The first thing you notice is the poet Fernando Pessoa. You see his image on magnets, tee-shirts, buttons, and posters. Pessoa is Lisbon's great touristic face. He has become commodified.

I wonder at the tourists who sit on the lap of his sculpture outside the Café A Brasiliera in Chiado, Lisbon's central neighborhood. Have they read his work? They smile and wave at the camera. Inside the café, in the 1930s, the poet stood at the bar pounding absinthe and aguardente , thus initiating his descent into death by alcoholism.

Across the street in the Basilica dos Mártires, the Basilica of the Martyrs, Pessoa was baptized. He was born and raised in a flat around the corner. He worked, lived, and courted the only woman he may have been intimate with just a few blocks down the street in Baixa, the low neighborhood. Her name, Ofélia, must have appealed to Pessoa, a lover of Shakespeare.

The other thing you notice, as you stand on Lisbon's hills, is the Tagus River, which flows next to Lisbon before opening to the wide expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, a different, known Atlantic from the one the Portuguese ships sailed into, returning with tales of other lands, and with gold, spices, and slaves. Pessoa wrote, “The Tagus is more beautiful than the river that flows through my village,/ But the Tagus is not more beautiful than the river that flows through my village/ Because the Tagus is not the river that flows through my village.”

Actually, Fernando Pessoa didn't write those words— Alberto Caiero did, one of his alter-egos, or heteronyms. Pessoa created many heteronyms, poets distinct from himself, each with their own names and biographies, but he is remembered most for four of them. Alberto Caiero is the great master, a pastoral poet, uneducated but profound in his simplicity. Ricardo Reis is the doctor who went to Brazil and writes odes in the style of Horace. Then there's Álvaro de Campos, influenced by Whitman and Futurism, with his expansive lines full of verve and longing.

Here is Campos's Tagus:

The delirium of maritime things slowly takes hold of me,
The wharf and its atmosphere physically penetrate me,
The surging of the Tagus inundates my senses,
And I begin to dream, to be wrapped in the dream of waters…

The fourth was one prose writer—Bernardo Soares—who wrote The Book of Disquiet, the fragments of which were discovered in the trunk Pessoa carried from apartment to apartment during his nomadic life in Lisbon, his muse. In fact, all the personalities were unearthed from this trunk, literature's equivalent of finding the buried treasure. This imaginative project is one of the great contributions to literature and certainly one of the most profound comments on the nature of identity.

Every summer Portuguese and North American writers gather for two weeks for a program I co-founded and named after Soares's work: The DISQUIET International Literary Program. We hope to open the rather myopic view of North American literature to wider influences (only about three percent of literature read in the United States is literature in translation), to provide a way to step out of the comforts of one's own culture, and to return to our own writing with a new sense of disquietude. Writers such as George Saunders, Denise Duhamel, Colson Whitehead, Denis Johnson, Robert Olmstead, Eileen Myles, and Mary Gaitskill have all participated in the conference. I won't mention which of these writers danced into the early hours of the morning in the bars in Cais do Sodre, now a trendy neighborhood but once a rough stretch along the Tagus reserved for sailors and prostitutes.

When we return to Pessoa's statue outside A Brasileira, we're reminded he is not the only poet. Far from it. If he could turn his head and gaze up Rua Garrett, he would see the statue of Luís de Camões, Portugal's Shakespeare, whose novel-in-verse The Lusiads remains the foundational text for Portuguese literature. The Lusiads recounts the story of Vasco de Gama's “discoveries” to India in the late fifteenth century. Though he lived a century later, Camões, swashbuckler, drinker, and philanderer, who lost an eye in a sword fight, puts himself on de Gama's ship and comments with a not uncritical eye upon Portugal's colonial efforts. He also recounts how Camões saved Portugal's greatest literary treasure, his own, from obscurity by carrying the manuscript over his head while swimming to shore as one of de Gama's ships sank. Along with Don Quixote, this is one of the earliest examples of metafiction in literature.

Leave Camões Square and turn down the Rua Alecrim, and you will find a small park with a statue to Eça de Queirós, the nineteenth-century novelist who should only be compared with himself, but we might say is Portugal's Dickens, Flaubert—Zola considered Queirós greater than Flaubert—and Tolstoy wrapped into one. Bitingly satirical, refreshingly hilarious, lively, and broad, The Maias is one of the great contributions to world literature. Queirós's The Crime of Father Amaro was made into a film starring Gael García Bernal and is the subject of some of the painter Paula Rego's most stunning work.

Return a block up the street, and you will find the Centro Nacional de Cultura, which was the seat of literary and political resistance during Salazar's repressive Fascist regime (1932-74). The Center was directed by the poet and story writer Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, known to the Portuguese only as Sophia, much as the great Fado singer Amália Rodrigues is known only Amália. Sophia is poet of the sea and mythology and center of the generation that followed Pessoa's and that includes Mário Cesariny, Alexandre O'Neill, Eugénio de Andrade, and Alberto de Lacerda.

Alberto de Lacerda, who taught at Boston University—he was my professor and friend, and the DISQUIET Literary Program is dedicated to his memory—often walked along both the Tagus and the Charles rivers, though as a lifelong inhabitant of London, perhaps the Thames is the most active in his imagination:

River-city
This is my river
This city is mine
Into the beloved the lover is transformed
My supreme majestic calm
Shakespearean forest
Naturally embracing
Everything

To this enchanted forest I came to be born
When I was twenty-three

We move through the ages to today. José Saramago died in 2010, but not before winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. Though known in the United States mostly for his novel Blindness, perhaps his greatest novel is The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. You recognize the name, the writer of Horatian odes, Pessoa's second great heteronym.

António Lobo Antunes, Portugal's Faulkner, is considered Saramago's equal. Many believe Antunes, not Saramago, deserved the Nobel. Both of these novelists set the stage for a thriving young generation of novelists and short story writers that includes everyone from Teolinda Gersão to José Peixoto, Gonçalo M. Tavares, Patrícia Portela, and Jacinto Lucas Pires, to name a few. There are a host of contemporary Portuguese poets, too: Vasco Graça Moura, Luís Amorim de Sousa, Adília Lopes, and Margarida Vale de Gato.

The first face you see when you arrive is Pessoa's, but soon you understand that his is really a collection of faces. You walk through Lisbon among a compendium of writers, both living and dead. You see Lisbon and the contemplative, halcyon Tagus, the bridge, the hills, the sharp light, the tiles, the cobblestone streets, and always there is the sea beyond, the endless sea.