PESSOA

A deep examination of an acclaimed literary figure.

Award-winning translator, literary critic, and Guggenheim fellow Zenith draws on the published work and vast unpublished archive of Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) to produce a capacious, perceptive biography of the enigmatic Portuguese writer. Among Zenith’s many sources is Pessoa’s semiautobiographical The Book of Disquiet and some 25,000 manuscript sheets of poetry, plays, prose, philosophy, and literary criticism, many attributed to the multitude of invented authors that Pessoa created throughout his life. His desire, he said, “to enlarge the world with fictitious personalities,” began in childhood and proliferated until he had imagined more than 100 distinct individuals. He imbued these personalities—he called them heteronyms—with complex biographies and often starkly different opinions and views of the world. Zenith prefaces the book with capsule biographies of dozens of the most significant heteronyms and offers an appendix featuring a detailed chronology of each one’s appearance. In 1904, poet Charles Robert Anon emerged as a predominant alter ego; soon he was joined by Horace James Faber, a writer of detective stories. One heteronym was French; another, British. One was a psychiatrist whose client was Pessoa; others included a monk undergoing a crisis of faith, an astrologer, and a promoter of neopaganism. Among the most well known was Ricardo Reis, a poet immortalized by novelist José Saramago in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Pessoa, born in Lisbon (Zenith is a longtime resident), lived with his family in Durban, South Africa, until he was 17, when he returned to Portugal for college. He never married and “almost certainly died a virgin.” A brief romantic relationship ended when Pessoa lost interest after about a year. Zenith delivers careful readings of Pessoa’s works and examines with sensitivity his varied intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic proclivities as well as his longing for posthumous fame, which he amply accrued.

Impressive research and evident enthusiasm inform a definitive biography.