Engeromic recognitions: Fernando Pessoa

Engerom will be hosting a major symposium on Wednesday 3 May from 13:00 to 17:00 celebrating the work of the European poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935).

Our guest speakers will be Richard Zenith, author of the prize-winning biography, Fernando Pessoa: An Experimental Life (2021) and the translator of Pessoa's works published by Penguin, including The Book of Disquiet (2002); and Paulo de Medeiros, Professor of Modern and Contemporary World Literature at the University of Warwick and author of Pessoa's Geometry of the Abyss: Modernity and the Book of Disquiet (2013).

Pessoa is famous for having written under numerous names which he termed heteronyms, none of which he acknowledged; for each heteronym, he would create a biography, a character, a style, and use of genres, each to be distinguished from the work published under the name of 'Fernando Pessoa'. It has been said that there are six or seven major poets in modern Portuguese literature, all of whom turned out to be Pessoa.  Richard Zenith has investigated the question of Pessoa's authorship more thoroughly than anyone else, and even he cannot be sure that all the heteronyms have been identified.

Among the themes to be discussed:

• Modernism as a European movement: the role of translation in transcending national traditions and shaping a polyglot canon.
• Impersonality as an aesthetic principle: Pessoa was exactly contemporary with T.S. Eliot.
• Multiple personalities as a creative strategy or psychological condition: as many selves as languages? Selves as styles and registers? 
• The challenge of the heteronyms to both biographers and literary critics.
• The colonial and the post-colonial: Pessoa was raised in South Africa and his entire education was in English, yet he chose to write almost all his poetry in Portuguese. (Almost all his heteronyms are Portuguese, though an Englishman or two may lurk among them.)
• Pessoa's work in its historical context: the politics of South Africa and Portugal.
• Modernism, Astrology and the Occult

Programme

 For further information, please contact one of the organisers:

• Ana Vera
• Carl-Henrik Bjerstrom
• Charles Lock