Os textos de prosa aqui reunidos, ainda que não sejam representativos da totalidade existente, pretendem ser, mesmo assim, «essenciais» num certo sentido, na medida em que tocam muito de perto o seu autor—ou porque gostou suficientemente deles para os acabar e publicar (Prosa Publicada em Vida—um volume que abrange, aliás, numerosas facetas da sua obra em prosa), ou porque o revelam na sua intimidade (Prosas Íntimas e de autoconhecimento) e na sua relação com os outros (Cartas). A presente Obra, com todos os seus limites, procura demonstrar a essencialidade de Fernando Pessoa não só para a literatura do século XX, mas também para a nossa cultura, actual e futura.
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.
