If you are Pessoa curious, now is the time to read him. Let me explain why.
The name Pessoa means person. It is related to ‘persona’ which has an etymological connection to ‘mask.’ One of the things that Pessoa’s work does for us is to put pressure on our understanding and to make us think about the nature of the self and identity. His work seems to show that the self is not necessarily a unity, but can be multiple.
Pessoa is not just one, but several unique voices in European modernist literature. Contemporaneous with Joyce and Proust, Pessoa’s unique literary universe is simultaneously intriguing and exciting, illuminating, humorous and unsettling. In our upcoming introductory study we will meet Álvaro de Campos, futurist Whitmanesque poet, Ricardo Reis the stoical neo-pagan classicist, Pessoa the experimental modernist, and Alberto Caeiro, their master, the almost anti-poet (for whom metaphor itself is an anathema), along with Bernardo Soares, the Lisbon book keeper and author of The Book of Disquiet. All these identities resided within one individual.
So, what can we get from reading Pessoa in 2025?
Pessoa’s work is above all a deep exploration of identity – indeed, it is in many ways a shattering of it, of the idea of the single, stable self. Pessoa fascinates because of the method of self replication, represented by his heteronymous writing.
With Pessoa there is a lot to take in. In a group study we can grapple together with the meanings and implications of this unusual group of authors: is this an elaborate literary hoax? What does it mean that one of the heteronyms denied that Pessoa exists? What does it mean that another of the heteronyms, Bernardo Soares, gave to Pessoa, one evening in a restaurant where the two regularly dined, a bundle of papers, journals and aphorisms, philosophical musings and thoughts and dreams, which was to become The Book of Disquiet?
Pessoa lived through a time of incredible political turmoil to which he both did and did not remain immune. To read Pessoa’s many personas – his heteronyms – is to come to terms with a complex coexistence of different philosophies, world views and aesthetic sensibilities. Pessoa was an experimenter and an innovator, perhaps a revolutionary. As such he produced some of the most astonishing and unique writing of his age that continues to speak to our lives today.
Our six week Introduction to Fernando Pessoa begins on Tuesday 13 May (12.00 noon – 2.00 pm BST). If you are interested but uncertain about joining the study please email us and we will arrange for you to try the first session without charge!
