Few writers have multiplied themselves as radically, or as deliberately, as Fernando Pessoa. The Portuguese poet did not merely use pen names. He invented entire authors, complete with biographies, temperaments, philosophies, and distinctive literary styles. He called them heteronyms, and through them he built one of the strangest and most intricate bodies of work in modern literature.
Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888. When he was five, his father died of tuberculosis and his mother married a military officer stationed in Durban and they both moved to South Africa. Pessoa spent his childhood in Durban, where his stepfather served as Portuguese consul. Educated in English, he grew up reading Shakespeare and Milton as naturally as Camões. He returned to Lisbon as a young man and remained there for most of his life, working as a commercial translator and correspondence clerk. Outwardly, his existence was modest and uneventful. He never married, lived frugally, and published little in book form during his lifetime.
But inwardly, Pessoa was extraordinarily prolific. At his death in 1935, he left behind a trunk containing more than 25,000 pages of manuscripts — poems, essays, philosophical reflections — many signed not with his own name, but with the names of entirely invented authors.
He called them heteronyms.
Pessoa insisted that heteronyms were not pseudonyms. A pseudonym hides the real author. A heteronym is a different author altogether, a different personality.
Each heteronym had an elaborate biography, temperament, philosophies, literary style, and worldview. They disagreed with one another in essays and letters. They critiqued each other’s poems. They formed, in effect, a private literary republic inside one man.
Fernando Pessoa's chest, with more than 25,000 pages, and part of his personal library. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Pessoa created his earliest heteronym at the age of six. It was a fictitious knight named Chevalier de Pas, with whom he exchanged letters. Other childhood heteronyms included the poet Dr. Pancrácio and short story writer David Merrick, followed by Charles Robert Anon, a young Englishman who became Pessoa's alter ego. When Pessoa was a student at the University of Lisbon, Anon was replaced by Alexander Search. Pessoa wrote many English poems, specifically sonnets, and short stories under the Search heteronym. After the 5 October 1910 revolution and its subsequently patriotic atmosphere, Pessoa created another alter ego, Álvaro de Campos, supposedly a Portuguese naval and mechanical engineer, who was born in Tavira, hometown of Pessoa's ancestors, and graduated in Glasgow. Pessoa eventually invented more than seventy heteronyms. Among these figures, three emerged as central.
Alberto Caeiro was a major character in Pessoa's fictional universe. This heteronym was presented as a largely uneducated shepherd living in the countryside, who wrote in plain, direct language, celebrating the immediacy of nature. In Pessoa’s literary universe, Caeiro was the “master” whom the others admired and looked up to.
Álvaro de Campos was an engineer educated in Scotland, with a reputation for a powerful and angry style of writing. Campos’s work unfolds in three stylistic phases. The decadent phase, marked by “Opiário,” expresses weariness and longing for sensation. The futurist phase celebrates machines, electricity, and urban dynamism. The final pessimistic phase retreats inward, revealing emptiness and nostalgia.
Imagined astrology chart of Ricardo Reis, created by Fernando Pessoa. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Ricardo Reis is portrayed as a melancholic physician, monarchist, and classical poet influenced by Horace. There was also Bernardo Soares, whom Pessoa called a “semi-heteronym” because he resembled the author more closely
About these heteronyms, Pessoa wrote:
How do I write in the name of these three? Caeiro, through sheer and unexpected inspiration, without knowing or even suspecting that I'm going to write in his name. Ricardo Reis, after an abstract meditation, which suddenly takes concrete shape in an ode. Campos, when I feel a sudden impulse to write and don't know what. (My semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, who in many ways resembles Álvaro de Campos, always appears when I'm sleepy or drowsy, so that my qualities of inhibition and rational thought are suspended; his prose is an endless reverie. He's a semi-heteronym because his personality, although not my own, doesn't differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it. He's me without my rationalism and emotions. His prose is the same as mine, except for certain formal restraint that reason imposes on my own writing, and his Portuguese is exactly the same – whereas Caeiro writes bad Portuguese, Campos writes it reasonably well but with mistakes such as "me myself" instead of "I myself", etc.., and Reis writes better than I, but with a purism I find excessive...)
Now the question that obviously comes to mind is: why did Pessoa create heteronyms?
Partly, it was an artistic experiment in voice and perspective. But it was also philosophical. Pessoa felt identity was not singular but fragmented. By inventing others, he escaped the confines of a single consciousness.
“My God, my God, who am I attending to? How many am I? Who is me? What is this interval between me and me?,” Pessoa wrote in The Book of Disquiet, the fragmentary autobiographical prose attributed to his semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares. In this work Pessoa writes repeatedly about fragmentation of self, alienation from one’s own identity, and the sense that the self is not singular.
Another passage that vividly expresses the idea of many inner ‘selves’ performing within a single consciousness that appear in The Book of Disquiet:
“To create, I destroyed myself; I made myself external to such a degree within myself that within myself I do not exist except in an external fashion. I am the living setting in which several actors make entrances, putting on several different plays.”
The Book of Disquiet is full of such reflections.
Pessoa published little during his lifetime, but he is now regarded as one of the major figures of literary modernism. His heteronyms remain one of the most radical explorations of authorship in world literature. Fernando Pessoa did not merely write under other names. He became other writers. And in doing so, he transformed the idea of what a writer could be.
References:
# Fernando Pessoa. Wikipedia
# Thinking Is a Sickness of the Eyes. Poetry Foundation
# Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet. Libquotes
# Fernando Pessoa. Zenevenes
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