Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa, born Fernando António Nogueira Pessôa (/pɛˈsoʊə/;[1] Portuguese:*[fɨɾˈnɐ̃dw ɐ̃ˈtɔɲju nuˈɣejɾɐ pɨˈsow.wɐ]; June 13, 1888 – November 30, 1935), was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language. He also wrote in and translated from English and French.

Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he dreamed up approximately seventy-five others. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. These imaginary figures sometimes held unpopular or extreme views.

Early years in Durban
Nothing had ever obliged him to do anything. He had spent his childhood alone. He never joined any group. He never pursued a course of study. He never belonged to a crowd. The circumstances of his life were marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon – perhaps, in fact, it’s true for all lives – of being tailored to the image and likeness of his instincts, which tended towards inertia and withdrawal.

Fernando Pessoa, from the preface of
The Book of Disquiet, tr. Richard Zenith.

Pessoa's birthplace: a large flat at São Carlos Square, just in front of Lisbon's opera.
On July 13, 1893, when Pessoa was five, his father, Joaquim de Seabra Pessoa, died of tuberculosis and next year, on January 2, his younger brother Jorge, aged one, also died.

Following the second marriage of his mother, Maria Magdalena Pinheiro Nogueira, with João Miguel dos Santos Rosa, on December 31, 1895, little Fernando sailed with his mother for South Africa in the beginning of 1896, to join his stepfather, a military officer appointed Portuguese consul in Durban, capital of the former British Colony of Natal.
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