Fernando Pessoa

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.6 • 978 Ratings

🗓️ 3 December 2020

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Portuguese poet Pessoa (1888-1935) who was largely unknown in his lifetime but who, in 1994, Harold Bloom included in his list of the 26 most significant western writers since the Middle Ages. Pessoa wrote in his own name but mainly in the names of characters he created, each with a distinctive voice and biography, which he called heteronyms rather than pseudonyms, notably Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and one who was closer to Pessoa's own identity, Bernardo Soares. Most of Pessoa's works were unpublished at his death, discovered in a trunk; as more and more was printed and translated, his fame and status grew.

With

Cláudia Pazos-Alonso Professor of Portuguese and Gender Studies and Senior Research Fellow at Wadham College, University of Oxford

Juliet Perkins Visiting Senior Research Fellow in Portuguese Studies at King’s College London

And

Paulo de Medeiros Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Transcript

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0:50.0	Hello, Fernando Pizoa, 1888 to 1935, is one of the greatest Portuguese poets and some
0:56.2	say one of the greatest in the whole Western tradition.
0:59.4	In his lifetime, he was seen as both shockingly new and deeply conservative. Some poems
1:04.9	scandalized others were recited at schools and since his death he's been
1:09.8	valued more and more for his explorations of the self, in works under his own name and in over 70 other personas, some of them with full biographies, whom he called his heteronyms.
1:21.0	With me to discuss Fernando Persoa are Claudia Pazas Alonso, Professor of Portuguese
1:26.1	and Gender Studies and Senior Research Fellow at Waddham College University of Oxford.
1:30.3	Juliet Perkins, visiting Senior Research Fellow in Portuguese studies at Kings College London,
1:35.0	and Paolo de Madeiroz, Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.
	...

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