text:
Talk:False document

Straying from the Definition
It seems to me that many of the examples listed aren't really false documents, but just fictional books mentioned within fictional books. In a false document, the author should make some attempt to convince people that the story is actually true, such as "The Seven Per-cent Solution" where Nicholas Meyers gives a false provenance showing that the story was written by Dr. Watson. Things like "The Hitchhiker's Guide tot he Galaxy" and "The Encyclopedia of Tlon" are plot devices to advance the story or convey information to the reader. Seantrinityohara (talk) 15:21, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

 * Yes, fiction within fiction is a very widely used conceit, listing examples of the use of this device in literature would be an endless task.
 * Now, within the fictional setting, such an attempt is usually made, but by a character or alter ego that is itself obviously fictional. On the other hand, when the attempt is made IRL, we are talking about hoaxes. 2A01:CB0C:761:5B00:29D6:4241:36C0:5150 (talk) 07:02, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

House of Leaves
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski appears to be a prime candidate for inclusion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.117.123.148 (talk) 20:52, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Not entirely accurate. Danielewski makes no effort to imply that the book itself is a false document. As an epistolary novel, it is however composed of elements presented as real-world documents that do not really exist outside the book, such as Johnny Truant's diary and the documentary film that Truant is ostensibly writing about. These might be considered false documents, but not the novel itself. Canonblack (talk) 15:06, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

Watchmen
(I'm adding this above title now for obvious reasons --Ludvikus (talk) 00:03, 20 April 2008 (UTC))

Trimalchio put:

 * Watchmen by Alan Moore

in the "False Documents in Art" section, and I can't remember any false documents in Watchmen (although it's been quite a while since I read it). Please explain, if you're going to move it back.

There are numerous "Newspaper articles" and framing information included in the Watchmen story that fill in some of the background (and in some cases provide vital clues as to what's really going on). But otherwise I can't really see how it fits here. -- DrBob

And various other fake "sources" (memos, sections of autobiography), I don't know if that qualifies as False document since, to be honest, I found the article hard to follow.

 * Well, this is where fluidity comes into play for literary technique... I suppose maybe there should be at least two lists for the art.

 * Art that IS a false document by its nature. Art that USES false documents to create an effect.

 * This is true for a lot of literary tricks and conceits, and I guess there is no easy answer to it. The Watchmen falls more under the second category... and clearly so. But I wonder about adding the second category because it leads to a kind of endless equivocation. What I meant by just one category is that these are works of art that find false documents to be central to the way they tell their tale. All kinds of other things use false documents, but in many cases only in small ways. Does Laura Palmer's Diary make Twin Peaks fall into this list? I don't think so... though the diary itself might fit. Anyway, I felt that Watchmen used false documents in a centrally important way, especially because verisimiltude in general was so important as it worked in opposition to the cartoonish origins of the material. So, while the work is not entirely composed of false documents, the documents that are used have a central thematic and technical role in the drama... especially Rorshach's psychiatric history and the Pirate Comic that plays as counterpoint to the larger narrative (and is the product of one of the kidnapped artists). The whole book, in a way, is about levels of authenticity. Is Roshsach the real masked hero because of his intense personal conviction, or is it Night Owl because of the level of energy and money that he dedicated to more and more elaborate toys and masks? The book is all about props and masks and a general investigation of "realness" and "perfection." It tries to inspect the depth and literality of an Ubermensch in a naturlistic setting. There is a kind of arms race of realness going on in the evolution of super heros as described by the book, starting with a masked wrestler, then a masked cop, then techno-dilletantes and madmen and vigalantes, finally culminating in Doctor Manhattan--the hero that is so "real" that he not only makes superheroes obsolete, he makes all of mankind irrelevant. For all of these reasons I felt that this book centrally exployed the kind of issues of authenticity that false documents are all about.

 * By contrast, From Hell may use documentary evidence, but in no way does it explore these kinds of issues or make an issue of whether something is false or not. I only mention it to show that there is something outside of my working definition of a false document. However, the criticism is well put and graciously taken. I wonder what you guys think. --trimalchio

Excellent answer, trimalchio -- thanks!

Say what? How could Currency of the American Confederacy qualify as a False document? Or am I not getting a ref?

 * Quite right. Hadn't thought that one through. As a northerner, I typically think of the southern seccession as politically ambiguous. So Confederate Currency is equated in my mind with the currency printed by Japan in WWII that they intended to use in captured territory, including new US Dollars... a kind of artificial statement of victory before the fact. But, upon reflection, I can see a whole galaxy of NPOV issues there. So, I have moved the material here for discussion.

 * False Documents in History

 * Currency of the American Confederacy

I don't buy this one at all either. Confederate currency was the legitimate, useful currency of a sovereign country. Soldiers were paid with it, and they bought food with it, and farmers traded with it. It only became wallpaper after the surrender. Calling it "fake" is like calling Webvan stock certificates "fake" just because they aren't worth anything anymore either. They were, nonetheless, legitimately traded when they were. --Lee Daniel Crocker

I agree that it doesn't belong on the page because the issues surrounding are too thorny, but the reason that Confederate Currency comes up as an issue when talking about false documents is because of the Authenticity problem. That is, if US Dollars are "real" and Monopoly Dollars are "fake" on this spectrum of Documentary Authenticity, what do we do with all of the stuff in between? This is Weschler's central issue in BOGGS. What makes something authentic, and another thing a forgery? Is Sealand money as real as US Dollars? Is Sealand money more real than Monopoly Money? Is it more or less real than confederate currency? In the end, the currency becomes a focal point of discussion because Confederate Currency exists in a kind of Schrodinger's Cat type-situation, existing forever between states, on the cusp of being real, but not quite. It's like Weimar Republic currency, or even, arguably, (from some points of view) US currency after stepping off the gold standard. It is not so much a false document as it is a case example of how all documents are one step away from becoming false. The only thing, from a certain point of view, that is real, is the transaction itself. Documents become arbitrary artifacts in a ritual of culture and faith. But, you are right, for all practical purposes the currency was real. --t

 * See the Pragmatists, Logical Positivists, and Wittgenstein (and for that matter, Philip K. Dick). Something is "real" in the senses we can use it. Monopoly money is "real" for playing Monopoly. U.S currency is "real" for buying things in the USA.

This is very interesting article!

"False document" is the usual technical term for the technique? --LMS

 * Well, it is only now being studied, and the terms haven't entirely settled down. I am relying on the version of this theory as put forth (in a sort of unofficial way) by Charles Baxter and Eileen Pollack at the University of Michigan, with whom I have done my own exploration. It's difficult to translate academics in motion to an encyclopedia... especially because I am a "staff member" of sorts and not an academic per se. --trimalchio

 * More to the point, I know of no established alternative term. Like I said, it is to my knowledge an unexplored (or underexplored) part of the discipline. The graduate seminar that Professor Pollack organized with my help was, at best, a university curiosity.

Aha. Well, all this should be stated very clearly in the article, I should think. Wikipedia isn't the place to publish new research, but since it's probably not entirely now, it's fine. Still, I think we should have details about the study of false documents, if that's the term used most by Baxter and Pollack and others, particularly that the theory behind it is all very new. --LMS

It appears that the wikipedian internal link to "Ova Prima" on the "False Document" article is BROKEN. Otherwise quite enjoyable, an interesting meme. -Flobie

Tolkien as purportedly nonfiction
I don't see how the Lord of the Rings employs a false document. I realize that Tolkien wrote languages, poetry, etc. that complement his novels, but where does he try to convince the reader that his mythology is true? The poems and snippets of languages found in LOTR are merely part of the fantasy. If all it takes for a work to be considered a false document is some made-up aspect of life or culture, than most, if not all, novels fit in the category. I could add Robinson Crusoe, A Tale of Two Cities, Wuthering Heights, Don Quixote; indeed, every novel which is by definition fictional is one of our "false documents."

 * "The Lord of the Rings", "The Hobbit" and "The Silmarillion" are all supposedly based on Bilbo's work, "The Red Book of Westmarch". It consists of Bilbo's diary and commentaries, and additions from Frodo. -- Zoe

 * Wouldn't that put them more into the realm of the epistolary novel than the false document? I just don't see Tolkien's works passing the definition in the first paragraph of this article; while I may feel that it's a well-constructed fiction, I never have occasion to doubt that the parts that present it as fact are themselves fiction. --Brion VIBBER

 * I agree. There are few novels that begin, "this is just fiction"; virtually all portray their events as factual.

 * The Book of Westmarch is portrayed in the Appendicies as being a real historical document. All of Tolkien's fiction from Middle Earth is claimed to be translations from the original books written in historical time.  His notes about translation are clear, there was a real Common Tongue and the family trees identify real persons who existed; the names have been altered to fit better into his English 'translation.' oneismany 11:26, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

 * Perhaps Lord of the rings has an epistolary aspect to it, in the Appendicies, but it is not largely composed of journal entries or newspaper articles. The story of the book is supposed to be a reconstruction of what really happened, based on historical documents.  oneismany 11:29, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

On that note, I've removed the following portion of the text. The parts that somebody thinks are actually legitimate can be restored:

BEGIN REMOVED TEXT

This has left open a very troubling debate. The divisions between the creation of authenticity through documents and actual authenticity in documentary evidence is unclear. The distinction between an "official" document and a forgery is sometimes only as clear as the prevailing political winds. Confederate Currency from the American Civil War and the Japanese Dollars printed by Japan in WWII in anticipation of taking American lands both illustrate the ambiguity of even the most officially produced documents. The work of Mr. Boggs further complicates the issue.

What divides an artistic endeavor from a political one or an economic one rests, almost entirely, on the ephemeral issue of intent.

False Documents in Art

 * The Nun by Denis Diderot
 * Fernando Pessoa
 * Dracula by Bram Stoker, in addition to letters and diaries, includes recorded dictation, and news stories.
 * F for Fake by Orson Welles
 * The War of the Worlds radio broadcast by Orson Welles
 * Citizen Kane by Orson Welles
 * House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
 * The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien, supposedly based on The Red Book of Westmarch, written by Bilbo Baggins and updated by his nephew, Frodo
 * The Necronomicon, created by H.P. Lovecraft
 * The modern satirical historical Flashman novels of George Macdonald Fraser are based on a supposed cache of Victorian military memoirs.
 * Emigrants by W. G. Sebald
 * Museum of Jurassic Technology
 * The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas
 * Dungeons and Dragons by Gary Gygax
 * Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton and the 1971 film.
 * Most role-playing games
 * Memoirs of Hadrian by Maurgeritte Yourcenair
 * I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves
 * The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
 * Watchmen by Alan Moore
 * The Princess Bride by William Goldman
 * Book of Counted Sorrows by Dean R. Koontz
 * Works of Kilgore Trout by Kurt Vonnegut
 * Avalon Landing by Sean Connery in the film Finding Forrester
 * Dune by Frank Herbert
 * The Grasshopper Lies Heavy "by Hawthorne Abendsen"

END REMOVED TEXT

The bit about Confederate & Japanese occupation dollars is 100% bull (they're not official United States currency, but they were backed by some authority at the time -- even Monopoly money is legitimate for playing Monopoly!), and a whooole lot of that list is just ordinary fiction, some of it in epistolary form. --Brion VIBBER 00:41 Aug 7, 2002 (PDT)

The dollars produced by the Japanese government in WW2 are often cause for confusion in the US. The fact is that they were not US dollars, they were Malayan dollars issued by the occupation authorities in Malaya and used as currency there. The Japanese government also issued banknotes denominated in guilders for use in the Dutch East Indies, and in pounds for various island chains in the SW Pacific. Collectively they are referred to in note-collecting circles as "JIM" - Japanese Invasion Money. Arwel 14:46 Mar 1, 2003 (UTC)

 * I've restored a few of these entries within a narrower context, see mainpage Nixdorf 10:47, 10 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Is the Zimmermann Telegram a real document or was it faked by British intelligence? -- Zoe

 * It was real, see for example. The Brits did use it cleverly to play it out on the Americans to prevent it from being seen as a false document in stead.

Blair Witch Project?
Is Blair Witch Project an example?

Osias, unregistred --200.97.51.150 12:15, 22 Aug 2004 (UTC)

False documents in religion?
Such as The True Furqan - a Palestinian Christian's attempt to copy the style of the Qu'ran?

Asimov's Thiotimeline Series?
I'm not sure about the second or third, but I'm pretty certain the original Endochronic Properties of Thiotimeline was a false document purporting to be a paper on a substance that could travel through time.

--Alazoral 01:31, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

 * This was always intended as a work of fiction, never any kind of a hoax. Unlike the Sokal paper, it was never published in a reputable academic journal.  The joke depends on the format, borrowed from real academic papers, and probably qualifies the story as a "false document" to the same degree, and in the same way, as Gulliver's Travels.

Astro jpc 17:43, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Paris in the Twentieth Century
Paris in the Twentieth Century is claimed to be a real found manuscript by Jules Verne. Should it be mentioned here somehow? --Error 00:23, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Science fiction?
In my opinion, the definition and examples in this article should only include works that a reader could easily interpret--as per the author's intent--as being true, and that therefore any documents referenced in the work must also exist. Works which are clearly science fiction should not be on the list--no one who reads The Man in the High Castle is going to think that The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is a real book. The same is true of The Foundation series, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Watchmen.

Maybe I'm wrong on this, though. I'd like to know what others think.

--Mumblingmynah

I reverted the re-adding of Watchmen to the literary examples, based on my above argument, but I would like to discuss this, please. --Mumblingmynah 10:26, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

Fiction in Fiction and other alternative conceptions
Suggestion, how about discerning among the conceptual status of different fictions? For example, The Necronomicon and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are both fictional and taken to be fiction by any reader of Lovecraft or Douglas Adams, respectively. Both of these examples appear in fictional stories that take these documents to be true. But, they are actually references with imaginary antecedents. I.e. there was no "Necronomicon" until Lovecraft quoted 'excerpts' from it, nor any "Hitchhiker's Guide" until Adams's characters consulted 'entries' from it. Their only previous existence was in the minds of their authors. The excerpts that exist comprise the entire extant Necronomicon and Hitchhiker's Guide, notwithstanding real books with the same titles that might purport to be the same books. They are not meant to be taken as true in reality, they are only true within their respective fictions. Of course such examples beg the question of truth, but it is common to regard the truth of a work of fiction to be contextual, that is, consistency with the other suppositions of the fiction.

The truth status of a fictional document that claims to be true but only in another fiction, is undecidable from the perspective of the fiction that it appears in. Consult the Wiki articles on Godel, and his inconsistency and incompleteness theorems. Briefly, a countable set of consistent axioms can't prove or refute a contradiction among themselves, or prove their own consistency. How this applies to 'false documents' is that although you and I know (or at least their creators knew) that such books as the Necronomicon and the Hitchhiker's Guide are not true in our world, the characters who read them in the stories that they appear in do not know that. Although a quote from these books could in theory be correctible in the story, the stories themselves assume the books to be true, so proving them false would prove the fiction false and hence prove the book within the book true!

Both of these examples are fiction, but true in their context. Other possibilities exist that might be termed 'false documents.' Fiction that is supposed to be fiction  within the fiction that it appears in. Nonfiction that appears in fiction and is supposed to be nonfiction in the fiction. Nonfiction that is supposed to be fiction in the fiction. Any of the above might be satirical, or partially satirical and partially serious. Then there is parody, which might be composed of fiction and nonfiction, neither of which is to be taken seriously. Of course it all depends on context.

This encyclopedia entry could be divided into sections with examples of each kind of 'false document.' The term 'False document' may not apply to some examples and could be changed, or some of the examples could be included in another entry. Other possibilities exist. Opinions?

oneismany 11:13, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Hoax/Forgery example
Protocols of the Elders of Zion Jaysbro 23:58, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

Modern literary example
Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events Jaysbro 23:58, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

But the author has asserted in interviews his contention that the story is actually true, though the identities of the individuals have been changed to protect their privacy and for comic or literary effect. Nuttyskin (talk) 17:34, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Journal of Irreproducible Results
The article lists Journal of Irreproducible Results as a hoax. Is it really a hoax, the purpose is not to deceive? --Bubba73 (talk), 03:35, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Mystery solved with POV!
Wow, it says here the DaVinci Code is undoubtedly based on false documents! Then what is all the controversy about, when you can just say it's all forged right here! (It even says Dan Brown helped making the documents up! Who knew!)

OF COURSE it's not certain if the many documents the novel talks about are fake or not, so as long as nobody is sure about that, then there is no reason for it to be here! Kreachure 17:43, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

 * What's not certain? The whole thing about the Priory of Sion has been proven to be a hoax. The people who perpetrated the hoax admitted to this in open court. I'm re-adding The Da Vinci Code back to the list, based on this. -- 12.116.162.162 16:37, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

In Fiction: Crichton's Airframe?
Would not Michael Crichton's Airframe qualify? The page for the book specifically links and mentions false documents, but this page does not include the book. --Cipherswarm 16:05, 21 July 2006 (UTC)
 * I think the matter here is trying to be useful, but not exhaustive. We could add every instance of a false document, but it would be a bit much. —Cliffb 19:43, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Indian Politics
I'm not sure what the Indian Politics section conveys, let alone if it should be in this article. I'm tagging the paragraph with and unless discussion to the contrary I'll delete it in five days. —Cliffb 19:43, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

Life of Pi?
Shouldn't Life of Pi by Yann Martel be included here?

Texas Chainsaw, Last House on the Left
I would not count Texas Chainsaw as a false document, since the narration only claims that it was "an account"-an account of something only means a narrative or scenario of events, not necessarily that the events are true. However, The Last House on the Left's introduction claimed the events depicted were true, so that is a blatant false document.

Enda80 22:54, 31 January 2007 (UTC)Enda80

The List In The "False Documents In Fiction" Section - Is It Necessary Or Useful, Really?
The device is so common that any attempt to list the works that use it can only be woefully incomplete and inadequate to the task; it would seem to be one of the very oldest and most widespread literary devices ever created. The list as it is now, in spite of the fact that it contains only a minute fraction of all possible works that could be included, takes up rather a large part of the entire article. I would think that the best thing to do would be to simply delete the entire list and replace it with a statement that is a common device, and perhaps put in one or two of the earliest examples; that would suffice, I think. Hi There 09:28, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

This list clearly has value even if it can never hope to be exhaustive. Equally though it's out of place in this article and detracts from it. Should it not be moved to a separate 'list of' article with a few of the more notable examples (Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe?) retained for illustrative purposes and a link to the larger list for those who are interested. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.168.196.224 (talk) 14:45, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

I would argue that "false documents" is in of itself another word for Epistolary writing, a device used to draw the reader in by formatting the novel in the form of letters, faxes, emails and other typees of communication that suggest what is happening is real.

My suggestion would be to add all the novels mentioned here into Epistolary Novels category:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_contemporary_epistolary_novels

[User:Pakaal|Pakaal]], 7:03 pm, 28 August, 2010 (Hawaiian Time) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Pakaal (talk • contribs) 05:04, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

Ossian
To be honest I found the article slightly confusing so I can't tell for sure, but shouldn't Ossian be one of the most important examples? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 81.107.33.77 (talk) 22:30, 9 May 2007 (UTC).

Alternative Terms
Are there other terms used in literary criticism for "false documents?" --jenlight 23:24, 4 August 2007 (UTC)

The common term is Epistolary writing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistolary_novel

--Pakaal 7:07pm, 28 August 2010 (Hawaiian Time) —Preceding undated comment added 05:08, 29 August 2010 (UTC).

 * that is the specific case where the documents are letters from A to B. The classic format is an alternation of a letter from A to B, then one from B to A, and so on. 2A01:CB0C:761:5B00:29D6:4241:36C0:5150 (talk) 07:04, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

WW2
should operation mincemeat be included? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.26.99.90 (talk) 10:39, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

What gives?
Hi.

I noticed this:

"The moral and legal implications of false document art are, by necessity, complex and perhaps insoluble. The difference between a great artistic achievement and a stunning forgery is slim."

Has anyone ever actually been punished for breaking the law with a work of art they made like this? If so, should there be a mention? (Although I doubt it's happened as if the issues are too complex to solve no judge on Earth could ever rule one way or another on it!) mike4ty4 (talk) 05:52, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

 * There is no difference as such, slim or otherwise. Any given document can be both at the same time, one but not the other, or neither. The term forgery can only be considered in its societal context - i.e. who was duped, and how, and what were they cheated out of?
 * Strictly speaking, religious texts purporting to carry the word of Higher Powers are all forgeries, but those who are duped refuse to recognise the fact. Hence we give church leaders tax breaks instead of prison terms. See what I mean about social context? 2A01:CB0C:761:5B00:29D6:4241:36C0:5150 (talk) 07:08, 25 April 2024 (UTC)
 * The forgers of the Hitler Diaries did time. 2A01:CB0C:761:5B00:29D6:4241:36C0:5150 (talk) 07:09, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

False Documents in Theory
I'm enjoying this article, trying to relate it to things I know. Maybe 63% understanding it, which is not bad for me reading an article of this degree of abstraction.

But the section "False Documents in Theory" stumps me. What does that mean? (I confess to not having read any of the three examples given.) But where are you going with this section? Please can the text give some indication?

---

The story "The Naval Treaty", included in "Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes", includes a letter to Dr. Watson from his old schoolfellow, Percy Phelps.

To clarify your concept of "false document", does this make the letter a false document, or does it make the story a false document? I'm guessing the former, but I don't think the article makes this clear.

-

In the Holmes story "The Five Orange Pips" there is a "quotation" from the American Encyclopedia, read aloud by Holmes. In "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" (both are in the book "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes"), Holmes reads a newspaper clipping about a jewel robbery. I expect these are both false documents. If this is so, then many if not most of the Holmes stories contain false documents.

A fascinating idea. Thanks. Wanderer57 (talk) 00:38, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

PS I see the suggestion above to remove all examples from the article. Don't do that (IMHO). Some examples are essential to make the concept clear. Wanderer57 (talk) 00:43, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Wouldn't every Sherlock Holmes story be an example of this, since they are all told through Watson's diary? 216.56.6.249 (talk) 21:56, 8 August 2011 (UTC)

Frustrating Article
This article is interesting but very frustrating.

 * So many diverse things have been brought in as examples of false documents that the concept now seems to me generalized almost to the point of being meaningless and useless.

 * The last time a comment or question asked in the talk page was given a response was August 2006.

Does anyone (except me) have this article on their watchlist? Some feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks, Wanderer57 (talk) 19:05, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Dictionary meaning(s)

 * I just want it noted here that my CD Merriam-Webster dictionary has no entry for "false document"? Accordingly, how would one defend a charge this we have by this article a neologism? --Ludvikus (talk) 23:56, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

 * Here's an External Link showing contemporary usage (my own evidence that it's not a neologism): "False Document Venders, Criminal Aliens, and the Arizona Borders".

RFC: Scope of FALSE DOCUMENT article
The initial scope of this article was a "false document" as a literary device. Has the article become a catchall and lost its focus and value? Wanderer57 (talk) 16:55, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

Rama
Well, more specifically Rama 2. There is a small ammount of documentation in it, regarding the intelligence, social skills, and likelihood to get along with each other based on tests (it's been about a year or two since I read it last, you'll have to forgive my poor memory) but that there are fictional tests means that the documents from them would be false documents.. - NemFX (talk) 04:24, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

But it's Art...
Hi.

I saw this:

"I noticed this:

"The moral and legal implications of false document art are, by necessity, complex and perhaps insoluble. The difference between a great artistic achievement and a stunning forgery is slim."

But it's art, so if it's explicitly marked as such (art), then why is there a problem? Also, have the courts ever ruled on this (dobutful since the issues are possibly "insoluble", meaning no court on Earth would be able to untangle them.)? mike4ty4 (talk) 01:37, 2 July 2008 (UTC)

False document, or forgery?
What is the difference between a "false document" and a "forged document"?

Also, I cannot believe that "One of the earliest examples of the technique is the 16th century chivalric romance Amadis of Gaul (1508, Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo)." There must have been false documents around in biblical times.

--Austrian (talk) 23:38, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Re: Protocols of the Elders of Zion
It's a small point, and quite peripheral, but worth pointing out. Since it is difficult to imagine a typesetter working without a manuscript, we must assume that one existed. The contemporaries and enemies of Restif de la Bretonne have both attested to the author actually composing directly onto the page form of a printing press with moveable type. Despite writing in the 18th Century, this must make him the first author to write using the idea if not the actual artefact of a typewriter - or indeed, a wordprocessor. Nuttyskin (talk) 17:43, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

More documents
Would the "insertions" in the files at The National Archives (as mentioned on that WP page), and the Report from Iron Mountain be false documents? Jackiespeel (talk) 19:29, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

Tanaka memorial
What about the Tanaka memorial of the late 1930s?--68.175.35.188 (talk) 03:34, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Very confusing article
I am reading the article for the first time and for me it´s not possible to understand the meaning of "false document" from the text as it is. The first paragraph is not clear and does not resolve if it is a technique from literature, or an intended fraud. The spirit of the paragraph though makes to think that it aims to cheat on the receiver of the document. But the examples named below are in complete contradiction with that (nobody is expected to believe in Tlon, or Uqbar from Borges text, but it is shown as an example though).

English is not my first language so i am not sure wich meaning is correct. I originally searched for the article with the intention of knowing it — Preceding unsigned comment added by Titopte (talk • contribs) 00:19, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

Sub-sections
I suggest breaking the large list in this article into at least five and perhaps more separate lists. Distinguishing at least the following:

 * 1) Works where the "false document" element is merely marketing, e.g. "Fargo" falsely claimed to be a true story.
 * 2) Works which claim internally to be something they are not (e.g. Goldman's "The Princess Bride" has footnotes and interjections which keep up the pretence that it is an abridgement of an existing story by a fictional person)
 * 3) Fictional works that merely refer to other works that do not exist (this is arguably no different from referring to people or places that don't exist)
 * 4) Apparently factual works that were discovered to be in part or in whole fiction (fake diaries, that sort of thing)
 * 5) Fragmentary works created as part of a larger fiction, where the "entire" work never existed. e.g. the "Black Freighter" comics in Watchmen, or the introductions to non-existent books in Stanisław Lem's "Imaginary Magnitude")

82.69.171.91 (talk) 13:17, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

 * We have to distinguish false documents (which are made with the intent to deceive) from fictional documents (which are cited in order to create verisimilitude). DS (talk) 15:24, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

False documents and false documentation
Should the article False documentation become a subsection of this page - or is there a fundamental difference between the two? Alternatively, is there 'a natural divide' so material can be partitioned between the two pages? Jackiespeel (talk) 10:30, 3 May 2013 (UTC)

Seminar
The graduate-level seminar 'happened recently' - dates anyone? Jackiespeel (talk) 22:36, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

the Barsoom tradition
In the entry for Edgar Rice Burroughs, is it worth mentioning that imitators such as Lin Carter (Jandar of Callisto) use the same framing device? —Tamfang (talk) 23:19, 17 February 2016 (UTC)

 * A slightly older example: The Lost Continent: The Story of Atlantis (1899) is framed as a translation of Atlantean writings found in a cave on Gran Canaria. —Tamfang (talk) 21:02, 23 April 2016 (UTC)

Disambiguation?
It looks like some people have mentioned this before, but it seems like this article should be split into 2, and a disambiguation page made for the term "false document"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by CeraWithaC (talk • contribs) 20:49, 2 August 2017 (UTC)

Removal of db/hijack material
I just removed a chunk of text from the article. A template had been in place since August 2017 regarding the insertion of information that appeared to be an attempt to turn the article into an invalid kind of db page. The inserted material in the lede gave a separate meaning for "false document", and an opening section apparently added at the same time confused "false document" with "falsified or forged contracts and credentials". None of the material I removed was supported by sources. Before attempting to re-add this information, please consider that this article is about false documents as defined in the lede, and not about real-world business swindles and fake credentials. There is other material still in the article that should probably also be removed.

From other comments on this page, it seems that this article is becoming subject to the same kinds of misunderstanding as the article Unseen character.

There is a specific definition for a false document: it is a literary device, as stated in the lede, and has nothing to do with real-world forgeries, swindles, and propaganda. Someone suggested merging this with False documentation; while there is right now some overlap between the two, there should be none. A false document is a literary device used to make the fiction seem more "real"; it does not include works of propaganda created to drive an audience to action by misleading or misinforming them, it does not include falsified information intended to commit a real-world crime.

A legitimate example of a false document is Lovecraft's Necronomicon, which he encouraged his colleagues to mention in their works, giving the fictional book "a life of its own" and thus lending verisimilitude to any work of fiction that also mentioned it.

A real-world book is only a false document if it is presented as something it is not; William Goldman's The Princess Bride was purported by the author to be a translation of a lost manuscript when it was in fact an original creation by Goldman. Jay Anson's The Amityville Horror is a novel, but it was marketed initially as an account of a true story, incorporating the names of real people for some of the characters to make it seem to have a basis in reality (the fact that some of these real people were actually attempting fraud to escape a mortgage or engaging in embellishment to further their real-world careers does not make the book a false document; the claim that it is a journalistic account does).

Despite what someone commented earlier, an epistolary novel is not the same thing as a false document, but it may create false documents within the text to lend an aura of authenticity to the events of the plot; examples of this would be Dracula and House of Leaves, neither of which is a false document itself.

Adding to the confusion is the natural-language use of the phrase to refer to binding legal documents signed by parties that are intentionally misrepresenting their identities, goals or details of a legal matter. This is more properly termed an invalid document (once the fraud has been discovered), as opposed to a forgery, which is a document appearing to be legal or accurate which is intentionally otherwise. Either of these uses might more appropriately be termed a "falsified document" or false documentation. Canonblack (talk) 15:52, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

"Feigned manuscript" or "Found document" in literature is nothing to do with "False document" in real life
I'm afraid that the many threads above, going back nearly 20 years now, testify to one simple fact obvious to anyone who's read a book that incorporates the feigned manuscript conceit, which is that there is no connection between this literary device and the practice of forging passports or financial documents or whatever for criminal purposes in real life. It is quite plain that many editors have had exactly this opinion: not surprising as it's, well, visibly correct and easily verified.

 * "Feigned manuscript": a supposed document that plays a role, often merely contextual, in a work of fiction.

 * "False document": a forgery, used to support a criminal activity.

 * And the "Epistolary novel" is actually a third subject that doesn't belong here either.

I suggest that we create a separate article, say "Feigned manuscript", and put all the literary material over there. The pedestrian practice of using forged documents for gain can then stay here, and we can use a hatnote if anyone thinks such a thing is necessary to distinguish the two. Chiswick Chap (talk) 16:44, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

 * I would certainly encourage a new article. The article as it stands is a mess that can’t be rescued, though several of its pieces would probably be useful elsewhere. It begins with a summary (“A false document is a technique by which an author aims to increase verisimilitude in a work of fiction…”) that explicitly makes most of the rest of the article irrelevant. But to change the summary to make it actually summarize the rest of the article, we would have to say something like “A false document is a document that is false,” because the rest of the article is an accumulation of examples of documents that are false in wildly different contexts. Chiswick Chap’s divisions would help. Instead of “Feigned manuscript,” I’d suggest “False document (literary technique),” to take in documents that are not in manuscript: the published play The King in Yellow in the Robert W. Chambers stories, for example, or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in the Douglas Adams series.
 * Cbaile19 (talk) 17:37, 7 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Yup, this. 2A01:CB0C:761:5B00:29D6:4241:36C0:5150 (talk) 07:10, 25 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Although there is a phenomenon that actually muddies the waters a bit. Popular representations tend to engender commonly held beliefs. Thus "misrepresentations" that were originally meant as obvious conceits can gradually become vague background knowledge among the general populace. 2A01:CB0C:761:5B00:29D6:4241:36C0:5150 (talk) 07:17, 25 April 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:False document


text:
Fernando Pessoa

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa (13 June 1888 – 30 November 1935) was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher, and philosopher. He has been described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language. He also wrote in and translated from English and French.

Pessoa was a prolific writer both in his own name and approximately seventy-five other names, of which three stand out: Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. He did not define these as pseudonyms because he felt that this did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms, a term he invented. These imaginary figures sometimes held unpopular or extreme views.

Early life

Pessoa was born in Lisbon on 13 June 1888. When Pessoa was five, his father, Joaquim de Seabra Pessôa, died of tuberculosis, and less than seven months later his younger brother Jorge, aged one, also died (2 January 1889). After the second marriage of his mother, Maria Magdalena Pinheiro Nogueira, by a proxy wedding to João Miguel dos Santos Rosa, Fernando sailed with his mother for South Africa in early 1896 to join his stepfather, a military officer appointed Portuguese consul in Durban, capital of the former British Colony of Natal.

In a letter dated 8 February 1918, Pessoa wrote:

"There is only one event in the past which has both the definiteness and the importance required for rectification by direction; this is my father's death, which took place on 13 July 1893. My mother's second marriage (which took place on 30 December 1895) is another date which I can give with preciseness and it is important for me, not in itself, but in one of its results – the circumstance that, my stepfather becoming Portuguese Consul in Durban (Natal), I was educated there, this English education being a factor of supreme importance in my life, and, whatever my fate be, indubitably shaping it. The dates of the voyages related to the above event are (as nearly as possible):

1st. voyage to Africa – left Lisbon beginning January 1896.

Return – left Durban in the afternoon of 1st. August 1901.

2nd. voyage to Africa – left Lisbon about 20th. September 1902.

Return – left Durban about 20th. August 1905."

The young Pessoa received his early education at St. Joseph Convent School, a Roman Catholic grammar school run by Irish and French nuns. He moved to the Durban High School in April 1899, becoming fluent in English and developing an appreciation for English literature. During the Matriculation Examination, held at the time by the University of the Cape of Good Hope (forerunner of the University of Cape Town), in November 1903, he was awarded the recently created Queen Victoria Memorial Prize for best paper in English. While preparing to enter university, he also attended the Durban Commercial High School during one year, taking night classes.

Meanwhile, Pessoa started writing short stories in English, some under the name of David Merrick, many of which he left unfinished. At the age of sixteen, The Natal Mercury (edition of 6 July 1904) published his poem "Hillier did first usurp the realms of rhyme ...", under the name of C. R. Anon (anonymous), along with a brief introductory text: "I read with great amusement...". In December, The Durban High School Magazine published his essay "Macaulay". From February to June 1905, in the section "The Man in the Moon", The Natal Mercury also published at least four sonnets by Fernando Pessoa: "Joseph Chamberlain", "To England I", "To England II" and "Liberty". His poems often carried humorous versions of Anon as the author's name. Pessoa started using pen names quite young. The first one, still in his childhood, was Chevalier de Pas, supposedly a French noble. In addition to Charles Robert Anon and David Merrick, the young writer also signed up, among other pen names, as Horace James Faber, Alexander Search, and other meaningful names.

In the preface to The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa wrote about himself: "Nothing had ever obliged him to do anything. He had spent his childhood alone. He never joined any group. He never pursued a course of study. He never belonged to a crowd. The circumstances of his life were marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon – perhaps, in fact, it's true for all lives – of being tailored to the image and likeness of his instincts, which tended towards inertia and withdrawal."

The young Pessoa was described by a schoolfellow as follows: "I cannot tell you exactly how long I knew him, but the period during which I received most of my impressions of him was the whole of the year 1904 when we were at school together. How old he was at this time I don't know, but judge him to have 15 or 16. [...]

He was pale and thin and appeared physically to be very imperfectly developed. He had a narrow and contracted chest and was inclined to stoop. He had a peculiar walk and some defect in his eyesight gave to his eyes also a peculiar appearance, the lids seemed to drop over the eyes. [...]

He was regarded as a brilliant clever boy as, in spite of the fact that he had not spoken English in his early years, he had learned it so rapidly and so well that he had a splendid style in that language. Although younger than his schoolfellows of the same class he appeared to have no difficulty in keeping up with and surpassing them in work. For one of his age, he thought much and deeply and in a letter to me once complained of 'spiritual and material encumbrances of most especial adverseness'. [...]

He took no part in athletic sports of any kind and I think his spare time was spent on reading. We generally considered that he worked far too much and that he would ruin his health by so doing."

Ten years after his arrival, he sailed for Lisbon by East through the Suez Canal on board the "Herzog", leaving Durban for good at the age of seventeen. This journey inspired the poems "Opiário" (dedicated to his friend, the poet and writer Mário de Sá-Carneiro) published in March 1915, in the literary journal Orpheu nr.1 and "Ode Marítima" (dedicated to the futurist painter Santa-Rita) published in June 1915, in Orpheu nr.2 by his heteronym Álvaro de Campos.

Lisbon revisited

While his family remained in South Africa, Pessoa returned to Lisbon in 1905 to study diplomacy. After a period of illness, and two years of poor results, a student strike against the dictatorship of Prime Minister João Franco put an end to his formal studies. Pessoa became an autodidact and a devoted reader who spent much of his time in libraries. In August 1907, he started working as a practitioner at R.G. Dun & Company, an American mercantile information agency (currently D&B, Dun & Bradstreet). His grandmother died in September and left him a small inheritance, which he spent on setting up his own publishing house, the "Empreza Ibis". The venture was not successful and closed down in 1910, but the name ibis, the sacred bird of Ancient Egypt and inventor of the alphabet in Greek mythology, would remain an important symbolic reference for him.

Pessoa returned to his uncompleted formal studies, complementing his British education with self-directed study of Portuguese culture. The pre-revolutionary atmosphere surrounding the assassination of King Charles I and Crown Prince Luís Filipe in 1908, and the patriotic outburst resulting from the successful republican revolution in 1910, influenced the development of the budding writer; as did his step-uncle, Henrique dos Santos Rosa, a poet and retired soldier, who introduced the young Pessoa to Portuguese poetry, notably the romantics and symbolists of the 19th century.

In 1912, Fernando Pessoa entered the literary world with a critical essay, published in the cultural journal A Águia, which triggered one of the most important literary debates in the Portuguese intellectual world of the 20th century: the polemic regarding a super-Camões. In 1915 a group of artists and poets, including Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro and Almada Negreiros, created the literary magazine Orpheu, which introduced modernist literature to Portugal. Only two issues were published (Jan–Feb–Mar and Apr–May–Jun 1915), the third failed to appear due to funding difficulties. Lost for many years, this issue was finally recovered and published in 1984. Among other writers and poets, Orpheu published Pessoa, orthonym, and the modernist heteronym, Álvaro de Campos.

Along with the artist Ruy Vaz, Pessoa also founded the art journal Athena (1924–25), in which he published verses under the heteronyms Alberto Caeiro and Ricardo Reis. Along with his profession, as free-lance commercial translator, Fernando Pessoa undertook intense activity as a writer, literary critic and political analyst, contributing to the journals and newspapers A Águia (1912–13), A República (1913), Theatro (1913), A Renascença (1914), O Raio (1914), A Galera (1915), Orpheu (1915), O Jornal (1915), Eh Real! (1915), Exílio (1916), Centauro (1916), A Ideia Nacional (1916), Terra Nossa (1916), O Heraldo (1917), Portugal Futurista (1917), Acção (1919–20), Ressurreição (1920), Contemporânea (1922–26), Athena (1924–25), Diário de Lisboa (1924–35), Revista de Comércio e Contabilidade (1926), Sol (1926), O Imparcial (1927), Presença (1927–34), Revista Solução Editora (1929–1931), Notícias Ilustrado (1928–30), Girassol (1930), Revolução (1932), Descobrimento (1932), Fama (1932–33), Fradique (1934) and Sudoeste (1935).

Pessoa the flâneur
After his return to Portugal, when he was seventeen, Pessoa barely left his beloved city of Lisbon, which inspired the poems "Lisbon Revisited" (1923 and 1926), written under the heteronym Álvaro de Campos. From 1905 to 1920, when his family returned from Pretoria after the death of his stepfather, he lived in fifteen different locations in the city, moving from one rented room to another depending on his fluctuating finances and personal troubles.

Pessoa adopted the detached perspective of the flâneur Bernardo Soares, one of his heteronyms. This character was supposedly an accountant, working for Vasques, the boss of an office located in Douradores Street. Soares also supposedly lived in the same downtown street, a world that Pessoa knew quite well due to his long career as freelance correspondence translator. Indeed, from 1907 until his death in 1935, Pessoa worked in twenty-one firms located in Lisbon's downtown, sometimes in two or three of them simultaneously. In The Book of Disquiet, Bernardo Soares describes some of these typical places and describes one's "atmosphere". In his daydream soliloquy he also wrote about Lisbon in the first half of the 20th century. Soares describes crowds in the streets, buildings, shops, traffic, the river Tagus, the weather, and even its author, Fernando Pessoa:

"Fairly tall and thin, he must have been about thirty years old. He hunched over terribly when sitting down but less so standing up, and he dressed with a carelessness that wasn't entirely careless. In his pale, uninteresting face there was a look of suffering that didn't add any interest, and it was difficult to say just what kind of suffering this look suggested. It seemed to suggest various kinds: hardships, anxieties, and the suffering born of the indifference that comes from having already suffered a lot."

A statue of Pessoa sitting at a table (below) can be seen outside A Brasileira, one of the preferred places of young writers and artists of Orpheu's group during the 1910s. This coffeehouse, in the aristocratic district of Chiado, is quite close to Pessoa's birthplace: 4, São Carlos Square (just in front of Lisbon's Opera House, where stands another statue of the writer), one of the most elegant neighborhoods of Lisbon. Later on, Pessoa was a frequent customer at Martinho da Arcada, a centennial coffeehouse in Comercio Square, surrounded by ministries, almost an "office" for his private business and literary concerns, where he used to meet friends in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1925, Pessoa wrote in English a guidebook to Lisbon but it remained unpublished until 1992.

Literature and mysticism
Pessoa translated a number of Portuguese books into English, and into Portuguese The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the short stories "The Theory and the Hound", "The Roads We Take" and "Georgia's Ruling" by O. Henry. He has also translated into Portuguese the poems "Godiva" by Alfred Tennyson, "Lucy" by William Wordsworth, "Catarina to Camoens" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "Barbara Frietchie" by John Greenleaf Whittier, and "The Raven", "Annabel Lee" and "Ulalume" by Edgar Allan Poe who, along with Walt Whitman, strongly influenced him.

As a translator, Pessoa had his own method:

"A poem is an intellectualized impression, an idea made emotion, communicated by others by means of a rhythm. This rhythm is double in one, like the concave and convex aspects of the same arc: it is made up of a verbal or musical rhythm and of a visual or image rhythm which concurs inwardly with it. The translation of a poem should therefore conform absolutely (1) to the idea or emotion which constitutes the poem, (2) to the verbal rhythm in which that idea or emotion is expressed; it should conform relatively to the inner or visual rhythm, keeping to the images themselves when it can, but keeping always to the type of image. It was on this criterion that I based my translation into Portuguese of Poe's 'Annabel Lee' and 'Ulalume', which I translated, not because of their great intrinsic worth, but because they were a standing challenge to translators."

In addition, Pessoa translated into Portuguese some books by the leading theosophists Helena Blavatsky, Charles Webster Leadbeater, Annie Besant, and Mabel Collins.

In 1912–14, while living with his aunt "Anica" and cousins, Pessoa took part in "semi-spiritualist sessions" that were carried out at home, but he was considered a "delaying element" by the other members of the sessions. Pessoa's interest in spiritualism was truly awakened in the second half of 1915, while translating theosophist books. This was further deepened in the end of March 1916, when he suddenly started having experiences where he believed he became a medium, having experimented with automatic writing. On 24 June 1916, Pessoa wrote an impressive letter to his aunt and godmother, then living in Switzerland with her daughter and son-in-law, in which he describes this "mystery case" that surprised him.

Besides automatic writing, Pessoa stated also that he had "astral" or "etherial visions" and was able to see "magnetic auras" similar to radiographic images. He felt "more curiosity than fear", but was respectful towards this phenomenon and asked secrecy, because "there is no advantage, but many disadvantages" in speaking about this. Mediumship exerted a strong influence in Pessoa's writings, who felt "sometimes suddenly being owned by something else" or having a "very curious sensation" in the right arm, which was "lifted into the air" without his will. Looking in the mirror, Pessoa saw several times what appeared to be the heteronyms: his "face fading out" and being replaced by the one of "a bearded man", or in another instance, four men in total.

Pessoa also developed a strong interest in astrology, becoming a competent astrologer. He elaborated hundreds of horoscopes, including well-known people such as William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, Chopin, Robespierre, Napoleon I, Benito Mussolini, Wilhelm II, Leopold II of Belgium, Victor Emmanuel III, Alfonso XIII, or the Kings Sebastian and Charles of Portugal, and Salazar. In 1915, he created the heteronym Raphael Baldaya, an astrologer who planned to write "System of Astrology" and "Introduction to the Study of Occultism". Pessoa established the pricing of his astrological services from 500 to 5,000 réis and made horoscopes of relatives, friends, customers, also of himself and astonishingly of the heteronyms and journals as Orpheu.

The characters of the three main heteronyms were designed according to their horoscopes, with special reference to Mercury, the planet of literature. Each was also assigned to one of the four astral elements: air, fire, water and earth. For Pessoa, his heteronyms, taken together with his actual self, embodied the full principles of ancient knowledge. Astrology was part of his everyday life and he actively practiced it until his death.

As a mysticist, Pessoa was an enthusiast of esotericism, occultism, hermetism, numerology and alchemy. Along with spiritualism and astrology, he also paid attention to gnosticism, neopaganism, theosophy, rosicrucianism and freemasonry, which strongly influenced his literary work. He has declared himself a Pagan, in the sense of an "intellectual mystic of the sad race of the Neoplatonists from Alexandria" and a believer in "the Gods, their agency and their real and materially superior existence". His interest in occultism led Pessoa to correspond with Aleister Crowley and later helped him to elaborate a fake suicide, when Crowley visited Portugal in 1930. Pessoa translated Crowley's poem "Hymn To Pan" into Portuguese, and the catalogue of Pessoa's library shows that he possessed Crowley's books Magick in Theory and Practice and Confessions. Pessoa also wrote on Crowley's doctrine of Thelema in several fragments, including Moral.

Pessoa declared about secret societies:

"I am also very interested in knowing whether a second edition is shortly to be expected of Athur Edward Waite's The Secret Tradition in Freemasonery. I see that, in a note on page 14 of his Emblematic Freemasonery, published by you in 1925, he says, in respect of the earlier work: 'A new and revised edition is in the forefront of my literary schemes.' For all I know, you may already have issued such an edition; if so, I have missed the reference in The Times Literary Supplement. Since I am writing on these subjects, I should like to put a question which perhaps you can reply to; but please do not do so if the reply involves any inconvenience. I believe The Occult Review was, or is, issued by yourselves; I have not seen any number for a long time. My question is in what issue of that publication – it was certainly a long while ago – an article was printed relating to the Roman Catholic Church as a Secret Society, or, alternatively, to a Secret Society within the Roman Catholic Church."

Literary critic Martin Lüdke described Pessoa's philosophy as a kind of pandeism, especially those writings under the heteronym Alberto Caeiro.

Writing a lifetime

In his early years, Pessoa was influenced by major English classic poets such as Shakespeare, Milton and Pope, and romantics like Shelley, Byron, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Tennyson. After his return to Lisbon in 1905, Pessoa was influenced by French symbolists and decadents such as Charles Baudelaire, Maurice Rollinat, and Stéphane Mallarmé. He was also importantly influenced by the Portuguese poets as Antero de Quental, Gomes Leal, Cesário Verde, António Nobre, Camilo Pessanha and Teixeira de Pascoaes. Later on, he was also influenced by the modernists W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, among many other writers.

During World War I, Pessoa wrote to a number of British publishers, namely Constable & Co. Ltd. (currently Constable & Robinson), trying to arrange publication of his collection of English verse The Mad Fiddler (unpublished during his lifetime), but it was refused. However, in 1920, the prestigious literary journal Athenaeum included one of those poems. Since the attempt at British publication failed, in 1918 Pessoa published in Lisbon two slim volumes of English verse: Antinous and 35 Sonnets, received by the British literary press without enthusiasm. Along with some friends, he founded another publishing house, Olisipo, which published in 1921 a further two English poetry volumes: English Poems I–II and English Poems III by Fernando Pessoa. In his publishing house, Pessoa also issued some books by his friends: A Invenção do Dia Claro (The Invention of the Clear Day) by José de Almada Negreiros, Canções (Songs) by António Botto, and Sodoma Divinizada (Deified Sodom) by Raul Leal (Henoch). Olisipo closed down in 1923, following the scandal known as "Literatura de Sodoma" (Literature of Sodom), which Pessoa started with his paper "António Botto e o Ideal Estético em Portugal" (António Botto and the Aesthetic Ideal in Portugal), published in the journal Contemporanea.

Politically, Pessoa described himself as "a British-style conservative, that is to say, liberal within conservatism and absolutely anti-reactionary," and adhered closely to the Spencerian individualism of his upbringing. He described his brand of nationalism as "mystic, cosmopolitan, liberal, and anti-Catholic." He was an outspoken elitist and aligned himself against communism, socialism, fascism and Catholicism. He initially rallied to the First Portuguese Republic but the ensuing instability caused him to reluctantly support the military coups of 1917 and 1926 as a means of restoring order and preparing the transition to a new constitutional normality. He wrote a pamphlet in 1928 supportive of the military dictatorship but after the establishment of the New State, in 1933, Pessoa became disenchanted with the regime and wrote critically of Salazar and fascism in general, maintaining a hostile stance towards its corporatist program, illiberalism, and censorship. In the beginning of 1935, Pessoa was banned by the Salazar regime, after he wrote in defense of Freemasonry. The regime also suppressed two articles Pessoa wrote in which he condemned Mussolini's invasion of Abyssinia and fascism as a threat to human liberty everywhere.

On 29 November 1935, Pessoa was taken to the Hospital de São Luís, suffering from abdominal pain and a high fever; there he wrote, in English, his last words: "I know not what tomorrow will bring." He died the next day, 30 November 1935, around 8 pm, aged 47. His cause of death is commonly given as cirrhosis of the liver, due to alcoholism, though this is disputed: others attribute his death to pancreatitis (again from alcoholism),  or other ailments.

In his lifetime, he published four books in English and one alone in Portuguese: Mensagem (Message). However, he left a lifetime of unpublished, unfinished or just sketchy work in a domed, wooden trunk (25,574 manuscript and typed pages which have been housed in the Portuguese National Library since 1988). The heavy burden of editing this huge work is still in progress. In 1985 (fifty years after his death), Pessoa's remains were moved to the Hieronymites Monastery, in Lisbon, where Vasco da Gama, Luís de Camões, and Alexandre Herculano are also buried. Pessoa's portrait was on the 100-escudo banknote.

The triumphant day
"[…] on 8 March 1914 – I found myself standing before a tall chest of drawers, took up a piece of paper, began to write, remaining upright all the while since I always stand when I can. I wrote thirty some poems in a row, all in a kind of ecstasy, the nature of which I shall never fathom. It was the triumphant day of my life, and I shall never have another like it. I began with a title, The Keeper of Sheep. And what followed was the appearance of someone within me to whom I promptly assigned the name of Alberto Caeiro. Please excuse the absurdity of what I am about to say, but there had appeared within me, then and there, my own master. It was my immediate sensation. So much so that, with those thirty odd poems written, I immediately took up another sheet of paper and wrote as well, in a row, the six poems that make up 'Oblique Rain' by Fernando Pessoa. Immediately and totally... It was the return from Fernando Pessoa/Alberto Caeiro to Fernando Pessoa alone. Or better still, it was Fernando Pessoa's reaction to his own inexistence as Alberto Caeiro." As the heteronym Coelho Pacheco, over a long period Pessoa's "triumphant day" was taken as real, however, it has been proved that this event was one more fiction created by Pessoa.

Heteronyms

Pessoa's earliest heteronym, at the age of six, was Chevalier de Pas, a fictitious knight whom he wrote to himself as. Other childhood heteronyms included the poet Dr. Pancrácio and short story writer David Merrick, followed by Charles Robert Anon, a young Englishman who became Pessoa's alter ego. When Pessoa was a student at the University of Lisbon, Anon was replaced by Alexander Search. Search represented a transition heteronym that Pessoa used while searching to adapt to the Portuguese cultural reality. As a result, Pessoa would write many English poems, specifically sonnets, and short stories under the Search heteronym, including "A Very Original Dinner", which was posthumously published after its recovery and subsequent reproduction by Portuguese literary historian Maria Leonor Machado de Sousa. After the 5 October 1910 revolution and its subsequently patriotic atmosphere, Pessoa created another alter ego, Álvaro de Campos, supposedly a Portuguese naval and mechanical engineer, who was born in Tavira, hometown of Pessoa's ancestors, and graduated in Glasgow. Translator and literary critic Richard Zenith notes that Pessoa eventually established at least seventy-two heteronyms. According to Pessoa himself, Zenith says, there were three main heteronyms of them all: Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. Pessoa's heteronyms differ from pen names, as they possess distinct biographies, temperaments, philosophies, appearances, writing styles, and even signatures. Thus, heteronyms often disagree on various topics as well as argue and discuss with each other about literature, aesthetics, philosophy, and so on.

Regarding the heteronyms, Pessoa wrote: "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...)."

Alberto Caeiro
Alberto Caeiro was the first heteronym which Pessoa considered to be great or seminal. Through that heteronym, Pessoa wrote exclusively poetry. According to an anthology edited by Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari titled The Collected Works of Alberto Caeiro, "This imaginary author was a shepherd who spent most of his life in the countryside, had almost no education, and was ignorant of most literature."

Critics note that Caeiro's poems demonstrate wide-eyed childlike wonder at nature. Octavio Paz, in translating his work, refers to him as an "innocent poet". Specifically, Paz observes Caeiro's willingness to accept reality as such rather than attempting to dress it up in what other poets would consider to be aesthetic. Rather than using poetry as an interpretative and transformative device, Paz argues, Caeiro simply wrote poetry as such. In other words, Caiero's method is phenomenological as opposed to aesthetic.

Such a philosophy makes Caeiro contrast greatly with his creator, Pessoa, who was deferential to modernism and thus interrogates the world around him rather than merely experience it. Pessoa regarded him as follows: "He sees things with the eyes only, not with the mind. He does not let any thoughts arise when he looks at a flower ... the only thing a stone tells him is that it has nothing at all to tell him ... this way of looking at a stone may be described as the totally unpoetic way of looking at it. The stupendous fact about Caeiro is that out of this sentiment, or rather, absence of sentiment, he makes poetry."

The critic Jane M. Sheets notes that the creation of Caeiro was a necessary precursor to the later heteronyms to follow by providing a universalizing poetic vision from which others could be derived. While Caeiro was a short-lived heteronym in Pessoa's career, it established several tenets which would inevitably appear in the works of Campos, Reis, and Pessoa's own work.

Ricardo Reis

In a letter to William Bentley, Pessoa wrote that "a knowledge of the language would be indispensable, for instance, to appraise the 'Odes' of Ricardo Reis, whose Portuguese would draw upon him the blessing of António Vieira, as his stile and diction that of Horace (he has been called, admirably I believe, 'a Greek Horace who writes in Portuguese')".

Reis, both a character and a heteronym of Fernando Pessoa himself, sums up his philosophy of life in his own words, admonishing, "See life from a distance. Never question it. There's nothing it can tell you." Like Caeiro, whom he admires, Reis defers from questioning life. He prides himself as a modern pagan who urges one to seize the day and accept fate with tranquility. "Wise is the one who does not seek. The seeker will find in all things the abyss, and doubt in himself." In such sense, Reis shares essential affinities with Caeiro.

Believing in the Greek gods, yet living in a Christian Europe, Reis feels that his spiritual life is limited and true happiness cannot be attained. Such feeling—paired with his belief in Fate as a driving force for all that exists and thus disregarding freedom—leads to his epicureanist philosophy, which entails the avoidance of pain, defending that man should seek tranquility and calm above all else, avoiding emotional extremes.

Where Caeiro wrote freely and spontaneously, with joviality, of his basic, meaningless connection to the world, Reis writes in an austere, cerebral manner, with premeditated rhythm and structure and a particular attention to the correct use of the language when approaching his subjects of, as characterized by Richard Zenith, "the brevity of life, the vanity of wealth and struggle, the joy of simple pleasures, patience in time of trouble, and avoidance of extremes".

In his detached, intellectual approach, he is closer to Fernando Pessoa's constant rationalization, as such representing the orthonym's wish for measure and sobriety and a world free of troubles and respite, in stark contrast to Caeiro's spirit and style. As such, where Caeiro's predominant attitude is that of joviality, his sadness being accepted as natural ("My sadness is a comfort for it is natural and right."), Reis is marked by melancholy, saddened by the impermanence of all things.

Ricardo Reis is the main character of José Saramago's 1986 novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis.

Álvaro de Campos

Álvaro de Campos manifests, in a way, as a hyperbolic version of Pessoa himself. Of the three heteronyms he is the one who feels most strongly, his motto being 'to feel everything in every way.' 'The best way to travel,' he wrote, 'is to feel.' As such, his poetry is the most emotionally intense and varied, constantly juggling two fundamental impulses: on the one hand a feverish desire to be and feel everything and everyone, declaring that 'in every corner of my soul stands an altar to a different god' (alluding to Walt Whitman's desire to 'contain multitudes'), on the other, a wish for a state of isolation and a sense of nothingness.

As a result, his mood and principles varied between violent, dynamic exultation, as he fervently wishes to experience the entirety of the universe in himself, in all manners possible (a particularly distinctive trait in this state being his futuristic leanings, including the expression of great enthusiasm as to the meaning of city life and its components) and a state of nostalgic melancholy, where life is viewed as, essentially, empty.

One of the poet's constant preoccupations, as part of his dichotomous character, is that of identity: he does not know who he is, or rather, fails at achieving an ideal identity. Wanting to be everything, and inevitably failing, he despairs. Unlike Caeiro, who asks nothing of life, he asks too much. In his poetic meditation 'Tobacco Shop' he asks:

"How should I know what I'll be, I who don't know what I am? To be what I think? But I think of being so many things!"

Message

Mensagem, written in Portuguese, is a symbolist epic made up of 44 short poems organized in three parts or Cycles:

The first, called "Brasão" (Coat-of-Arms), relates Portuguese historical protagonists to each of the fields and charges in the Portuguese coat of arms. The first two poems ("The castles" and "The escutcheons") draw inspiration from the material and spiritual natures of Portugal. Each of the remaining poems associates to each charge a historical personality. Ultimately they all lead to the Golden Age of Discovery.

The second Part, called "Mar Português" (Portuguese Sea), references the country's Age of Portuguese Exploration and to its seaborne Empire that ended with the death of King Sebastian at El-Ksar el Kebir (Alcácer-Quibir in Portuguese) in 1578. Pessoa brings the reader to the present as if he had woken up from a dream of the past, to fall in a dream of the future: he sees King Sebastian returning and still bent on accomplishing a Universal Empire.

The third Cycle, called "O Encoberto" ("The Hidden One"), refers to Pessoa's vision of a future world of peace and the Fifth Empire (which, according to Pessoa, is spiritual and not material, because if it were material England would already have achieved it). After the Age of Force (Vis), and Taedium (Otium) will come Science (understanding) through a reawakening of "The Hidden One", or "King Sebastian". The Hidden One represents the fulfillment of the destiny of mankind, designed by God since before Time, and the accomplishment of Portugal.

King Sebastian is very important, indeed he appears in all three parts of Mensagem. He represents the capacity of dreaming, and believing that it's possible to achieve dreams.

One of the most famous quotes from Mensagem is the first line from O Infante (belonging to the second Part), which is Deus quer, o homem sonha, a obra nasce (which translates roughly to "God wishes, man dreams, the work is born"). Another well-known quote from Mensagem is the first line from Ulysses, "O mito é o nada que é tudo" (a possible translation is "The myth is the nothing that is all"). This poem refers to Ulysses, king of Ithaca, as Lisbon's founder (recalling an ancient Greek myth).

Literary essays

In 1912, Fernando Pessoa wrote a set of essays (later collected as The New Portuguese Poetry) for the cultural journal A Águia (The Eagle), founded in Oporto, in December 1910, and run by the republican association Renascença Portuguesa. In the first years of the Portuguese Republic, this cultural association was started by republican intellectuals led by the writer and poet Teixeira de Pascoaes, philosopher Leonardo Coimbra and historian Jaime Cortesão, aiming for the renewal of Portuguese culture through the aesthetic movement called Saudosismo. Pessoa contributed to the journal A Águia with a series of papers: 'The new Portuguese Poetry Sociologically Considered' (nr. 4), 'Relapsing...' (nr. 5) and 'The Psychological Aspect of the new Portuguese Poetry' (nrs. 9,11 and 12). These writings were strongly encomiastic to saudosist literature, namely the poetry of Teixeira de Pascoaes and Mário Beirão. The articles disclose Pessoa as a connoisseur of modern European literature and an expert of recent literary trends. On the other hand, he does not care much for a methodology of analysis or problems in the history of ideas. He states his confidence that Portugal would soon produce a great poet – a super-Camões – pledged to make an important contribution for European culture, and indeed, for humanity.

Philosophical essays
The philosophical notes of the young Pessoa, mostly written between 1905 and 1912, illustrate his debt to the history of philosophy more through commentators than through a first-hand protracted reading of the Classics, ancient or modern. The issues he engages with pertain to every philosophical discipline and concern a large profusion of concepts, creating a vast semantic spectrum in texts whose length varies between half a dozen lines and half a dozen pages and whose density of analysis is extremely variable; simple paraphrasis, expression of assumptions and original speculation.

Pessoa sorted the philosophical systems thus: Such pantheist transcendentalism is used by Pessoa to define the project that "encompasses and exceeds all systems"; to characterize the new poetry of Saudosismo where the "typical contradiction of this system" occurs; to inquire of the particular social and political results of its adoption as the leading cultural paradigm; and, at last, he hints that metaphysics and religiosity strive "to find in everything a beyond".
 * 1) Relative Spiritualism and relative Materialism privilege "Spirit" or "Matter" as the main pole that organizes data around Experience.
 * 2) Absolute Spiritualist and Absolute Materialist "deny all objective reality to one of the elements of Experience".
 * 3) The materialistic Pantheism of Spinoza and the spiritualizing Pantheism of Malebranche, "admit that experience is a double manifestation of any thing that in its essence has no matter neither spirit".
 * 4) Considering both elements as an "illusory manifestation", of a transcendent and true and alone realities, there is Transcendentalism, inclined into matter with Schopenhauer, or into spirit, a position where Bergson could be emplaced.
 * 5) A terminal system "the limited and summit of metaphysics" would not radicalize – as poles of experience – one of the single categories: matter, relative, absolute, real, illusory, spirit. Instead, matching all categories, it takes contradiction as "the essence of the universe" and defends that "an affirmation is so more true insofar the more contradiction involves". The transcendent must be conceived beyond categories. There is one only and eternal example of it. It is that cathedral of thought -the philosophy of Hegel.

Works

 * Antinous: a poem, Lisbon: Monteiro & Co., 1918 (16 p., 20 cm). Portugal: PURL.
 * 35 Sonnets, Lisbon: Monteiro & Co., 1918 (20 pp., 20 cm). Portugal: PURL.
 * English Poems, 2 vols. (vol. 1 part I – Antinous, part II – Inscriptions; vol. 2 part III – Epithalamium), Lisbon: Olisipo, 1921 (vol. 1, 20 pp.; vol. 2, 16 pp., 24 cm). Portugal: PURL.
 * Selected Poems, tr. Edwin Honig, Swallow Press, 1971. ISBN B000XU4FE4
 * Selected Poems, tr. Peter Rickard, University of Texas Press, 1972
 * The Book of Disquiet (first published 1982; multiple translations and editions exist)
 * Fernando Pessoa: Self-Analysis and Thirty Other Poems, tr. George Monteiro, Gavea-Brown Publications, 1989. ISBN 0-943722-14-4
 * Message, tr. Jonathan Griffin, introduction by Helder Macedo, Menard Press, 1992. ISBN 1-905700-27-X
 * The Anarchist Banker and Other Portuguese Stories. Carcanet Press, 1996. ISBN 978-1-8575420-6-6
 * The Keeper of Sheep, bilingual edition, tr. Edwin Honig & Susan M. Brown, Sheep Meadow, 1997. ISBN 1-878818-45-7
 * Fernando Pessoa & Co: Selected Poems, tr. Richard Zenith, Grove Press, 1999. ISBN 0-8021-3627-3
 * Selected Poems: with New Supplement  tr. Jonathan Griffin, Penguin Classics; 2nd edition, 2000. ISBN 0-14-118433-7
 * Sheep's Vigil by a Fervent Person: A Translation of Alberto Caeiro/Fernando Pessoa, tr. Erin Moure, House of Anansi, 2001. ISBN 0-88784-660-2
 * The Education of the Stoic, tr. Richard Zenith, afterwords by Antonio Tabucchi and Richard Zenith, Exact Change, 2005. ISBN 1-878972-40-5
 * A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems, tr. Richard Zenith, Penguin Classics, 2006. ISBN 0-14-303955-5
 * A Centenary Pessoa, tr. Keith Bosley & L. C. Taylor, foreword by Octavio Paz, Carcanet Press, 2006. ISBN 1-85754-724-1
 * Philosophical Essays: A Critical Edition. Edited with notes and introduction by Nuno Ribeiro. New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-9836972-6-8
 * The Transformation Book — or Book of Tasks. Edited with notes and introduction by Nuno Ribeiro and Cláudia Souza. New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2014.
 * Un libro muy original | A Very Original Book [as Alexander Search]. Bilingual edition with notes by Natalia Jerez Quintero. Medellin: Tragaluz, 2014.
 * The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro. Edited by Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari. New York City: New Directions, 2020.
 * Writings on Art & Poetical Theory (2022). Edited with notes and introduction by Nuno Ribeiro and Cláudia Souza. New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2022.
 * The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari. New York City: New Directions, 2023.
 * Philosophical Essays: A Critical Edition. Edited with notes and introduction by Nuno Ribeiro. New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-9836972-6-8
 * The Transformation Book — or Book of Tasks. Edited with notes and introduction by Nuno Ribeiro and Cláudia Souza. New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2014.
 * Un libro muy original | A Very Original Book [as Alexander Search]. Bilingual edition with notes by Natalia Jerez Quintero. Medellin: Tragaluz, 2014.
 * The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro. Edited by Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari. New York City: New Directions, 2020.
 * Writings on Art & Poetical Theory (2022). Edited with notes and introduction by Nuno Ribeiro and Cláudia Souza. New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2022.
 * The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari. New York City: New Directions, 2023.
 * The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro. Edited by Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari. New York City: New Directions, 2020.
 * Writings on Art & Poetical Theory (2022). Edited with notes and introduction by Nuno Ribeiro and Cláudia Souza. New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2022.
 * The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari. New York City: New Directions, 2023.

In Popular Culture
Poetry from Fernando Pessoa appears in many films. For example, a quote from Autopsychography opens the Korean film The Cage (2017) by Iranian director Lior Shamriz. The 1982 film Five and the Skin was based on Pessoa's Book of Disquiet.

The 2008 film The night Fernando Pessoa met Constantine Cavafy, directed by Stelios Haralambopoulos focuses on a meeting between Constantine P. Cavafy and Pessoa on board a transatlantic ship.

Books

 * Gray de Castro, Mariana, ed. Fernando Pessoa's Modernity Without Frontiers: Influences, Dialogues, Responses. Vol. 320. Tamesis Books, 2013.
 * Green, J. C. R. Fernando Pessoa: The Genesis of the Heteronyms. Isle of Skye: Aquila, 1982.
 * Jackson, Kenneth David. Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa. New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
 * Jennings, Hubert D. and Carlos Pittella. Fernando Pessoa, the Poet with Many Faces: A biography and anthology. Providence, RI: Gavea-Brown, 2018.
 * Klobucka, Anna and Mark Sabine, (eds.). Embodying Pessoa: Corporeality, Gender, Sexuality. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.
 * Kotowicz, Zbigniew. Fernando Pessoa: Voices of a Nomadic Soul. London: Menard, 1996.
 * Lancastre, Maria José de and Antonio Tabucchi. Fernando Pessoa: Photographic Documentation and Caption.Paris : Hazan, 1997.
 * Lisboa, Eugénio and L. C. Taylor. A Centenary Pessoa. Manchester, England: Carcanet, 1995.
 * McGuirk, Bernard. Three Persons on One: A Centenary Tribute to Fernando Pessoa. Nottingham, England: University of Nottingham, 1988.
 * Monteiro, George. Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-century Anglo-American Literature. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2000.
 * Monteiro, George. The Man Who Never Was: Essays on Fernando Pessoa. Providence, RI: Gávea-Brown, 1982.
 * Monteiro, George. The Presence of Pessoa: English, American, and Southern African Literary Responses. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1998.
 * Pessoa's Alberto Caeiro. Dartmouth, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, 2000.
 * Santos, Maria Irene Ramalho Sousa. Atlantic Poets: Fernando Pessoa's Turn in Anglo-American Modernism. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2003.
 * Sadlier, Darlene J. An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa, Literary Modernist. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998.
 * Terlinden-Villepin, Anne. Fernando Pessoa: The Bilingual Portuguese Poet. Brussels: Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, 1990.
 * Zenith, Richard. Pessoa: A Biography. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2021, ISBN 9781324090779. Also published as Pessoa: An Experimental Life. London: Allen Lane, 2021.

Articles

 * Anderson, R. N., "The Static Drama of Pessoa, Fernando", Hispanofila (104): 89–97 (January 1992).
 * Bloom, Harold, "Fernando Pessoa" in Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. New York: Warner Books, 2002.
 * Brown, S. M., "The Whitman Pessoa Connection", Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 9 (1): 1–14 SUM 1991.
 * Bunyan, D, "The South-African Pessoa: Fernando 20th Century Portuguese Poet", English in Africa 14 (1), May 1987, pp. 67–105.
 * Cruz, Anne J., "Masked Rhetoric: Contextuality in Fernando Pessoa's Poems", Romance Notes, vol. XXIX, no. 1 (Fall, 1988), pp. 55–60.
 * De Castro, Mariana, |A153241195&v=2.1&it=r&sid=googleScholar&asid=592ef5ac "Oscar Wilde, Fernando Pessoa, and the art of lying", Portuguese Studies 22 (2): 219, 2006. JSTOR
 * Dyer, Geoff, "Heteronyms", The New Statesman, vol. 4 (6 December 1991), p. 46.
 * Eberstadt, Fernanda, "Proud of His Obscurity", The New York Times Book Review, vol. 96, (1 September 1991), p. 26.
 * Ferrari, Patricio. "Proverbs in Fernando Pessoa's works", Proverbium, vol. 31, pp. 235–244.
 * Guyer, Leland, "Fernando Pessoa and the Cubist Perspective", Hispania, vol. 70, no. 1 (March 1987), pp. 73–78.
 * Haberly, David T., "Fernando Pessoa: Overview" in Lesley Henderson (ed.), Reference Guide to World Literature, 2nd ed. St. James Press, 1995.
 * Hicks, J., "The Fascist imaginary in Pessoa and Pirandello", Centennial Review 42 (2): 309–332 SPR 1998.
 * Hollander, John, "Quadrophenia", The New Republic, 7 September 1987, pp. 33–6.
 * Howes, R. W., "Pessoa, Fernando, Poet, Publisher, and Translator", British Library Journal 9 (2): 161–170 1983.
 * Jennings, Hubert D., "In Search of Fernando Pessoa" Contrast 47 – South African Quarterly, vol. 12 no. 3 (June 1979).
 * Lopes J. M., "Cubism and intersectionism in Fernando Pessoa's 'Chuva Obliqua", Texte (15–16),1994, pp. 63–95.
 * Mahr, G., "Pessoa, life narrative, and the dissociative process" in Biography 21 (1) Winter 1998, pp. 25–35.
 * McNeill, Pods, "The aesthetic of fragmentation and the use of personae in the poetry of Fernando Pessoa and W. B. Yeats", Portuguese Studies 19: 110–121 2003.
 * Monteiro, George, "The Song of the Reaper-Pessoa and Wordsworth", Portuguese Studies 5, 1989, pp. 71–80.
 * Muldoon P., "In the hall of mirrors: 'Autopsychography' by Fernando Pessoa", New England Review 23 (4), Fall 2002, pp. 38–52.
 * Pasi, Marco, "September 1930, Lisbon: Aleister Crowley’s lost diary of his Portuguese trip" Pessoa Plural, no. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 253–283.
 * Pasi, Marco & Ferrari, Patricio, "Fernando Pessoa and Aleister Crowley: New discoveries and a new analysis of the documents in the Gerald Yorke Collection", Pessoa Plural, no. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 284–313.
 * Phillips, A., "Pessoa's Appearances" in Promises, Promises, London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2000, pp. 113–124.
 * Polito, Robert, "Fernando Pessoa" Bomb Magazine, Issue #65, 1 October 1998.
 * Ribeiro, A. S., "A tradition of empire: Fernando Pessoa and Germany", Portuguese Studies 21: 201–209, 2005
 * Riccardi, Mattia, "Dionysus or Apollo? The heteronym Antonio Mora as moment of Nietzsche's reception by Pessoa", Portuguese Studies 23 (1), 109, 2007.
 * Rosenthal, David H., "Unpredictable Passions", The New York Times Book Review, 13 December 1987, p. 32.
 * Seabra, J.A., "Pessoa, Fernando Portuguese Modernist Poet", Europe 62 (660): 41–53 1984.
 * Severino, Alexandrino E., "Fernando Pessoa's Legacy: The Presença and After", World Literature Today, vol. 53, no. 1 (Winter, 1979), pp. 5–9.
 * Severino, Alexandrino E., "Pessoa, Fernando – A Modern Lusiad", Hispania 67 (1): 52–60 1984.
 * Severino, Alexandrino E., "Was Pessoa Ever in South Africa?" Hispania, vol. 74, no. 3 (September 1991).
 * Sheets, Jane M., "Fernando Pessoa as Anti-Poet: Alberto Caeiro", Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, vol. XLVI, no. 1 (January 1969), pp. 39–47.
 * Sousa, Ronald W., "The Structure of Pessoa's Mensagem", Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, vol. LIX, no. 1, January 1982, pp. 58–66.
 * Steiner, George, "A man of many parts", The Observer, 3 June 2001.
 * Suarez, Jose, "Fernando Pessoa's acknowledged involvement with the occult", Hispania 90 (2): (May 2007), 245–252.
 * Wood, Michael, "Mod and Great" The New York Review of Books, vol. XIX, no. 4 (21 September 1972), pp. 19–22.
 * Wood, Michael, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" The New York Review of Books (24 October 1991).
 * Zenith, Richard, "Pessoa, Fernando and the Theater of his Self", Performing Arts Journal (44), May 1993, pp. 47–49.

Videos
Professor Jacksons research interests focus on Portuguese and Brazilian Literatures; modernist and inter-arts literature; Portuguese culture in Asia; and ethnomusicology. He has written and edited several books and other publications. We talk with Professor Jackson about his forthcoming book, Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa.
 * Professor David Jackson: Adverse Genres in Fernando Pessoa 10:20. Yale University, 11/12/2009.

18 November 2013, at the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University.
 * PESSOA & OTHER POETS IN THE PORTUGUESE: An Evening with Translator Richard Zenith 1:35:17.

As a part of our Omniglot Seminar series, Portuguese translator Richard Zenith read from his translations of Luís de Camões, Fernando Pessoa and Carlos Drummond de Andrade. He compared his experiences translating archaic vs. contemporary linguistic registers, highly formal poetry vs. free verse, and European vs. Brazilian Portuguese. And he discussed the unique challenge of translating (and researching a biography of) a poet such as Pessoa, with alter egos that wrote in radically different styles.

Richard Zenith presented a lecture on Fernando Pessoa, one of Portugal's most important literary figures of the 20th century and a towering figure in modernism.
 * Fernando Pessoa: An Englishly Portuguese, Endlessly Multiple Poet 1:04:12. Library of Congress, 22/04/2015.

In this poem, Pessoa creates an inner struggle that the speaker has with trying to figure out whether it was fate or free will that has determined how his life panned out. By making the whole poem essentially one, elongated metaphor, Pessoa is able to give multiple interpretations to his poem. In the titular first line of the first stanza, Pessoa states "I don’t know how many souls I have". Automatically, Pessoa causes the speaker to question his morality and inner being. Line two of the first stanza has a literal translation of "each time changed." When put in context, it becomes apparent that the speaker is referring to himself that changes so often. These two lines become the foundation for the rest of the poem, seeing as they set up a questioning within the speaker. The translations of these two lines are also crucial to fully grasp the meaning of the poem as a whole.
 * I Don't know How Many Souls I Have - Fernando Pessoa 02:16. WisdoMango, 15/11/2020.

 * Fine Poetry - Poems of Fernando Pessoa 15:46. Richard Eggenberger, 31/01/2018.
 * "Pop" by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Richard Zenith 01:14. Poem read by David Novak, 07/01/2021.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Fernando Pessoa