From Lisbon to the World: Fernando Pessoa’’s Enduring Literary Presence

Fernando Pessoa is one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. Until some years ago known in the English-speaking world only among a minority of connaisseurs, his work is finally becoming available in English translations, and more are in the process of reaching the literary public. Born in Lisbon in 1888, Pessoa was only forty-seven when he died, but he left behind a staggering number of unpublished manuscripts that are still being screened and brought to light. George Steiner heralded the day Pessoa discovered his major Portuguese heteronyms, for no country had ever seen the birth of four great poets in a single day. That was a reference to the personae Pessoa created, the famous heteronyms Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis, besides the man himself -- all poets in their own right with their biographies and even critical exchanges among themselves. Today well over a hundred Pessoa heteronyms are known, including, notably, the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, author of The Book of Disquiet, presently available in two English translations. Lately, another Pessoa is emerging -- an English writer, as well as a thinker. Indeed, having been educated in Durban, South Africa, where his stepfather was the consul of Portugal, the poet had a strong English education that shaped his life and thought. George Monteiro has been in the forefront of the uncovering of this side of Pessoa. Author, among many other works, of The Presence of Pessoa: English, American, and Southern African Literary Responses, and Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature, in this volume Monteiro continues to explore and interpret the world of Pessoa to English-speaking readers.

George Monteiro, Professor Emeritus of English and of Portuguese Studies, Brown University, has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American, English, and Portuguese literatures. Besides contributing to the scholarship on Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Bob Dylan, he has published books on Fernando Pessoa, José Rodrigues Miguéis, Luiz Vaz de Camões, Pedro da Silveira, Jorge de Sena, and Miguel Torga.