File:Pessoa's book sculpure (3620057647).jpg

Chiado, Lisbon,Portugal

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa (Portuguese pronunciation: [fɨɾˈnɐ̃du pɨˈsoɐ]; b. June 13, 1888 in Lisbon, Portugal — d. November 30, 1935 in the same city) was a Portuguese poet and writer. He was also a literary critic and translator. The critic Harold Bloom referred to him in the book The Western Canon as the most representative poet of the twentieth century, along with Pablo Neruda. He was bilingual in Portuguese and English, and fluent in French.

In 1893, when Pessoa was five, his father died of tuberculosis. The following year his younger brother, aged only one, died too and his mother married again in 1895. In the beginning of 1896, he moved with his mother to Durban, capital of the former British Colony of Natal, where his stepfather was appointed Portuguese consul. The young Pessoa received his early education at Durban High School, becoming fluent in English and developing an appreciation for English literature. In the "Intermediate Examination in Arts", for admission to the Cape Town University, he was awarded the Queen Victoria Memorial Prize, recently created, for the best paper in English.

At the age of sixteen, The Natal Mercury (July 9, 1904 edition) published his poem "Hillier did first usurp the realms of rhyme...", under the name of Charles Robert Anon, along with a small introductory text: "I read with great amusement...". In December, The Durban High School Magazine published his essay «Macaulay»[1]. From February to June, 1905, in the section "The Man in the Moon", The Natal Mercury also published at least four sonnets by Fernando Pessoa: "Joseph Chamberlain", "To England I", "To England II" and "Liberty" [2]. Joking with the name Anon, short for anonymous author, the young Pessoa revealed a fine sense of humour that he would keep during his lifetime.

In 1905, at the age of seventeen, he sailed for Lisbon via the Suez Canal on board the "Herzog", leaving Durban for good. This journey inspired the poems "Opiario" (dedicated to Mario de Sa-Carneiro) publishd in March, 1915, in Orpheu nr.1 [3] and "Ode Maritima" (dedicated to the futurist painter Santa Rita Pintor) publishd in June, 1915, in Orpheu nr.2 [4] by his heteronym Alvaro de Campos.

While his family remained in South Africa, Pessoa returned to Lisbon to study literature. A student strike soon put an end to his studies and Pessoa chose to study privately at home for a year. His grandmother died in 1907 and left him a small inheritance that he spent on setting up his own publishing house, the Empreza Ibis. The venture was not a success and closed down in 1910. Ibis, the sacred bird in the Ancient Egypt would remain an important symbolic reference for him. Meanwhile, Pessoa found a job working as an assistant to a businessman, writing correspondence and translating documents. In 1915, he and other artists and poets, such as Almada Negreiros and Mário de Sá-Carneiro, created the literary magazine Orpheu [5], which introduced modernist literature in Portugal. In his early years, Pessoa was influenced by English Classics such as Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser, and Romantics like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. Later on he was influenced by French symbolists Charles Baudelaire and Stephane Mallarme, mainly by Portuguese poets such as Antero de Quental, Camilo Pessanha, Cesário Verde, Antonio Nobre and modernists such as Yeats, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, among many other writers. In 1918 Pessoa published in Lisbon two slim volumes of English verse: Antinous [6] and 35 Sonnets [7]. Along with two associates, he founded a publishing house, Olisipo, which published in 1921 a further two English poetry volumes: English Poems I-II and English Poems III by Fernando Pessoa. He wrote a guidebook to Lisbon in English, but it remained unpublished until 1992: Lisbon - What the Tourist Should See (Shearsman Books, 2008). Pessoa translated a number of English books into Portuguese, and translated the poems "The Raven" and "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe which, along with Walt Whitman, strongly influenced him. After his return to Lisbon in 1905, Pessoa barely left his beloved city, which inspired the poems "Lisbon Revisited" (1923 and 1926). If Franz Kafka is the writer of Prague, Fernando Pessoa is certainly the writer of Lisbon. In The Book of Disquiet, his heteronym Bernardo Soares describes some typical places of Lisbon's downtown and its "atmosphere". Bernardo Soares was supposedly an accountant, working at Vasques's office, the boss, in Douradores Street, an world Pessoa knew very well, during his almost 30 year career, as free lance correspondence translator in a number of firms. Pessoa was a frequent client at Martinho da Arcada a centennial coffee house downtown, almost an "office" for his private business and literary issues. He also frequented other coffee shops, bars and restaurants, a number of which no longer exist. The statue of Fernando Pessoa (above) can be seen outside A Brasileira, one of the places where he would meet friends, writers and artists during the period of Orpheu. In the aristocratic district of Chiado, this coffee shop is quite close to Pessoa's birthplace: 4, Largo de Sao Carlos (in front of the Opera House), one of the most elegant quarters of Lisbon [8]. His interest in mysticism led Pessoa to correspond with the occultist Aleister Crowley. He later helped Crowley plan an elaborate fake suicide when he visited Portugal in 1930 [9]. He translated Crowley's poem "Hymn To Pan" into Portuguese.