Fernando Pessoa Poems

Fernando Pessoa
Fernando António Nogueira de Seabra Pessoa (b. June 13, 1888 in Lisbon, Portugal — d. November 30, 1935 in the same city) was a poet and writer. 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. Pessoa's statue in front of famous Lisbon café "A Brasileira".When Pessoa was five years old, his father died of tuberculosis. A year later, his brother also died and his widowed mother was remarried to the Portuguese consul in Durban, South Africa; the family moved to the city in 1896. The young Pessoa received his early education in Durban and Cape Town, becoming fluent in the English language and developing an appreciation for English poets such as William Shakespeare and John Milton. He then went back to Lisbon, at the age of seventeen, attending a "Curso Superior de Letras" in a Portuguese university. A student strike soon put an end to his studies, however, and Pessoa chose to study privately at home for a year. His term of study ended and Pessoa found a job working as an assistant for a businessman, where he was charged with writing correspondence and translating documents. In 1914, he and other artists and poets such as Almada Negreiros and Mário de Sá Carneiro, created the literary magazine Orpheu that would introduce modern literature in Portugal. His interest in the mystical led Pessoa to correspond with the occultist Aleister Crowley, later helping him to plan an elaborate fake suicide when the latter visited Portugal in 1930. He translated Crowley's poem Hymn To Pan into Portugese. Pessoa died of cirrhosis in 1935, almost unknown to the public and with only one book published: "Mensagem" (Message). In 1985, his remains were moved to the Jerónimos Monastery, in Lisbon, the same place where there are the tombs of Vasco da Gama, Luís de Camões, and Alexandre Herculano. Pessoa's image was on the 100-escudo banknote.


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Poems

Poems Collection - poems, 2021 edition