He did, however, leave 25,000 manuscript sheets of poems, essays, short stories, plays, literary criticism, philosophical and political treatises, horoscopes, and disaggregated bits of a work in prose called The Book of Disquiet-almost none of it “his.” The writer Mário de Carvalho, contemplating the vastness of Pessoa’s oeuvre, said, “Tanto Pessoa já enjoa” (So much Pessoa you’ll puke). When Pessoa died in 1935, he left behind only a smattering of writing bearing his signature. He gave them distinct literary styles and cast their birth charts. But Pessoa-a self-described medium and amateur astrologer-treated his alter egos as actually existing contemporaries, past lives he was living in real time. There’s nothing unusual about publishing under a name that’s not your own.
The architect of Portuguese modernism, Pessoa invented as many as 136 independent aliases, or, to use his word, heteronyms, to which he attributed much of his work. Fernando Pessoa painting by Anna Bak-KvapilĮven among the eccentric annals of poets who talked to God, angels, tutelary spirits, and disincorporated souls, Fernando Pessoa is a special case.