Fernando Pessoa is Portugal's most important contemporary poet.
He wrote under several identities, which he called heteronyms: Albet
Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and Bernardo Soares. He wrote
fine poetry under his own name as well, and each of his "voices" is
completely different in subject, temperament and style. This volume
brings back into print the comprehensive collection of his work
published by Ecco Press in 1986.
"At last, at last, at last, Pessoa again! More Pessoa! One of the very
great poets of the twentieth century, again and more! And one of the
fascinating figures of all literature, with his manifold identities, his
amazing audacities, his brilliance and his shyness. I think I have under
control the reluctance I feel in having to share Pessoa with the public
he should have had all along in America: until now, only the poets, so
far as I can tell, have even heard of him, and delighted and exulted in
him. He is, in some ways, the poet of modernism, the only one willing
to fracture himself into the parcels of action, anguish, and nostalgia
which are the grounds of our actual situation."--C. K. Williams
"Pessoa is one of the great originals (a fact rendered more striking by
his writing as several distinct personalities) of the European poetry of
the first part of this century, and has been one of the last poets of
comparable stature, in the European languages, to become known in
English. Edwin Honig's translations of Spanish and Portuguese poetry
have been known to anyone who cares about either, since his work on
Lorca in the forties, and his Selected Poems of Pessoa (1971) was a
welcome step toward a long-awaited larger colection."--W. S. Merwin
"Fernando Pessoa is the least known of the masters of the
twentieth-century poetry. From his heteronymic passion he produced, if
that is the word, two of our greatest poets, Alberto Caeiro and Álvaro
de Campos, and a third, Ricardo Reis, who isn't bad. Pessoa is the
exemplary poet of the self as other, of the poem as testament to
unreality, proclamation of nothingness, occasion for expectancy. In
Edwin Honig's and Susan Brown's superb translations, Pessoa and his
'others' live with miraculous style and vitality."--Mark Strand
