Pessoa, in a certain way, remained forever on that threshold. Instead of getting down to the practical business of living, he continued to wrestle with theoretical problems and the big questions: the existence of God, the meaning of life and the meaning of death, good vs. evil, reality vs. appearance, the idea (is it just an idea?) of love, the limits of consciousness, and so on. All of which was rich fodder for his poetry, thriving as it did on ideas more than on actual experience.

In December of 1904 Pessoa took the Intermediate Arts Examination and received the highest score in Natal, which would have earned him a government grant to study at Oxford or Cambridge, but there was a hitch: applicants had to have spent the four previous years at a Natal school. Because of the trip he made to Lisbon in 1901-02, Pessoa was disqualified. Instead of going to England, the precocious seventeen-year-old returned to Lisbon, where he studied literature at a college for almost two years before dropping out. He earned no academic credits, having missed the first year’s exams due to illness, and the second year’s exams due to a student strike. While at the college and afterwards, he spent long hours at the National Library studying Greek and German philosophy, world religions, psychology, and evolutionary thought (cultural and social more than biological). He read a wide range of Western literature, especially in French (Hugo, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Rollinat, among others), in English, and in Portuguese, his readings in this last language filling a serious lacuna in his South African education.

And he wrote steadily: poetry, fiction, philosophy, sociology, and literary criticism. During his first years back on home turf he occasionally wrote in Portuguese, somewhat more often in French (Pessoa’s solitary French heteronym, Jean Seul, emerged in 1907), and most of all in English. Pessoa’s ambition, even after he had returned to Lisbon, was to become a great poet in English, and he continued to produce poems in that language up until one week before his death. In 1917 he submitted a book-length collection of verse, The Mad Fiddler, to a London publisher who quickly rejected it, but one of the book’s poems appeared three years later in the prestigious magazine Athenaeum. In 1918 Pessoa self-published two chapbooks of his English poems, with two more following in 1921, and these received guarded praise from the British press. About his 35 Sonnets (1918), a note in the Times Literary Supplement remarked: “Mr. Pessoa’s command of English is less remarkable than his knowledge of Elizabethan English. . . . The sonnets . . . will interest many by reason of their ultra-Shakespearean Shakespeareanisms, and their Tudor tricks of repetition, involution and antithesis, no less than by the worth of what they have to say.” The Glasgow Herald was also complimentary, but noted “a certain crabbedness of speech, due to an imitation of a Shakespearean trick.”

Pessoa’s English was the English of the books he read, and these included contemporary novelists, such as H. G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and W. W. Jacobs, but it lacked the brutal naturalness of a mother tongue. His English, though fluent in the literal sense of that word, was his English—a more literary, slightly archaic, and occasionally stilted variety of the language. The poetry he wrote in it is interesting for the ideas and emotions it contains, as well as for its skillful use of poetic devices, but like a piano out of tune or a camera out of focus, Pessoa’s English introduces a slight distortion that mars the overall effect.

The English language provided a modest but dependable income for Pessoa, who made his living by translating and by drafting letters in French and English for Portuguese firms doing business abroad. He also tried to do business himself, mainly as an agent for Portuguese mining companies in search of investment capital from Britain and elsewhere, but it doesn’t seem that he ever cut any profitable deals.

Where English best served Pessoa, however, was in the poetry and prose he wrote in Portuguese.