A CENTENARY PESSOA

FERNANDO PESSOA was born in Lisbon in 1888. After his father’s death his mother remarried, and in 1896 she and her children moved to Durban, South Africa. In 1905 Pessoa returned to Portugal. He enrolled at the University of Lisbon, but left after a few months. For the rest of his life he supported himself by working as a freelance translator. His first poems were written in English between 1905 and 1908. In 1912 he began to write critical and polemical articles, and in 1915 he founded a Modernist journal, Orpheu. It ran for only two issues, but he went on to set up a publishing house in 1921, and to found further journals. Around 1914, Pessoa began to create four distinct ‘heteronyms’ or poetic identities, going on to develop further identities throughout his oeuvre. He died in 1935.

EUGÉNIO LISBOA was born in Mozambique in 1930 and educated there and in Portugal. An eminent poet, essayist and literary critic, his publications include standard works on José Régio and Jorge de Sena, and critical studies of Modernism in Portugal.

L.C. TAYLOR was the Director of the Gulbenkian Foundation and a founder of the Carcanet Press/Gulbenkian Foundation series Aspects of Portugal, for which he edited Rose Macaulay’s They Went to Po rtugal, To o (1990).