CULTURE Happy Birthday Álvaro de Campos

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 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 Pessoa passed away on November 30, 1935, in Lisbon, leaving behind thousands of unpublished papers, one of the most brilliant works in the history of literature.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

diary composed of dreams and reflections. And Pessoa – the orthonym? He was not only the demiurge who invented this imaginary coterie; he also played a relevant role. He was also the poet who wrote Message, the only book in Portuguese published in life, a set of poems dedicated to Portugal’s heroes and myths in a universalist projection that sees a future of tremendous culture for Portugal and for humanity. We are the future: Readers of the texts that he kept in a legendary case – Pessoa’s assets – full of papers, many of which have yet to be published. After all, who was Fernando Pessoa? It’s difficult to say. Every heteronym and each instant for him was an “eternal novelty,” full of poetry and beauty. A beauty that also has the light and colors of Lisbon, his beloved city, sung masterfully by him.

Fragmentary, contradictory, irresistable in his intricate fascination, Pessoa is the author to discover, with multiple facets. From poetry to philosophy to literary criticism to psychology... Pessoa’s genius unsettles us for its multiplicity and leaves us with a major, fundamental question which is always open and challenging: who are we?

Álvaro de Campos (1890 - 1935) is one of Fernando Pessoa’s best known heteronyms. Campos emerges when Fernando Pessoa feels an impulse to write. Fernando himself considers that Álvaro de Campos is in the “opposite extreme, entirely opposite, to Ricardo Reis”, despite being, like the latter, a disciple of Caeiro. Álvaro de Campos is the “undisciplined son of sensation and for him sensation is everything. Sensationism makes sensation the reality of life and the basis of art. The poet’s self tries to integrate and unify everything that has or had existence or possibility of existing. Álvaro de Campos was born in Tavira on the 15th October 1890 at 1.30 in the afternoon. He had a common high school education, described as vulgar by Fernando Pessoa himself. Later he went to Scotland to study engineering, first mechanical engineering, and then naval engineering. Fernando Pessoa made a biography for each of his heteronyms and stated that Álvaro de Campos was an engineer of English education and Portuguese origin, but always had a feeling of being a foreigner whereevr he was in the world. Pessoa also said in relation to this heteronym that: “I pretended to study engineering. I lived in Scotland. I have visited Ireland. My heart is a granny who walks begging alms at the gates of joy. Among all the heteronyms, Álvaro de Campos was the only one to manifest different poetic phases throughout his work. He begins his career as a decadentist (influenced by Symbolism), but soon joins Futurism: it is the so-called ‘Sensationist phase’, in which he produces, with a style similar to that of Walt Whitman (to whom he dedicated a poem, the Salute to Walt Whitman), versilibrist, boastful, and with a euphoric language where onomatopoeia abound, a series of poems of exaltation of the modern World, of technical and scientific progress, of the evolution and industrialisation of Humanity: he is greatly influenced by Marinetti, one of the top names of Futurism in this period. After a series of disillusions with existence, he takes on a nihilistic vein or intimism: this is known as the ‘Abelic phase’, and is very similar, especially in the themes addressed, to the work of the orthonymous Pessoa: disillusionment with the world in which he lives, sadness, tiredness (what is in me is above all tiredness, so begins one of his most famous poems) leads him to reflect, in a rather nostalgic way, on his childhood, spent in the old house: archetypal childhood, full of happiness, is the counterpoint to his present. A phase characterised by tiredness and sleepiness that is quite evident in the pessimistic poem.

To coincide with the celebrations, various restaurants and cafe’s are taking part in ‘scattered poetry’ with poems written on boards and ‘sweet pessoa’ where chefs will produce a dessert with a stenciled image of Álvaro de Campos. Below are two examples one from Restaurant ‘A Carpintaria’ in Luz de Tavira, the other from Cafe ‘A da Marta’ in Tavira.