by Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon on June 13, 1888, and he died there in November 1935. When Pessoa was five years old, his father died, and his mother remarried two years later. Pessoa’s stepfather was the Portuguese consul in Durban, South Africa, and after the boy and his mother moved there in 1896, he attended local schools and became fluent in English. Pessoa returned to the Portuguese capital in 1905, where he enrolled in the University of Lisbon, but two years later abandoned his studies in favor of a career as a commercial correspondent. He never returned to school and rarely ever left the area of greater Lisbon. Best known for writing poetry under the guise of four distinct literary personalities (heteronyms), Pessoa published only one complete book of poems during his lifetime— Mensagem, or Message. While his work was known only to a small group of friends...