Fernando Pessoa
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Portuguese poet Pessoa (1888-1935) who was largely unknown in his lifetime but who, in 1994, Harold Bloom included in his list of the 26 most significant western writers since the Middle Ages. Pessoa wrote in his own name but mainly in the names of characters he created, each with a distinctive voice and biography, which he called heteronyms rather than pseudonyms, notably Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos and one who was closer to Pessoa’s own identity, Bernardo Soares. Most of Pessoa’s works were unpublished at his death, discovered in a trunk; as more and more was printed and translated, his fame and status grew.
→ Listen on BBC Sounds website
Guests
-
Claudia Pazos-Alonso No other episodes
Professor of Portuguese and Gender Studies and Senior Research Fellow at Wadham College, University of Oxford -
Juliet Perkins No other episodes
Visiting Senior Research Fellow in Portuguese Studies at King's College London -
Paulo de Medeiros No other episodes
Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick
Reading list
-
Pessoa's Geometry of the Abyss: Modernity and the Book of Disquiet
Paulo de Medeiros (Routledge, 2013) Google Books → -
Fernando Pessoa as English Reader and Writer
Patricio Ferrari and Jeronimo Pizarro (eds) (Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2015) Google Books → -
Pessoa in an Intertextual Web: Influence and Innovation
David Frier (ed.) (Legenda, 2012) Google Books → -
Fernando Pessoa, Modernity Without Frontiers: Influences, Dialogues, Responses
Mariana Gray de Castro (ed.) (Tamesis, 2013) Google Books → -
Fernando Pessoa: Message
Jonathan Griffin (trans.) (The Menard Press/King's College London, 1992) -
Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa
David K. Jackson (Oxford University Press, 2010) Google Books → -
Embodying Pessoa: Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality
Anna Klobucka and Mark Sabine (eds.) (University of Toronto Press, 2007) Google Books → -
Fernando Pessoa: Voices of a Nomadic Soul
Zbigniew Kotowicz (The Menard Press, 1996) Google Books → -
The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism
Pericles Lewis (ed.) (Cambridge University Press, 2011) Google Books → -
A Centenary Pessoa
Eugenio Lisboa and L.C. Taylor (eds) (Carcanet Press, 1995) -
The Tobacconist's. Tabacaria: A poem by Fernando Pessoa
Suzette Macedo (trans.) (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1987) -
Three Persons on One: A Centenary Tribute to Fernando Pessoa
Bernard McGuirk (ed.) (University of Nottingham, 1988) Google Books → -
A Companion to Portuguese Literature
Stephen Parkinson, Claudia Pazos Alonso and T.F. Earle (eds) (Tamesis, 2009) Google Books → -
The Book of Disquiet: Complete edition
Fernando Pessoa (trans. Margaret Jull Costa) (Serpent's Tail, 2017) Google Books → -
The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa (trans. Richard Zenith) (Penguin, 2002) Google Books → -
I Have More Souls Than One
Fernando Pessoa (Penguin, 2018) Google Books → -
A Little Larger Than the Universe: Selected Poems
Fernando Pessoa (trans. Richard Zenith) (Penguin, 2006) -
The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa
Fernando Pessoa (trans. Richard Zenith) (Grove Press/Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002) Google Books → -
The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro: Bilingual edition
Fernando Pessoa (trans. Margaret Jull Costa) (W. W. Norton & Company, 2020) Google Books → -
Fernando Pessoa: A Critical Introduction
Jeronimo Pizarro (Sussex Academic Press, 2020) Google Books → -
Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa's turn in Anglo-American Modernism
Irene Ramalho Santos (Dartmouth College Press, 2002) Google Books → -
Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems
Peter Rickard (ed. and trans.) (Edinburgh University Press, 1971) -
An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa: Modernism and the Paradoxes of Authorship
Darlene J. Sadlier (University Press of Florida, 1998) Google Books → -
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
Jose Saramago (trans. Giovanni Pontiero) (Harvill Press, 1991) Google Books → -
Yeats and Pessoa: Parallel Poetic Styles
Patricia Silva McNeill (Legenda, 2010) Google Books →
Related episodes
-
Jorge Luis Borges
4 Jan, 2007 860 Spanish, Portuguese, Galician literatures -
Gerard Manley Hopkins
21 Mar, 2019 820 English and Old English literatures -
Pope
9 Nov, 2006 820 English and Old English literatures -
Lorca
4 Jul, 2019 860 Spanish, Portuguese, Galician literatures -
Sir Thomas Browne
6 Jun, 2019 820 English and Old English literatures -
Edgar Allan Poe
30 Nov, 2023 810 American literature in English -
The Metaphysical Poets
3 Jul, 2008 820 English and Old English literatures -
Italo Calvino
24 Nov, 2024 850 Italian, Romanian and related literatures -
Shakespeare and Literary Criticism
4 Mar, 1999 820 English and Old English literatures -
Catullus
9 Jan, 2020 870 Latin and Italic literatures
Programme ID: m000q0yj
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q0yj
Auto-category: 800 (Literature)
Hello (First sentence from this episode)
Hello, Fernando Pessoa, 1888 to 1935, is one of the greatest Portuguese poets and some say one of the greatest in the whole Western tradition.