Fernando Pessoa - Böcker

The Book of Disquiet is one of the great literary works of the twentieth century. Written over the course of Fernando Pessoa's life, it was first published in 1982, pieced together from the thousands of individual manuscript pages left behind by Pessoa after his death in 1935. Now this fragmentary modernist masterpiece appears in a major new edition that unites Margaret Jull Costa's celebrated translation with the most complete version of the text ever produced. It is presented here, for the first time in English, by order of original composition, and accompanied by facsimiles of the original manuscript.Narrated principally by an assistant bookkeeper named Bernardo Soares - an alias of sorts for Pessoa himself - The Book of Disquiet is 'the autobiobraphy of someone who never existed', a mosaic of dreams, of hope and despair; a hymn to the streets and cafés of 1930s Lisbon, and an extraordinary record of the inner life of one of the century's most important writers. This new edition represents the most complete vision of Pessoa's genius.

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'.

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'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.

'But no, she's abstract, is a birdOf sound in the air of air soaring,And her soul sings unencumberedBecause the song's what makes her sing.'Dramatic, lyrical and ranging over four distinct personae, these poems by one of Portugal's greatest poets trace a mind shaken by intense suffering and a tireless search for meaning.Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

The Book of Disquiet is the Portuguese modernist master Fernando Pessoa’s greatest literary achievement. An “autobiography” or “diary” containing exquisite melancholy observations, aphorisms, and ruminations, this classic work grapples with all the eternal questions. Now, for the first time the texts are presented chronologically, in a complete English edition by master translator Margaret Jull Costa. Most of the texts in The Book of Disquiet are written under the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper. This existential masterpiece was first published in Portuguese in 1982, forty-seven years after Pessoa’s death. A monumental literary event, this exciting, new, complete edition spans Fernando Pessoa’s entire writing life.

Here, in Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari’s splendid new translations, are the complete poems of Alberto Caeiro, the imaginary “heteronym” coterie created by Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese modernist master. Pessoa conceived Caeiro around 1914 and may have named him loosely after his friend, the poet Mário de Sa-Cárrneiro. What followed was a collection of some of Fernando Pessoa’s greatest poems, grouped under the titles The Keeper of Sheep, The Shepherd in Love, and Uncollected Poems. This imaginary author was a shepherd who spent most of his life in the countryside, had almost no education, and was ignorant of most literature; yet he (Pessoa) wrote some of the most beautiful and profound poems in Portuguese literature. This edition of The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro is based on the magnificent Portuguese Tinta-da-China edition, published in Lisbon in 2016, and contains an illuminating introduction by the Portuguese editors Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari, some facsimiles of the original Portuguese texts, and prose excerpts about Caeiro and his work written by Fernando Pessoa well as his other heteronyms Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis, and other fictitious authors such as Antonio Mora and I. I. Crosse.

Álvaro de Campos is one of the most influential heteronyms created by Portugal’s great modernist writer Fernando Pessoa. According to Pessoa, Campos was born in Tavira (Algarve) in 1890 and studied mechanical engineering in Glasgow, although he never managed to complete his degree. In his own day, Campos was celebrated—and slandered—for his vociferous poetry imbued with a Whitman-inspired free verse, his praise of the rise of technology and his polemical views that appeared in manifestos, interviews and essays. Here in Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari’s translations are the complete poems of Campos. This edition is based on the Portuguese Tinta-da-china edition and includes an illuminating introduction about Campos by the Portuguese editors Jerónimo Pizarro and Antonio Cardiello, facsimiles of original manuscripts and a generous selection of Campos’s prose texts.

Here is the fourth in a series of volumes by Fernando Pessoa’s celebrated “heteronyms”, a coterie of writers that Pessoa created and conceived as distinct personalities, each with a unique literary style. Ricardo Reis was imagined as a melancholic doctor “with a darkish complexion”, a self-taught Hellenist who exiled himself in Brazil because he was a monarchist. In a 1914 letter to Pessoa, the writer Mário Sá-Carneiro described Reis’s odes as “admirable”, “a marvel of impersonality”, praising the way he “achieved a Horatian, classical novelty”. Based on the definitive Tinta-da-China edition, published in Lisbon in 2016, this bilingual collection includes an illuminating introduction by Pessoa scholar Jerónimo Pizarro, facsimiles of original manuscripts and prose excerpts written by Ricardo Reis on art, on life and on the writings of Pessoa’s other heteronyms. Magnificently translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari, The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis is a must-have collection by one of Pessoa’s most refined heteronyms.

"After looking for him in the poems, we search for him in the prose. The pursuit of the Other in Pessoa's work is never-ending," writes Edwin Honig. Essential to understanding the great Portuguese poet are the essays written about (and by) his heteronyms--Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Alvaro de Campos--the several pseudonyms under which he wrote an extraordinary body of poetry. In Always Astonished, Pessoa and his several selves debate and discuss one another's work, revealing how Portuguese modernism was shaped. Fernando Pessoa is one of the great voices of twentieth-century literature, and these manifestos, letters, journal notes, and critical essays range through aesthetics, lyric poetry, dramatic and visual arts, and the psychology of the artist. He gives us, too, a singularly heterodox political position in his strange work of fiction, The Anarchist Banker. "Eloquent, volatile and obsessed with life--and death--[Pessoa is one of the] modernist giants in whose shadow we live and who made our century one of the extraordinary richness."--The New York Times "Only a few years ago Fernando Pessoa was all but invisible in English.Now this outsider's outsider looms as the latest icon of modern poetry. Eugenio Lisboa devised A Centenary Pessoa in 1995, a lavish miscellany of poems, essays, biography, photographs, even paintings he inspired. Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown reissued Poems of Fernando Pessoa, along with Honig's Always Astonished, a selected prose."-Robert Polito, BOMB Magazine Fernando Pessoa is Portugal's most important contemporary poet. He wrote under several identities, which he called heteronyms: Albet Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, and Bernardo Soares. He wrote fine poetry under his own name as well, and each of his "voices" is completely different in subject, temperament, and style.

"At last, at last, at last, Pessoa again! More Pessoa! One of the very great poets of the twentieth century, again and more! And one of the fascinating figures of all literature, with his manifold identities, his amazing audacities, his brilliance and his shyness. I think I have under control the reluctance I feel in having to share Pessoa with the public he should have had all along in America: until now, only the poets, so far as I can tell, have even heard of him, and delighted and exulted in him. He is, in some ways, the poet of modernism, the only one willing to fracture himself into the parcels of action, anguish, and nostalgia which are the grounds of our actual situation." --C. K. Williams "Pessoa is one of the great originals (a fact rendered more striking by his writing as several distinct personalities) of the European poetry of the first part of this century, and has been one of the last poets of comparable stature, in the European languages, to become known in English.Edwin Honig's translations of Spanish and Portuguese poetry have been known to anyone who cares about either, since his work on Lorca in the forties, and his Selected Poems of Pessoa (1971) was a welcome step toward a long-awaited larger colection." -- W. S. Merwin "Fernando Pessoa is the least known of the masters of the twentieth-century poetry. From his heteronymic passion he produced, if that is the word, two of our greatest poets, Alberto Caeiro and Alvaro de Campos, and a third, Ricardo Reis, who isn't bad. Pessoa is the exemplary poet of the self as other, of the poem as testament to unreality, proclamation of nothingness, occasion for expectancy. In Edwin Honig's and Susan Brown's superb translations, Pessoa and his "others" live with miraculous style and vitality." --Mark Strand Fernando Pessoa is Portugal's most important contemporary poet. He wrote under several identities, which he called heteronyms: Albet Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, and Bernardo Soares. He wrote fine poetry under his own name as well, and each of his "voices" is completely different in subject, temperament, and style.This volume brings back into print the comprehensive collection of his work published by Ecco Press in 1986.

A temporary move to Toronto in the winter of 2000, a twisted ankle, an empty house -- all inspired Moure as she read Alberto Caeiro/Fernando Pessoa's classic long poem O Guardador de Rebanhos. For fun, she started to translate, altering tones and vocabularies. From the Portuguese countryside and roaming sheep of 1914, a 21st century Toronto emerged, its neighbourhoods still echoing the 1950s, their dips and hollows, hordes of wild cats, paved creeks. Her poem became a translation, a transcreation, the jubilant and irrepressible vigil of a fervent person. "Suddenly," says Moure impishly, "I had found my master."Caeiro's sheep were his thoughts and his thoughts, he claimed, were all sensations. Moure's sheep are stray cats and from her place in Caeiro's poetry, she creates a woman alive in an urban world where the rural has not vanished, where the archaic suffuses us even when we do not beckon it, and yet the present tense floods us fully.

Sitting at his desk, Bernardo Soares imagined himself free forever of Rua dos Douradores, of his boss Vasques, of Moreira the book-keeper, of all the other employees, the errand boy, the post boy, even the cat. But if he left them all tomorrow and discarded the suit of clothes he wears, what else would he do? Because he would have to do something. And what suit would he wear? Because he would have to wear another suit. A self-deprecating reflection on the sheer distance between the loftiness of his feelings and the humdrum reality of his life, The Book of Disquiet is a classic of existentialist literature.

Pessoa's most famous work depicts a vast interior landscape laced with daily minutiae and aphoristic brillianceThe eternal mystique of Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) stems largely from his practice of writing under "heteronyms." More than just nom de plumes, Pessoa's heteronyms came with distinct biographies, careers, life spans, even horoscopes. In The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa came as close as he ever would to autobiography. Left on disordered scraps of paper in a trunk, the fragments that make up The Book of Disquiet record in disjunct entries a vast interior landscape and daily minutiae, making for a discontinuous, gently unhinged monologue in daybook form.

In 1999, translator Richard Zenith made a new find in the Pessoa archive in Lisbon: a group of prose writings by a previously unknown heteronym, the Baron of Teive.' The Portuguese volume of these writings has been received by scholars as a crucial piece of the puzzle that is Pessoa's oeuvre. The Education of the Stoic is the unique work left by the Baron of Teive, who, after destroying all his previous literary attempts and before destroying himself, explains 'the impossibility of producing superior art.' It is the dark companion piece to The Book of Disquiet.'