I laid in that blind trying to think of as many
heteronyms as I could.
Within the vast range of
heteronyms created by Fernando Pessoa, Alberto Caeiro was supposed to be the master, who argues for an absolute nominalism by which he claims to have eliminated metaphysics and revealed what is false in philosophy and poetry.
For the first time a full volume (493 pages) was dedicated to the
heteronym Caeiro, including essays by Mendes, Jackson, Ken Krabbenhoft, Antonio Ladeira, George Monteiro, Darlene Sadlier and Richard Zenith; I supplied a bibliography in Portuguese and a list of English translations of Caeiro's poetry.
The simultaneous wonder and difficulty of any consideration of Pessoa's career lies in tracing the distinct personalities of his many writerly personae, or '
heteronyms'.
Alvaro de Campos, last of the
heteronym trilogy, described by
Once again, it is as if Max Stirner was commenting on Pessoa--and at the same time, bitterly, on the failings of his
heteronym the Baron of Teive--when he wrote:
Written in 1900, and now translated by Gregory Rabassa, the reader will here discover a playful
heteronym of the great realist, smitten by (or mocking) the stylistic bravado of the French Symbolists, their precursors, and their followers: Hugo, Leconte de Lisle, Baudelaire, Coppee, Mallarme, et al.
Pessoa was introduced at the beginning of the chapter, marked by a jagged flashback to an initial thematization of melancholy: "La Saudade, diceva Maria do Carmo, non e una parola, e una categoria dello spirito, solo i portoghesi riescono a sentirla, perche hanno questa parola per dire che ce l'hanno, lo ha detto un grande poeta" (12); then she leads the narrator between the haunts of one
heteronym and another, before launching into her childhood reminiscences.