I began reading a recent acclaimed biography of Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith, Pessoa: An Experimental Life (2021).
Pessoa is a writer from the Burning Archive pantheon. His fame is largely posthumous. He wrote largely in fragments. His texts are miracles of survival, and later uncertain reconstruction. He wrote in an elaborate form of pseudonyms, which he called heteronyms. These heteronyms were more than concealing masks. They were whole, imagined personas in which Pessoa (which means person in Portugese) wrote in distinct style and with invented back stories. He published major poems in the name of three of these heteronyms, as well as his own name. It is said then that the four greatest Portugese poets of the twentieth century are all Fernando Pessoa.
He wrote large numbers of unpublished, fragmentary texts that he stored ina trunk in his home in Lisbon. The trunk was discovered well after his death. This home has been converted to a literary museum, Casa de Pessoa, where the trunk, texts and heterotopy of international poetry are commemorated today. In the trunk, there was one envelope of disordered texts, which has been published in various scholary reorderings as The Book of Disquiet. It joins the other enigmatic texts, such as Beowulf or the Lay of Igor’s Campaign, celebrated on The Burning Archive for their miraculous outwitting of the fires of oblivion.
Pessoa left a legacy of a multi-persona person. He personified fragments of the cultural heritage of the multipolar world. His biography spanned Portugal, Britain and South Africa. Let me share two fragmentary statements from this fragment of the Burning Archive that stand as guiding flags for my writing.
The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves.
(Bernardo Soares, one of the major heteronyms of Pessoa)
Be plural like the universe!
Pessoa
You can read more glimpses of the multipolar world every week by subscribing to my free weekly newsletter at jeffrich.substack.com. It comes out each Saturday morning (Australian time). This week I have fragments on Colonel Douglas MacGregor, the rapprochement between Europe and China, Bureaucracy, Madness, and America’s bloody hands in the Phillipines.
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Image Credit: Pessoa’s Trunk from Casa Fernando Pessoa
