“Ben şiirsel yetileri olan bir filozof değil felsefeyle hayat bulan bir şairdim,” der Pessoa. İnsan Bir Uçurumdur, Pessoa’nın –çoğu henüz hiç bilinmeyen– İngilizce kaleme aldığı felsefi yazılarını en kapsamlı ve aslına sadık kalınarak bir araya getirmekle kalmıyor, felsefi tasarılarının ortaya koyduğu düşünce çizgisini de takip ediyor. İnsan Bir Uçurumdur’da, Pessoa en çok Aquinolu Tommaso, Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Platon, Leibniz, Herakleitos, Pascal üzerinden özgür irade, yanılgı, duyum ve özgürlük meselelerini sorguluyor. Pessoa Arşivi’ndeki 1478 sayfalık felsefe yazılarından hareketle hazırlanan İnsan Bir Uçurumdur’da da, birçok başka eserinde olduğu gibi, Pessoa’nın iki farklı dışkimliğine rastlayacağız.
Author
Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was a poet and writer. It is sometimes said that the four greatest Portuguese poets of modern times are Fernando Pessoa. The statement is possible since Pessoa, whose name means ‘person’ in Portuguese, had three alter egos who wrote in styles completely different from his own. In fact Pessoa wrote under dozens of names, but Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos were – their creator claimed – full-fledged individuals who wrote things that he himself would never or could never write. He dubbed them ‘heteronyms’ rather than pseudonyms, since they were not false names but “other names”, belonging to distinct literary personalities. Not only were their styles different; they thought differently, they had different religious and political views, different aesthetic sensibilities, different social temperaments. And each produced a large body of poetry. Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis also signed dozens of pages of prose. The critic Harold Bloom referred to him in the book The Western Canon as the most representative poet of the twentieth century, along with Pablo Neruda.
