Pessoa

Richard Zenith's biography of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa belongs to the same tradition as Richard Ellmann's life of James Joyce. Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888 and died there in 1935, leaving more than 25,000 manuscript sheets stored in a wooden chest. Published some eighty-five years after his death, the book places his life against the nationalist movements that shaped early twentieth-century Europe.

Pessoa is best known for writing through dozens of distinct poetic personas, which he called heteronyms. The best known include Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Alvaro de Campos. Translator Richard Zenith follows the backstories of nearly all of these invented figures and shows how each was a projection, offshoot, or transformation of Pessoa himself.

Jose Saramago's novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis gave one of these heteronyms a fictional life. Zenith approaches the whole group from the biographical side, tracing how Pessoa's imagination produced them.