More about multiple personalities
Pessoa, Pessoa.....
I cannot think of other thing but Fernando Pessoa right now. Pessoa means: Person in Portuguese, and the Portuguese poet Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa created about 70 different persons out of him. His creations wrote in different publications, and even criticized and admired each other. He invented their lives, so even literary critics would comment on them. They even had each other mourn the death of some of his heteronyms!
The most amazing thing is that some of these heteronyms were not discovered until 50 years after Pessoa passed away in 1935!
Ricardo Reis, Alvaro dos Campos, and Bernardo Soares (all three heteronyms of Pessoa) admired Alberto Caeiro (another heteronym). While Caeiro published criticism to Pessoa´s writings in some magazines of the time. Pessoa is so interesting, that even Nobel Prize José Saramago (not, he is not an heteronym of Pessoa, he is his own person, and still alive) wrote a novel about the death of Ricardo Reis (which he argues happened one year later than Pessoa himself!).
What a Pessoa!
Jonathan Griffin, who extensively translated Pessoa to English, said, with Fernando Pessoa sayings "noted this way", that:
Caeiro is what Pessoa longed "all the simplicity, all the grandeur the ancients had", all their "possession of things" and it is was Pessoa longed to be and could not. Reis is the nearest that Pessoa could come to being Caeiro. A disciple of Caeiro, Reis works paganism into an ethical doctrine, part epicurean, part stoic, yet conscious, and kept clear of, a human environment conditioned by Christianity Through Campos, Pessoa saved himself from settling down into Reis. He starts as an extrovert, ends as an introvert; starts determined "to feel all every way there is", and ends up obsessed, asking if he is real. As poet in his own name, Fernando Pessoa matured fully almost as soon as his heteronym poets appeared. Caeiro is ideal; Reis the good second best; Campos doing Pessoa's travelling for him: but no escape from coming home to the real exploring.
The following is extracted from an article on Technology and Culture for the Trenches, about the personalities of the heteronyms that Pessoa created.
Alberto Caeiro: Both Alvaro dos Campos and Ricardo Reis considered Caeiro a master writer. They both confessed that Caeiro's thoughts influenced their work. Alberto was a shepperd who lived outside Lisbon, agnostic who avoided the city and crowds, who lived barefoot in contact with nature and peace. Caeiro was what Pessoa longed to be and could not, he was "the Master."
Ricardo Reis was a poet of Sad Epicureanism, master of highly wrought, metaphysical and neoclassical odes. He was born in Porto and educated by Jesuits. He was a doctor by profession and monarchist by conviction. Reis sought exile in Brazil after the proclamation of the first Portuguese Republic in 1919. Antonio Tabucchi, one of the writer's foremost critics and translators, believes Reis to have died peacefully in exile at the end of 1935. Novelist Jose Saramago, however, speculated that Reis died in Lisbon one year later under mysterious circumstances, unwittingly entangled in the revolts which spilled over from the Spanish Civil war in Lisbon. Reis was the nearest that Pessoa could come to being Caeiro.
Alvaro dos Campos was born in the city of Taviras and was a naval engineer in Glasgow who travelled widely before settling in Lisbon and founding the avant-garde magazine Orfeu. His writings proclaimed the advent of a perfect and mathematical humanity. Impressed by the force and ambition of Campos' works, Mario de Sa Carneiro, ventured that Campos' poetry would outlast his own. Campos did Pessoa's travelling for him.
Bernardo Soares was a book-keeper who lived a humble life in Lisbon which book was only discovered in 1982. Soares was perhaps a close image of the darkest side of Pessoa.
You can follow this link and explore more about this fascinating poet, and more on his multiple personalities.
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/9/11/15138/9002
