Fernando Pessoa's Heteronyms Collected in Pléiade Edition

Gallimard's prestigious Pléiade collection has published "Œuvres poétiques," a comprehensive volume gathering the poetic works of Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) and his heteronyms. The edition, prefaced by Robert Bréchon and directed by Patrick Quiller, includes over twenty texts spanning Pessoa's Portuguese, English, and French poems, as well as works by his main heteronyms Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and Bernardo Soares. Pessoa famously described his heteronymic process in March 1914, when he wrote thirty poems in a single burst, signing them as Caeiro. The volume features the complete "The Keeper of Flocks," "Message," "Lisbon Revisited," and fragments from "The Book of Disquiet," which was begun around 1908 and only fully assembled by Jacinto do Prado Coelho in 1982. Pessoa's literary innovations—intersectionism, Cubism, sensationism—are explored in the preface. The edition marks the first time Pessoa's heteronymic texts have been collected together in the Pléiade series.