Happy Birthday Álvaro de Campos Celebrating the birthday of Álvaro de Campos, born in Tavira on the 15th October 1890; a character created by Portugal’s most famous poet, Fernando Pessoa. To mark this occasion 'Festa dos anos Álvaro de Campos 2021' have created numerous events around Tavira this month.
WHO WAS FERNANDO PESSOA In order to discover who Fernando Pessoa was, perhaps it would be opportune to begin by his last name, Pessoa, from the latin word persona: mask. Pessoa was, in fact, a poet of many faces and many names, spending his life inventing fictitious authors called heteronyms. Also, thanks to this peculiarity, he is considered to be one of the most brilliant contemporary poets today and Portugal’s most famous and important poet. HIS LIFE AND THE MAN Pessoa was born in Lisbon on June 13, 1888, in the elegant zone of Chiado. For family reasons, between his youth and adolescence, he lived in the British Empire, namely South Africa. This period (1896-1905) spent in the cosmopolitan city of Durban left a strong impression on his life. In 1915, Pessoa founded the magazine Orpheu, which introduced Modernism to Portugal. He changed residences frequently during the
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1910s and also came to live in the Carmo zone, near Lisboa Pessoa Hotel. In 1920, he settled into an apartment in Campo de Ourique, in a building that today houses Casa Fernando Pessoa, an indispensable cultural center for anyone who wants to know who this man named Fernando Pessoa was. The poet lived his anonymously, with little money, working as a translator of commercial documents. His absolute love was literature. He felt like a genius and constantly dedicated himself to his “mission.” He left little room for his own feelings, but at least one woman – Ophelia Queiroz – will remain in history as the girlfriend to whom the genius sent letters full of affection. Pessoa passed away on November 30, 1935, in Lisbon, leaving behind thousands of unpublished papers, one of the most brilliant works in the history of literature. In order to know who Fernando Pessoa was, one needs to read his texts, since, as Octavio Paz affirmed, a poet’s biography is their work.
THE WORK, THE HETERONYMS Pessoa left his mark as an extremely original writer for inventing fictitious authors – heteronyms – who “wrote” parts of his work. Each one “had” a personality, a biography, a physionomy, a character, a defined literary style, unlike the others and even Pessoa, the “orthonym,” that is, himself. The main “imaginary friends” of Pessoa were the poets Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos: Caeiro, the pastoral and (anti)philosophical poet, was the “master” of heteronyms; Reis was the neoclassical singer of a new paganism; and Campos was the exuberant modernist who “felt everything in every way.” Bernardo Soares deserves special attention, author of The Book of Disquiet, an intimate
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