The Book of Disquiet

Fernando Pessoa was a Portuguese author, philosopher, essayist, poet, and translator. Although he published little of his work during his lifetime, he has since been deemed a formative voice in existentialist and modernist literature. He is also known for helping to lay the groundwork for post-modern thought. His fictions exploring the nature of fiction prefigure the metafictional practices of postmodern writers, and his multiple heteronyms, occupying a liminal space between author and character, anticipate postmodernism’s interest in the figure of the author as a fictional character.  

Born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1888, Pessoa spent much of his early life in Durban, South Africa. He returned to Lisbon in 1905 to seek a higher education. He “studied briefly at the University of Lisbon, and began to publish criticism, prose, and poetry soon thereafter while working as a commercial translator” (“Fernando Pessoa 1888-1935.” The Poetry Foundation). He wrote in English, Portuguese, and French, and he self-published “several chapbooks of his English poems in 1918 and 1922” (ii). These titles include Antinous, Sonnets, English Poems, and in Portuguese, Mensagem. Beyond these collections, Pessoa published standalone poems in literary journals including Orpheu and Portugal Futurista. Most of his poems were published under Pessoa’s heteronyms; these alter egos (or literary personas) included Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis, to each of whom Pessoa gave a rich biography and distinct writing style and point of view. Pessoa coined the term heteronym to emphasize that these fictional authors had their own independent lives, unlike a pseudonym, which is commonly understood as simply an alternate name for the actual author. Alberto Caeiro was “a rural, uneducated poet of great ideas who wrote in free verse; Ricardo Reis, a physician who composed formal odes influenced by Horace; and Álvaro de Campos an adventurous London-based naval engineer influenced by American poet Walt Whitman and the Italian Futurists” (ii).

Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet was never published during his lifetime. It is an assemblage of fragments Pessoa left behind at the time of his death. These writings were accompanied by vague instructions for organization, translation, and publication written by Pessoa himself. He did not gain literary recognition for the text until decades after his death from cirrhosis of the liver in 1935. He has since been deemed by the critic Harold Bloom as one of the most influential writers in Western literature.