SOURCE: "Quadrophenia," in The New Republic, Vol. 197, No. 3, 790, September 7, 1987, pp. 33-36.

Renowned American poet John Hollander reviews two editions of English translations of Pessoa's work: The Keeper of the Sheep and Poems of Fernando Pessoa, both translated and edited by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown. Hollander praises the translations and comments on Pessoa's significant position within the whole of modernism.

If Fernando Pessoa had never existed, Jorge Luis Borges might have had to invent him. This remarkable modern poet started writing in English, in which he was educated; and then, in his native Portuguese, he produced four major poetic oeuvres, one under his own name and three completely different ones by fictional poets—no mere pseudonyms—called Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. This was not a matter of tragic, literal psychiatric disorder; it was a figurative revision of a multiple poetic personality that, with...