrarian and individualistic, would move from a certain racism, misogyny and tendency towards Salazar’s totalitarianism to more liberal postulates, but always skeptical of any doctrine or ideal set,” says the biographer.
Zenith, who speaks fluent Spanish after living for years in Colombia, now resides in Lisbon, where People Archive. He confirms that his famous box is not just a legend, but that it exists, and that Pessoa carried it on his many trips, but it soon became very small and the papers spread everywhere. “He acquired it in 1910, however Pessoa’s activity was hectic. I didn’t stop writing. The family sold it in the 1970s to the Portuguese government, which kept it in an archive. There is still the possibility of finding some unpublished books, because on the same page Pessoa could write a list of books that interested him, a project for a publishing house, and in the corner a quatrain, Persian poems that he liked to imitate.”
The decisive year in the poet’s life was 1914. In that year, Pessoa’s three main pseudonyms were born: Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis. “At the age of fifteen, he was publishing poems attributed to poets invented by him in an English newspaper, but in March 1914, Alberto Caeiro was born like a vision and gave him freedom in everything he had been searching for since reading Whitman. He realizes that the self is nothing more than a means to achieve the whole and seeks to write everything from all points of view. “I wanted to put myself in other people’s shoes and feel life differently,” says Zenith.
Then begins his frantic activity, which leads him even to agree with himself in the voice of other pseudonyms. Pessoa remains one of their voices, but he is not the most important. The problem is that living a lot with others doesn’t give you much time to live your own life. «My autobiography, which is one, because with Pessoa there can be hundreds of desires Focus on that life that lies behind the nicknames. When he returns to Lisbon, he never leaves Portugal again, but he does not live in confinement. Every day he goes for a walk and looks around, and every day he stops for two or three hours in bars where he meets his friends. “The myth of man separated from life is also not true,” he says.
What is certain is that he never had any sexual relations He has only one friend, Ophelia.At the end of his life, a relationship lasted only one year and, despite some kisses, was fairly platonic. “She was very smitten, but he didn’t fully reciprocate. For him, it was just another experience. “He didn’t do it with bad intentions,” Zenith says. “He wanted to know firsthand what love was, but he didn’t understand it.” As for sex, he lived it more in his mind than in his body, through more sensual pseudonyms, which spoke of his multiple relationships, such as Alvaro de Campos.
It can be said that Pessoa’s interest goes beyond the physical body. For this reason, he became interested in astrology from a very early age, and among his thousands of papers there are astrological charts of his own, but also of his pseudonyms. “He read Aleister Crowley, the famous English black magician, who practiced sexual magic through multiple physical contacts. “Pessoa was a whiter magician in that sense, and he was interested in sexual ritual but not as a practice in itself, but more in fantasy,” says Zenith, who emphasizes that in the 1910s, while he was practicing auto-writing in English, masturbation was a topic that came up again and again.
Portuguese writer He died on November 30, 1935At the age of 47 and without achieving the fame or literary respect he thought he deserved. It was not until the 1950s that critics revived and elevated his unprecedented literary project. “This filled him with frustration. He couldn’t understand why no one seemed excited about what he did, not even his friends. In a sense, he was ahead of his time. People thought this borrowed thing was just a joke. Pessoa consoled himself by thinking that no great genius had ever been recognized by his contemporaries and said so Shakespeare He was only considered a funny and witty writer at first. It was not until a generation later that he was considered the great tragic author we know today. “He left in writing the greatness he felt within himself that they would later acknowledge, and he was also right about it,” Zenith concludes.