Whether you’ve visited Lisbon already or are planning to, chances are you’ve heard about Fernando Pessoa. His statue outside Café Brasileira has to be the most famous one in the whole city where people pose for photos.
The bronze statue, sharply dressed and low-key, sits as a regular customer (which he was, in the early 20th Century).
Pessoa was a complex author, and his work is challenging to interpret. He probably didn’t want to be interpreted at all; he just wanted to write (frequently under the influence of low-quality alcohol).
He kept writing and creating, in a furious and dizzying moment of creativity, generating new personas when his own voice wasn’t enough to say what he meant.
After his death, his descendants found a trunk of bits and pieces, some scribbled random notes, and a lot of unpublished work. “What the Tourist Should See” was among them.
Originally written in English (Pessoa was bilingual), the author shows the real Lisbon to tourists (as it was in 1925, of course). Even then, he was concerned with what was authentic.
I bought the Fernando Pessoa book at the end of 2014 as a kind of Lisbon tourist guide slash Portuguese language lesson. I thought it would be most interesting to read Pessoa writing in English alongside an interpretation of his words to Portuguese.
I’m still reading it! 🙂
He had plans to write one book per city, according to the experts at Casa Fernando Pessoa. Well, he had many plans for his writing, but because he was a perfectionist, we only got to see a portion of all the work he intended to do. If you’ve never been to Casa Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon, you should. The tour ends up being a bit long, but instead of being bored, you actually have more and more questions.