“In fact, Pessoa, as was so often the case, left several pieces for the preface—two of them typed, one handwritten—without articulating them into a final version. The handwritten fragment (not published here) explains that the heteronyms embody different “aspects,” or sides, of a reality whose existence is uncertain. For more details about the heteronyms and their origins, see “Preface to Fictions of the Interlude,” Thomas Crosse’s “Translator’s Preface to the Poems of Alberto Caeiro,” Alvaro de... Campos’s Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro, and most especially Pessoa’s letter of January 13, 1935, to Adolfo Casais Monteiro. The Complete Work is essentially dramatic, though it takes different forms—prose passages in this first volume, poems and philosophies in other volumes. It’s the product of the temperament I’ve been blessed or cursed with—I’m not sure which. All I know is that the author of these lines (I’m not sure if also of these books) has never had just one personality, and has never thought or felt except dramatically—that is, through invented persons, or personalities, who are more capable than he of feeling what’s to be felt.MoreLessRead More Read Less
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