Did I say one-man band? Actually, he was a one-man symphony orchestra. Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was not only a poet, writer, translator, and philosopher. He was eighty poets, writers, translators, and philosophers. Born (and died) in Lisbon, Portugal, Pessoa wrote under approximately eighty heteronyms.
These heteronyms were like pseudonyms, except that each wrote in a different style. In a way, Pessoa constituted an entire literary movement. The work for which he is best known, The Book of Disquiet, is a collection of fragments in no particular order—and probably one of the greatest works of the Twentieth Century.
There are several editions of The Book of Disquiet. I have read the Penguin edition translated by Richard Zenith.
Today, while eating lunch at the Mitsuwa Marketplace in Mar Vista, I was reading an old New York Review of Books and came across this passage in a new translation by Margaret Jull Costa:
To say things! To know how to say things! To know how to exist through the written voice and the intellectual image! That’s what life is about: the rest is just men and women, imagined loves and fictitious vanities, excuses born of poor digestion and forgetting, people squirming beneath the great abstract boulder of a meaningless blue sky, the way insects do when you lift a stone.
I first learned about Pessoa when IO read José Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984). It turns out that Ricardo Reis was a poet and prose writer, author of Odes and texts on the work of Alberto Caeiro. Interestingly, Reis and Caeiro were merely two heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa.
The man constituted an entire literary movement in his person!
Obviously, I had to get to know more about Pessoa. I plan to read more of his work if I had world enough and time.
Tarnmoor 
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