Fernando Pesoa

...Ever since I was a child, I have had the tendency to create a fictitious world around me, to surround myself with friends and acquaintances who never existed. (I don’t know, of course, if they didn’t really exist or if it is me who doesn’t exist. On such matters, as in all others, one shouldn’t be dogmatic.) Ever since I became aware of the thing that I call self, I can remember with mental precision, the figures, the movements, the character and the history of several fictitious people who were, to me, as visible and mine as those things which we, perhaps abusively, call real life. This tendency, which exists since I realized that I was a self,  has always been with me, modifying slightly the kind of music it uses to bewitch me but never altering its manner of bewitching.

It’s the deep characteristics of hysteria that exist in me. I don’t know if I am simply hysterical, or if I am, to put it more adequately, hysterical neurasthenic. Whatever the case, your mental origins are in my organic and constant tendency to depersonalize and to simulate. If  I were a woman – in women hysterical phenomena manifest themselves through seizures and things like that – each poem by Álvaro Campos, the most hysterical within me, would cause a commotion in the neighborhood. But I am a man and in men hysteria becomes, mostly, a matter of the mind; thus, everything ends up in silence and poetry...

One day, it was March 8, 1914, when I had finally decided to give it all up, I went up to a high desk, took a sheet of paper and began to write, standing up as I usually do whenever I can. I wrote thirty-odd poems in one go, in a kind of trance whose nature I cannot define. It was the greatest day of my life and I’ll never have another one like it. I started with the title, O Guardador de Rebanhos ( The Keeper of Sheep). What followed was the appearance of someone in me, to whom I immediately gave the name of Alberto Caeiro. ...So much so, that upon finishing those thirty-odd poems, I immediately took another piece of paper and wrote, also in one go, the six poems that make up A Chuva Oblíqua (Oblique Rain), by Fernando Pessoa.  Once Alberto Caeiro’s presence materialized, I, instinctively and subconsciously, set out to find him some disciples.  I yanked a latent Ricardo Reis out of his false paganism, discovered his name, and adjusted him to himself, because, at this stage, I could already see him.  And, suddenly, arising from sources directly opposed to those of Ricardo Reis, a new individual burst impetuously into my mind.  In one fell swoop, at the typewriter, without interruption or correction, there emerged the Ode Triunfal (Triumphal Ode) by Alvaro Campos – both, the Ode and the author,  already carrying the name they have now.

How do I write in the name of these three? Caeiro, through sheer and unexpected inspiration, without knowing or even suspecting that I’m going to write in his name. Ricardo Reis, after an abstract meditation, which suddenly takes concrete shape in an ode. Campos, when I feel a sudden impulse to write and don’t know what. (My semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, who in many ways resembles Álvaro de Campos, always appears when I'm sleepy or drowsy, so that my qualities of inhibition and rational thought are suspended; his prose is an endless reverie. He’s a semi-heteronym because his personality, although not my own, doesn’t differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it. He’s me without my rationalism and emotions. His prose is the same as mine, except for certain formal restraint that reason imposes on my own writing, and his Portuguese is exactly the same – whereas Caeiro writes bad Portuguese, Campos writes it reasonably well but with mistakes such as "me myself" instead of "I myself", etc.., and Reis writes better than I, but with a purism I find excessive...