The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith (Translator), Richard Zenith (Editor)

Overview

Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet is a modernist masterwork that has now taken on a similar iconic status to Ulysses, The Trial or In Search of Lost Time. This complete and unabridged edition – published in Penguin Modern Classics - is edited and translated with an introduction by Richard Zenith

'The best English-language version we are likely to see for a long time, if ever' - The Guardian

*Winner of the Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Prize for Portuguese Translation*

'Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn't exist,' - so claimed Alvaro de Campos, one of the 'heteronyms', fully-realised substitute personalities invented by Fernando Pessoa to spare himself the trouble of living real life. In this extraordinary book, the putative 'factless autobiography' of an accountant named Bernardo Soares, Fernando Pessoa explores and dismantles the nature of memory, identity, time and narrative, creating one of the greatest - but also the strangest - modernist texts. An assembly of sometimes-linked fragments, The Book of Disquiet is a mesmerising, haunting 'novel' without parallel in any other culture.

This edition includes notes on the reconstruction of the text, appendices containing material omitted from the final version and letters which Pessoa intended to incorporate into the text. This edition also includes a table of the 'heteronyms' used by Pessoa in his writing.

Fernando Pessoa (1888– 1935) was born in Lisbon but went to live in Durban, South Africa, at the age of seven. He returned to Lisbon in 1905. A prolific writer who ascribed much of his work to a variety of personas, or heteronyms, Pessoa published relatively little of his vast output and supported himself by writing letters in English for import– export firms. Although acknowledged as an intellectual and a poet, his literary genius went largely unrecognized until after his death.

Richard Zenith lives in Lisbon, where he works as a freelance writer, researcher and translator. He has edited and translated many works by Fernando Pessoa, including A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe – Selected Poems. His Pessoa: An Experimental Life was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780141914046
Publisher:	Penguin UK
Publication date:	05/30/2002
Series:	Penguin Modern Classics
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	544
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) was born in Lisbon and brought up in Durban, South Africa. He returned to Lisbon in 1905. A prolific writer, ascribing his work to a variety of personas or heteronyms, Pessoa published little in his lifetime and supported himself by working as a commercial translator. Although acknowledged as an intellectual and a poet, his literary genius went largely unrecognized until after his death.
 
Richard Zenith (editor, translator, introducer) lives in Lisbon, where he works as a freelance writer, translator, and critic. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Pessoa: A Biography. His translations include Galician-Portuguese troubadour poetry; novels by Antonio Lobo Antunes; Pessoa's A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems; Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems, which won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; and João Cabral de Melo Neto's Education by Stone: Selected Poems, which won the Academy of American Poets’ Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. In 2012, Zenith was awarded Portugal’s Pessoa Prize. 

Table of Contents

Introduction   vii
Notes on the Text and Translation   xxvii
Acknowledgements   xxxii

The Book Of Disquiet

Preface by Fernando Pessoa   3
A Factless Autobiography   9
A Disquiet Anthology   393

Appendix I: Texts Citing the Name of Vicente Guedes   465
Appendix II: Two Letters   467
Appendix III: Reflections on The Book of Disquiet from Pessoa's Writings   471
Notes   477
Table of Heteronyms    505

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“This superb edition of The Book of Disquiet is . . . a masterpiece.”  —John Lanchester, The Daily Telegraph

“Pessoa’s rapid prose, snatched in flight and restlessly suggestive, remains haunting, often startling. . . . There is nobody like him.” —W. S. Merwin, The New York Review of Books

“Extraordinary . . . a haunting mosaic of dreams, autobiographical vignettes, shards of literary theory and criticism and maxims.” —George Steiner, The Observer

"I plan to use this book every year in my course at Yale.  Thanks for making it available." —K. David Jackson, Yale University

 

Editorial Reviews

His prose masterpiece... Richard Zenith has done an heroic job in producing the best English-language version we are likely to see for a long time, if ever— The Guardian

Judging the English alone, Zenith’s translation is most compelling... I want Pessoa to be as great as the version Zenith presents— Chris Power New Statesman

One of the twentieth century's greatest literary talents... This superb edition of The Book of Disquiet is... a masterpiece— John Lanchester The Telegraph

Pessoa’s rapid prose, snatched in flight and restlessly suggestive, remains haunting, often startling, like the touch of a vibrating wire, elusive and persistent like the poetry... there is nobody like him— The New York Review of Books

Fascinating, even gripping stuff . . . a strangely addictive pleasure— Sunday Times

Extraordinary... a haunting mosaic of dreams, autobiographical vignettes, shards of literary theory and criticism and maxims— The Observer

A Modernist touchstone... no one has explored alternative selves with Pessoa’s mixture of determination and abandon... In a time which celebrates fame, success, stupidity, convenience and noise, here is the perfect antidote, a hymn of praise to obscurity, failure, intelligence, difficulty, and silence— The Daily Telegraph

Portugal's greatest modern poet ... deals with the only important question in the world, not less important because it is unanswerable: What am I?— Anthony Burgess Observer

Must rank as the supreme assault on authorship in modern European literature... readers of Zenith’s edition will find it supersedes all others in its delicacy of style, rigorous scholarship and sympathy for Pessoa’s fractured sensibility... the self-revelation of a disoriented and half-disintegrated soul that is all the more compelling because the author himself is an invention... Long before postmodernism became an academic industry, Pessoa lived deconstruction— John Gray New Statesman

The Book of Disquiet was left in a trunk which might never have been opened. The gods must be thanked that it was. I love this strange work of fiction and I love the inventive, hard-drinking, modest man who wrote it in obscurity— Independent

From the Publisher

The first English translation (by Alfred Mac Adam) of selections from the major prose work of Pessoa (1888-1935), the most important Portuguese man of letters of the 20th century, and often identified, along with Rilke and Yeats, as one of the greatest European poets of the century. Composed (under the heteronym of Bernardo Soares) of reveries and everyday impressions from the last two decades of Pessoa's life, The book of disquiet partakes of the genres of the intimate diary, prose poetry, and the descriptive narrative. Of inestimable importance. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

The private meditations of one of modern Portugal's most celebrated poets and critics, set down pseudonymously in the form of a journal spanning some 20 years. Pessoa (1888-1935) is not well known outside of Portugal. A bookkeeper and journalist, he lived quietly in Lisbon and published much of his poetry under assumed names. (The putative author of The Book of Disquiet is "Bernardo Soares, Assistant Bookkeeper in the City of Lisbon.") Although he was raised in South Africa and educated in English, Pessoa held that "my country is the Portuguese language"; this work shows the truth of that claim. It records with palpable clarity the inner life of an immensely gifted and unbelievably self-contained writer who moves through the daily world of offices and trams and restaurants with no apparent aim besides the description and re-creation of his thoughts. We are given a picture of extraordinary tedium and solitude, but the "fatigue" that the narrator complains of so frequently does not prevent him from breathing life into the most commonplace events and discerning the true wonder of familiar things. The cut of a woman's dress, for example, glimpsed in passing aboard a streetcar, becomes a reminder of human society: of the factory that produced it, the hands that sewed it, the inventories that recorded it, and the threads that wove it. A thunderstorm watched through an office window carries all the force and terror of an apocalypse. Throughout, the focus is constantly sharpened by the author's narrative restraint, which commands attention, and by his depth of vision, which rewards it. Profound and moving: a work of immense, quiet power.

Kirkus Reviews