“The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa” Ed./Trans. by Richard Zenith (post 1): The only writer many professors admit may have had multiple personality

from Introduction

Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1888. His father died when he was five.

His mother remarried Portugal’s consul to Durban, South Africa, where Pessoa spoke English. His formative literary influences included Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Carlyle. At age seventeen, he returned to Lisbon.

When he died in 1935, the Lisbon newspapers paid tribute to the “great Portuguese poet” Fernando Pessoa. However, he had published his poetry under three different names besides his own, which he said were not mere pseudonyms, but false personalities, with biographies, points of view, and literary styles that differed from Pessoa’s. He called them “heteronyms,” of which he had more than forty.

When Pessoa, the greatest Portuguese poet of the last four centuries, said, “I prefer prose to poetry as an art form for two reasons, the first of which is purely personal: I have no choice, because I’m incapable of writing in verse,” the speaker was his heteronym Bernardo Soares, who wrote only prose (1, xi-xiv).

from Pessoa’s Preface

“The Complete Work is essentially dramatic, though it takes different forms—prose passages in this first volume, poems and philosophies in other volumes…All I know is that the author of these lines (I’m not sure if also of these books) has never had just one personality…

“Each of the more enduring personalities, lived by the author within himself, was given an expressive nature and made the author of one or more books whose ideas, emotions, and literary art have no relationship to the real author (or perhaps only apparent author, since we don’t know what reality is) except insofar as he served, when he wrote them, as the medium of the characters he created.

“Neither this work nor those to follow have anything to do with the man who writes them. He doesn’t agree or disagree with what’s in them. He writes as if he were being dictated to…

“That this quality in the writer is a manifestation of hysteria, or of the so-called split personality, is neither denied nor affirmed by the author of these books. As the helpless slave of his multiplied self, it would be useless for him to agree with one or the other theory about the written results of that multiplication…

"In the vision that I call inner merely because I call the ‘real world’ outer, I clearly and distinctly see the familiar, well-defined facial features, personality traits, life stories, ancestries, and in some cases even the death, of these various characters. Some of them have met each other; others have not…" (1, p. 1-4).

Also search the related post on “Pessoa Syndrome” by Mitova.

1. Richard Zenith (Ed. and Trans.). The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa. New York, Grove Press, 2001.