Product Description

Fernando Pessoa was many writers in one. The Portuguese author attributed his work to literary alter egos that he called "heteronyms," each of which had a fully developed identity. When Pessoa died, he left behind a trunk filled with disorderly scraps of unpublished poems and unfinished works, among which was The Book of Disquiet. Published for the first time some fifty years after his death, this unique collection of short, aphoristic paragraphs comprises the "autobiography" of Bernardo Soares, one of Pessoa's alternate selves. Part intimate diary, part prose poetry, part descriptive narrative, captivatingly translated by Richard Zenith, The Book of Disquiet is one of the greatest works of the twentieth century.

Edited and Translated with an Introduction by Richard Zenith

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #45047 in Books
• Published on: 2002-12-31
• Released on: 2002-11-26
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

From Publishers Weekly
When Pessoa died in 1935, a few years short of 50, he left behind a trunk of mostly unpublished writing in a variety of languages; his Lisbon publishers and variously translators are still sifting them. This perpetually unclassifiable and unfinished book of self-reflective fragments was first published in Portuguese in 1982, and it is arguably Pessoa's masterpiece. Four previous English translations, all published in 1991, were compromised either by abridgement, poor translation or error-laden source texts. While he's now a Pessoa veteran-having edited and translated Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems, the 1999 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation winner-Zenith's first pass at this book was one of the four misses. He bases this new translation on his own Portuguese edition of 1998, and has done an admirable job in bringing out the force and clarity in Pessoa's serpentine and sometimes opaque meditations. Pessoa often wrote as various personae (as Pessoa & Co. carefully demonstrated); Disquiet is no exception, being putatively the work of "Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon." Thus it is impossible to ascribe the book's anti-humanist logophilia directly to the author: "I weep over nothing that life brings or takes away, but there are pages of prose that have made me cry." That is just one of many permutations of similar sentiments, but the genius of Pessoa and his personae is that readers are left weighing each and every such sentence for sincerity and truth value.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was born in Lisbon and raised in South Africa. After returning to Lisbon to study, he made a living as a translator and wrote obsessively in English, French, and Portuguese. While acknowledged as an intellectual and a poet, his literary genius went largely unrecognized until after his death.

Customer Reviews

To dream instead of to live...
*The Book of Disquiet* is one of those great books that isn't for the great majority of people. Basically a collection of fragments written over the good part of a lifetime and attributed to one of Pessoa's literary alter-egos Bernardo Soares, *Disquiet* was assembled and translated by editor Richard Zenith from a legendary trunkful of unpublished texts discovered after Pessoa's death.

These semi-autobiographical reflections are dominated by an all-pervading world-weariness and negation of ordinary life--a book of disgust, as it were--saved from out and out nihilism only by a sort of idealistic solipsism--a perverse counter-celebration of dream, inertia, solitude, impotence, and failure. From this unlikely recipe, Pessoa manages to distill a formula for taking a morbidly decadent pleasure from a total rejection of the bleak facts of human existence just this side of suicide!

The short texts that make up *The Book of Disquiet* range from philosophical speculations to surrealistic prose poems, from misanthropic diatribes worthy of Dostoyevsky's "underground man," to daily diary entries that reflect on a wide-range of everyday subjects. The result is an exhaustive if uneven and often repetitive text, although through no fault of Pessoa's inasmuch as putting together a finished book from these fragments was a project that eluded him in his shortened life. As an editor, what Zenith has done here--for better and for worse--is give us a text almost scholarly in its completeness. As such, there is a great deal of redundancy in this edition of *Disquiet.* It's hard to imagine that Pessoa wouldn't have cut and shaped a finished version differently. The fact that he didn't, however, is not only a consequence of his short life, but of his own documented indecision of just how to proceed with the task.

And yet, as Zenith convincingly points out in his introduction, the very "messiness" of *Disquiet* is part of its charm; it's unfinished and indeterminate nature is a perfect realization of Pessoa's message--a reflection in prose form of the man and his beliefs. While many readers--and occasionally I was one of them--might wish for an abridged and "cleaned-up" version of *Disquiet* it's ultimately hard to complain about what, in the end, is nothing more egregious than too much of a good thing.

Certainly one of the more unique texts in world literature, *The Book of Disquiet* is a daring assertion of the meaninglessness of life and an unorthodox response to despair through a radical withdrawal from life into an interior realm of the literary imagination.

Tedium of Tediums, saith Pessoa
"Tedium", the most recurrent theme in these collections, by Pessoa's (or, excuse me, one of his "heteronym's") definition is the "serious disease of feeling there's nothing worth doing." Another one of these heteronyms remarks at an earlier point that "...the very idea of reading vanishes as soon as I pick up a book from the table." This, at any rate, was the effect this book had on me. Normally, I knock off a book of this length in a couple days. It's taken me a month now to complete. Every time I picked up this particular book, I said to myself, time and again, "What's the point? It's just going to be more tedious description of tedium." And I was quite correct. I think most readers would do well to heed another remark made in this book, to wit, that all this has been said before in the book of Ecclesiastes. He might have added that Ecclesiastes is much shorter, more moving and less redundant as well.

What saves The Book of Disquiet from being an utter wash is the conflict essential in it. Pessoa and his heteronyms, despite their sense of life's futility, love literature and words with such utter devotion that living life as if in a book seems the only hope of salvation from the torpor of existence:

"To see all things that happen to us as accidents or incidents from a novel, which we read not with our eyes but with life. Only with this attitude can we overcome the mischief of each day and the fickleness of events." P.211

This, and Pessoa's beautiful use of language, as translated by Robert Zenith in any event, save the day:

"We don't know if what ends with daylight terminates in us as useless grief, or if we are just an illusion among shadows, and reality just this vast silence without wild ducks that falls over the lakes where straight and stiff reeds swoon. We know nothing. Gone is the memory of the stories we heard as children, now so much seaweed; still to come is the tenderness of future skies, a breeze in which imprecision slowly opens into stars. The votive lamp flickers uncertainly in the abandoned temple, the ponds of deserted villas stagnate in the sun, the name once carved into the tree now means nothing, and the privileges of the unknown have been blown over the road like torn-up paper, stopping only when some object blocked their way. Others will lean out the same window as the rest; those who have forgotten the evil shadow will keep sleeping, longing for the sun they never had; and I, venturing without acting, will end without regret amid soggy reeds, covered with mud from the nearby river and from my sluggish weariness, under vast autumn evenings in some impossible distance. And through it all, behind my daydream, I'll feel my soul like a whistle of stark anxiety, a pure and shrill howl, useless in the world's darkness." P.179

Perhaps a bit on the belaboured side anent reeds and rivers and wild ducks---Still, never was meaningless death by sluggishness so gloriously apotheosized. Passages like this make the book worth reading, perhaps. But, caveat lector, don't expect to close the cover with any sense of enchantment. The book, cover to cover, is full of emptiness.

All is here...
I am making the journey through The Book of Disquiet with much care and fear, and I think all that you can expect from literature is delivered here with unflinching honesty and heart-breaking tenderness.

Penetrating insight into social affairs, acute awareness of the chaotic absurdity behind the facade of human orderliness, sophist interrogations about universal truths, sadistic playing with one's own feelings, descriptive analysis of the tragic futility of all beings, unfathomable sadness in all human souls. All that was, all that is and all that will be are presented here in the lamenting prose from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.