Fernando Pessoa’s Disappearing Act


"If ever there was a writer in flight from his name, it was Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa is the Portuguese word for 'person,' and there is nothing he less wanted to be. Again and again, in both poetry and prose, Pessoa denied that he existed as any kind of distinctive individual. 'I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist,' he writes in one poem. 'I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made of me. That’s me. Period.' In his magnum opus, 'The Book of Disquiet'—a collage of aphorisms and reflections couched in the form of a fictional diary, which he worked on for years but never finished, much less published—Pessoa returns to the same theme: 'Through these deliberately unconnected impressions I am the indifferent narrator of my autobiography without events, of my history without a life. These are my Confessions and if I say nothing in them it’s because I have nothing to say.' ..."
New Yorker

2008 March: Fernando Pessoa, 2012 October: The Book of Disquiet, 2012 November: Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems, 2014 May: Aspects by Fernando Pessoa, 2016 March: Passoa's Trunk - 13+ ways of looking at a poem.

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