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144 Vierzeiler

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Von den im Nachlass aufgefundenen, etwas mehr als 300 Vierzeilern bringt unser Band eine Auswahl jener poetischen Perlen, die für Nichtportugiesen eingängig und leicht zu verstehen sind.

Pessoa hat von früher Jugend an bis zu seinem Tod immer wieder zu besonderen Gelegenheiten seine »Quadras«, wie er offenbar selbst vermerkt hat, »au goût populaire« verfasst. Pessoa knüpfte mit seinen Vierzeilern an eine alte Tradition volkstümlicher Dichtkunst an, die bis heute in Portugal verbreitet ist und, zum Beispiel in einer Papiernelke versteckt, zu besonderen Anlässen verschenkt wird.

160 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

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About the author

Fernando Pessoa

1,248 books6,343 followers
Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was a poet and writer.

It is sometimes said that the four greatest Portuguese poets of modern times are Fernando Pessoa. The statement is possible since Pessoa, whose name means ‘person’ in Portuguese, had three alter egos who wrote in styles completely different from his own. In fact Pessoa wrote under dozens of names, but Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos were – their creator claimed – full-fledged individuals who wrote things that he himself would never or could never write. He dubbed them ‘heteronyms’ rather than pseudonyms, since they were not false names but “other names”, belonging to distinct literary personalities. Not only were their styles different; they thought differently, they had different religious and political views, different aesthetic sensibilities, different social temperaments. And each produced a large body of poetry. Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis also signed dozens of pages of prose.

The critic Harold Bloom referred to him in the book The Western Canon as the most representative poet of the twentieth century, along with Pablo Neruda.

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