Whether you’ve visited Lisbon already or are planning to, chances are you’ve heard about Fernando Pessoa. His statue has to be the most famous one in the whole city where people pose for photos. Outside the Brasileira Café – an overrated and overcrowded place where the service does not live up to the expectations brought by its fame – the bronze statue, sharply dressed and low-key, sits with the posture of a regular customer (which he was, in the early 20th Century).
Pessoa was a complex author, and one of the most difficult to interpret. I will argue one day that 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, furiously, generating new personas when his own voice wasn’t enough to say what he meant. To say the least, he was vertiginous.
After his death, his descendants found a trunk of bits and pieces, some scribbled random notes and some unpublished work – this book was among them, written in English, as the author’s take on showing the real Lisbon to tourists. See? Even in 1925, there was already a concern 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.