The Book of Disquiet

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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.

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

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

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

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

Fascinating, even gripping stuff . . . a strangely addictive pleasure

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

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

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

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

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

With its astounding hardcover reviews Richard Zenith's new complete translation of THE BOOK OF DISQUIET has now taken on a similar iconic status to ULYSSES, THE TRIAL or IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME as one of the greatest but also strangest modernist texts. An assembly of sometimes linked fragments, it is a mesmerising, haunting 'novel' without parallel in any other culture.

Selected Poems

A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe

Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888 and was brought up in Durban, South Africa. In 1905 he returned to Lisbon where he matriculated at the University, and continued to read and write in English. He published in 1918 35 Sonnets and in 1922 the three parts of his English Poems, all composed many years before. The rest of his life passed uneventfully in Lisbon. The only book published in his lifetime was Mensagem, a collection of poems on patriotic themes which won a consolation prize in a national competition. Pessoa also wrote under three pseudonyms, Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis, whose biographies he invented. 
 
 
Richard Zenith lives in Lisbon, where he works as a freelance writer, translator, and critic. His translations include Galician-Portuguese troubadour poetry, novels by Antonio Lobo Antunes, Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, and Fernando Pessoa and Co - Selected Poems, which won the 1999 American PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.

This is the largest and richest volume of poetry by Pessoa available in English. It includes generous selections from the three poetic alter egos that the Portuguese writer dubbed "heteronyms" - Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Alvaro de Campos - and from the vast and varied work he wrote under his own name.

Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888 and was brought up in Durban, South Africa. In 1905 he returned to Lisbon where he matriculated at the University, and continued to read and write in English. He published in 1918 35 Sonnets and in 1922 the three parts of his English Poems, all composed many years before. The rest of his life passed uneventfully in Lisbon. The only book published in his lifetime was Mensagem, a collection of poems on patriotic themes which won a consolation prize in a national competition. Pessoa also wrote under three pseudonyms, Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis, whose biographies he invented.

The writing of Fernando Pessoa reveals a mind shaken by intense inner suffering. In these poems he adopted four separate personae: Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and himself, using them to express 'great swarms of thought and feeling'. While each personae has its own poetic identity, together they convey a sense of ambivalence and consolidate a striving for completeness. Dramatic, lyrical, Christian, pagan, old and modern, Pessoa's poets and poetry contribute to the 'mysterious importance of existence'.

Fernando Pessoa

Books by Fernando Pessoa

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