Heteronyms differ from noms de plume (or pseudonyms, from the Greek “False Name”) in that the latter are just false names, while the former are characters having their own supposed physiques, biographies and writing styles.
«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…)»
- Fernando Pessoa, Letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, 13.01.1935, in The Book of Disquiet, Penguin classics, 2003, p. 474.dd
Here’s the Wiki’s list of known Pessoa heteronyms. Maybe if you’re listening you’ll hear from one of them tomorrow…- (UPDATE: Here you go.)
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