He wrote the book of unrest: Who is Fernando Pessoa?

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa, a poet, writer, thinker, and literary critic, considered one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century and the pioneers of Portuguese modernism, was born on June 13, 1888, in Lisbon. June 13 is the feast of St. António. Saint António's day is Lisbon's day, and for Pessoa, the principal author of his native city, there could not have been a more fitting birthday. Pessoa is more a Lisbon writer than Kafka is a Prague writer or Joyce a Dublin writer.

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa (13 June 1888 – 30 November 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.

Both his mother and father nurtured Pessoa's cultural development. The family lives directly opposite the Lisbon opera house. As a young boy, Pessoa may have watched a few shows with his father, a passionate music critic, and civil servant. Pessoa's mother, from the Asor Islands, taught her son to read and write in Portuguese and French, and likely a little bit of English. He lost his father a month after he turned five, and his brother six months later.

His mother married a naval officer who was appointed Portuguese consul in Durban, South Africa, in February 1896. The fact that his mother went to Africa with her new husband and that Pessoa was perhaps left with his relatives, undoubtedly had an impact on the poet's writing of his first poem in June 1895.

In Durban, Pessoa attends a primary school run by Irish nuns. Three years later he enters Durban High School. Pessoa, though unfamiliar, immediately stands out as a bright student. In 1903, he won the Queen Victoria Award for Best Essay in English when he took the entrance exam for the University of the Cape of Good Hope. But Durban doesn't seem to have left a deep mark on him. Among the hundreds of literary texts he wrote throughout his adult life, he never explicitly mentions Africa. It is only in the year of his death that he remembers listening to his mother in a poem that portrays his mother playing the piano at home in Durban, gazing out the window at the vast African landscape illuminated by the hunting light.

While in Africa, Pessoa reads, alongside Shakespeare and Milton, the romantic poets Shelley, Byron, Keats, and Wordsworth, and in prose Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, and Edgar Allan Poe. He receives a full English education and thus has the opportunity to meet English Literature. However, a year-long trip to Portugal in 1901 with his mother, stepfather, and half-siblings made him a gift to Portuguese Literature. It was there that Pessoa wrote the earliest known poems in Portuguese. One of these poems was published in a Lisbon newspaper in 1902.

Both in Lisbon and on the island of Terceira, where they visit their aunt, Pessoa creates a series of elaborate, fabricated newspapers; these newspapers feature news, jokes, commentary, and poems written by a fictional team of journalists, some of whom he fabricates biographies for.

He was entitled to a government scholarship to study at Oxford or Cambridge because he scored high in the exam he took in December 1904, but he must have spent the last four years in Durban. He lost his scholarship due to his trip to Lisbon in 1901-1902.

In 1905, 17-year-old Pessoa returns to Lisbon. He studied literature at the university for about two years, then left the university. In the first year due to illness and in the second year due to a student boycott, he misses exams and cannot earn credits. During and after university, he spent long hours at the Portuguese National Library, studying Greek and German philosophy, world religions, psychology, and Darwinian thought. In the first years, he writes occasionally in Portuguese, a little more often in French, and mostly in English.

Pessoa uses his paternal inheritance to buy a printing press in 1909 and opens Empresa Ibis. It's a printing house, but it closes almost immediately. He would establish a publishing house called Olisipo in 1921 and the Athena magazine in 1924. During these years, Pessoa made a living by writing or translating letters in French and English to Portuguese companies doing business abroad. He also tries to do business as a representative of mining companies, mostly from England or other countries, but he can never make profitable deals.

After returning to Lisbon, Pessoa's ambition was to become a great poet in English, and he continued to write poems in that language until the week before his death. In 1913, his friend Mário de Sá-Carneiro, together with other leading writers and artists, publishes a literary magazine called Orpheu, which only two issues brought modernism to Portugal.

The fact that Fernando Pessoa's surname meaning person in Portuguese is synonymous with persona in Latin, meaning mask or play person, gives Pessoa's poetry consistent and interesting content. Pessoa creates multiple external identities, which he calls heteronyms. Pessoa argues that he is the least real person of all persons in this self-creating universe. These personalities created by Pessoa are considered alter egos, namely Pessoa's second person or another Pessoa.

Between March and June 1914, he created the three most recognizable main identities: Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis.

Pessoa created Alberto Caeiro by saying, "One day my master was born in me". He wrote to his friend Adolfo Casais Monteiro, “It was March 8, 1914, when I took a wad of paper in front of a tall cabinet with drawers and started writing standing up (as I do at every opportunity). I wrote about 30 poems in a row with enthusiasm I can't explain how. It was the glory day of my life; I don't think I will ever have a day like this again. First, I gave a title to my writings: Shepherd of the Herds. Immediately after that, someone I named Alberto Caeiro appeared in me,” he writes.

Alberto Caeiro is a shepherd living outside of Lisbon. Caeiro was named after Pessoa's early friend, Mário de Sá-Carneiro. Carneiro means sheep in Portuguese. He is a poet who does not enter cities and crowds and lives in peace in the bosom of nature with bare feet. Caeiro is everything that Pessoa cannot be, he is simple, wise, a pagan poet who is integrated with nature.

Various parts of his masterpiece The Book of Disquiet were published in 1929, a part of which was published in 1913. In this work, a new personality emerges. Bernardo Soares, assistant accounting officer living and working in Lisbon. Among the identities he created, he is the most similar to Pessoa. After his death, Pessoa would leave behind more than five hundred chapters of this work, many of which are scattered among his papers and notebooks. It will be necessary to wait until 1982 for the publication of the first edition of The Book of Unrest, compiled by experts.

With The Book of Disquiet, a lyrical and metaphysical diary, Pessoa creates Bernardo Soares, who has an important place in the literary world and reveals the fine fiction of his autobiography through this fictional character. The book can be called a simple, poetic novel, diary, or perhaps prose poetry, with a philosophical depth.

Pessoa actively participates in the social and political life of his time but expresses his attitude in writing. In 1935, when the dictator Salazar's regime passed a law banning secret societies such as Freemasonry, he published a passionate piece. In 1934, Pessoa did not attend the ceremony presided over by Salazar, although Mensagem (The Message), the only poetry book published during his lifetime, was awarded the Antero de Quental Prize. In his speech at the ceremony, Salazar informs the writers that their creative and intellectual products must conform not only to certain limits but also to certain basic principles stipulated by the moral and patriotic principles of the New State. Pessoa, who did not attend the ceremony, but read the speech from the newspaper, became enraged and wrote anti-fascist poems.

The poems of his last year reflect an increasingly felt loneliness. On November 28, 1935, Pessoa, who developed a fever and suffered from severe abdominal pain, was taken to the hospital. The next day, he writes his last words in English: "I don't know what tomorrow will bring." He died of cirrhosis on November 30, 1935, at the age of 47.

Pessoa was a writer few people knew at the time of his death. But then...