Antonio Tabucchi

Antonio Tabucchi in 1988
photo: Louis Monier/Gamma-Rapho/Getty
(source: The Guardian)
no copyright infringement intended

During his university years Tabucchi traveled around Europe, trailing authors he had encountered as a teenager in his family library. In Paris he discovered a Portuguese poem, translated in French. It was on a bookstall near Gare de Lyon. The poem was Cruz na porta da tabacaria, and the author was Fernando Pessoa, who was using one of his heteronyms (Álvaro De Campos). And so began the interest of a whole life for Portuguese language and literature, and for the work of Pessoa, with all that it meant, saudade, and multiple poetical universes, expressed through heteronyms, and saudade in fado, and fado in saudade, and saudade in the poetry of Pessoa, and so many other things. A life of passion. But all this is already history. Tabucchi passed away in 2012, letting us with his great novels, for instance Notturno Indiano, or Sosiene Pereira ... Among them, Requiem: uma alucinação, in Portuguese. He had learned Pessoa's language to understand better his poems.





(Una Vita Tra I Libri)

(Fernando Pessoa)