El Arte de Razonar

by Fernando Pessoa

Ahora bien, la invasión de todo el espíritu, por la deficiencia o el exceso de un elemento, se revela de tres formas diferentes: por la depresión mental, como en la idiotez o la demencia; por la confusión mental, como en las locuras cuyo distintivo es el delirio o la perturbación general del espíritu; y por el enviciamiento central de las operaciones del espíritu, como en la llamada locura lúcida o paranoia.

88 pages, Paperback

First published June 11, 2014

About the author

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was a poet and writer.

It is sometimes said that the four greatest Portuguese poets of modern times are Fernando Pessoa. The statement is possible since Pessoa, whose name means ‘person’ in Portuguese, had three alter egos who wrote in styles completely different from his own. In fact Pessoa wrote under dozens of names, but Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos were – their creator claimed – full-fledged individuals who wrote things that he himself would never or could never write. He dubbed them ‘heteronyms’ rather than pseudonyms, since they were not false names but “other names”, belonging to distinct literary personalities. Not only were their styles different; they thought differently, they had different religious and political views, different aesthetic sensibilities, different social temperaments. And each produced a large body of poetry. Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis also signed dozens of pages of prose.

The critic Harold Bloom referred to him in the book The Western Canon as the most representative poet of the twentieth century, along with Pablo Neruda.