Will the real Fernando please stand up? - Ilan Stavans
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TEDEd Animation
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On November 30th, 1935, dozens of writers passed away. They came from different backgrounds, espoused divergent beliefs, and wrote in a variety of styles. Yet almost 30,000 pages of their work was stashed in a trunk in an apartment in Lisbon, Portugal. So, what mysterious string tied all these writers together? Ilan Stavans explores the enigmatic life of Fernando Pessoa and his many identities.
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Fernando Pessoa was a modernist writer who converted the anxieties of life into a rich, symphonic inner dialogue. He saw himself as having multiple literary personalities and allowed many of them to develop an oeuvre. He is often equated with Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf. Among other contributions, Pessoa’s legacy invites us to question the concept of human personality as a uniform, monolithic approach to life. To learn more about Pessoa, take a virtual tour of the house in which the author spent the last 15 years of his life.
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Meet The Creators
- Educator Ilan Stavans
- Director Héloïse Dorsan Rachet
- Narrator Christina Greer
- Music André Aires, João Mendes
- Sound Designer André Aires, João Mendes
- Director of Production Gerta Xhelo
- Producer Sazia Afrin
- Editorial Director Alex Rosenthal
- Editorial Producer Cella Wright
- Script Editor Iseult Gillespie
- Fact-Checker Charles Wallace
