About In the Footsteps of a Shadow: Literary Responses to Fernando Pessoa 

Poets and writers in the US have been captivated by the Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa since Thomas Merton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Edwin Honig, and Susan Brown began translating his work in the 60s and 70s. George Monteiro was instrumental, through his creative and scholarly work, in bringing Pessoa to wider audiences outside of Portugal and Erin Moure & Richard Zenith has been just as instrumental keeping those Pessoa fires burning. This anthology is the first of its kind and represents the huge influence Pessoa has had on the modern and contemporary literary scene. To that end, we have work from over one hundred poets and writers in this anthology. 

Pessoa once said, “To pretend is to know oneself.” He took this maxim to the extreme, creating upwards of eighty clearly defined heteronyms that wrote poetry and prose and interacted with each other, the world, and even their creator. These heteronyms were not pseudonyms or disguises but were the spiraling iterations of a person (“Pessoa” means “person” in Portuguese) who ultimately declared—in true Whitmanian form— “I only know myself as a symphony.” Pessoa is utterly contemporary in this time where authors create or dissolve identities at will, write novels on twitter, and plaster their avatars on social media walls. Kent Johnson considers the future of the culture industry when 10,000 heteronyms are writing to and about each other through time, “re-valuing, dis-assembling, re-making the canon… Heteronyms can float through the walls of the Museum at will.” But the work in this anthology also addresses questions how writers engage the variations of “self” internalized by the act of writing. As contributor Chris Merrill so succinctly puts it, “…the voices running through my lines seem to come from somewhere else, in the manner of his heteronyms. Pessoa taught me how to listen.” In this anthology readers will find writing that is playful, absurd, profound, and welcoming.

Pessoa in the current literary landscape. In 2017, New Directions published an expanded edition of The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa’s factless autobiography, and in 2020, New Directions came out with The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro (a Pessoa heteronym). In 2021, Liveright (Norton) published Pessoa: A Biography a mammoth book written by Pessoa scholar and translator Richard Zenith. Not to mention all of the recent essays about Pessoa and his heteronyms one can find by just googling his name: New Yorker, Lithub, Hyperallergic, Entropy, The Millions, etc.