The heteronymy of Fernando Pessoa: multilingual and translational literature

Abstract

Fernando Pessoa is considered one of the most important Portuguese poets, but he was at the same time a great English poet. Proceeding on this observation, the present study proposes to discuss the function of languages, of their differences and of the interlingual passages in the work of Pessoa. This question, nonetheless, involves the problem of the heteronymic writing, as some heteronyms were foreigners and wrote in English and French, others were Portuguese and wrote in Portuguese, some translated into English, others translated into Portuguese, some divulged foreign literary works with essays in Portugal, others did the same in England. As a matter of fact, heteronymy founds in the transgressions of linguistic and cultural boundaries a constitutive project. In order to better understand this pluralistic and translational tendency it seems inevitable to analyze the meaning and the ways of functioning of the heteronymy. The idea of the study is to debate the phenomenon as a radical literary proposal that, on the basis of the experience of the dissolution irremediable of the real, simulates not reality but fiction. Heteronymy constitutes literature in the sense of a web of works of authors that neither exist nor don’t exist. As literature in both a qualitative and a quantitative sense, heteronymy involves intercultural passages and tends even to transgress its own limit: its language.