Fernando Pessoa
Pessoa invented multiple fictional authors, called "heteronyms," each with their own biography, style, and philosophy: Alberto Caeiro the naive pantheist, Ricardo Reis the Horatian classicist, Alvaro de Campos the Whitmanesque modernist, and Pessoa himself the melancholy metaphysician. The result is a one-man anthology that also constitutes a meditation on identity's fundamental instability. Richard Zenith's translation opened Pessoa to English readers.
A concept this good forgives a lot, and needs to. Caeiro says things are only things for poem after poem; Reis writes the same Horatian ode dozens of times; the rhymed Portuguese that made orthonym Pessoa sing is exactly what translation loses. Read as a system it fascinates. Read poem by poem, whole stretches are one idea, restated.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
