The Pessoa Chronicles

The least known of the great European Modernist poets of the twentieth century, Fernando Pessoa was born in 1888. A virtuoso of poetic voices, he created a coterie of distinct heteronyms, individual voices for whom he created full biographies and full bodies of work that were not only distinctive and original but so distinguished that several have earned an honored place in the annals of world poetry. The Pessoa Chronicles-a collection, a scrapbook, an accumulation, an offering, take your pick-had its beginning as a book around 1990. Some of the entries in The Pessoa Chronicles are expressed in the (imagined) voice of Pessoa speaking for himself or that of one of his heteronyms. Many others are in an unidentified voice, usually indistinguishable from Monteiro's.