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.

The prizewinning, complete and unabridged translation--the best English-language version we are likely to see for a long time, if ever (The Guardian)--of a work of unclassifiable genius: the crowning achievement of Portugal's modern master

Edited, Translated, and with an Introduction by Richard Zenith, the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Pessoa: A Biography

Winner of the Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Prize for Portuguese Translation

A Penguin Classic

Fernando Pessoa was many writers in one. He attributed his prolific writings to a wide range of alternate selves, each of which had a distinct biography, ideology, and horoscope. When he died in 1935, Pessoa left behind a trunk filled with unfinished and unpublished writings, among which were the remarkable pages that make up his posthumous masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, an astonishing work that, in George Steiner's words, gives to Lisbon the haunting spell of Joyce's Dublin or Kafka's Prague.

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.

Pessoa is a genius. --André Aciman

The largest and richest English-language volume of poetry from the greatest twentieth-century writer you have never heard of (Los Angeles Times)

Edited, Translated, and with an Introduction by Richard Zenith, the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Pessoa: A Biography

A Penguin Classic

Writing obsessively in French, English, and Portuguese, poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) left a prodigious body of work, much of it credited to three heteronyms―Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Alvaro de Campos―alter egos with startlingly different styles, points of view, and biographies. Offering a unique sampling of his most famous voices, this collection features Pessoa's major, best-known works and several stunning poems that have come to light only in this century, including his long, highly autobiographical swan song. Featuring a rich body of work that has never before been translated into English, this is the finest introduction available to the stunning breadth of Pessoa's genius.

Readers with a particular interest in modernism will find this work indispensable.--Publishers Weekly

Pessoa's amazing personality is as beguiling and mysterious as his unique poetic output.--William Boyd

A self-deprecating reflection on the sheer distance between the loftiness of feelings and the humdrum reality of life, The Book of Disquiet is a classic of existentialist literature.

Fernando Pessoa, one of the founders of modernism, was born in Lisbon in 1888. Most of Pessoa's writing was not published during his lifetime: The Book of Disquiet was first published in Portugal in 1982.

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.

One of the great originals of modern European poetry and Portugal's premier modernist.--Washington Post

Pessoa has had many English-language interpreters but none better than Richard Zenith.--New York Review of Books

Fernando Pessoa--a poet who lived most of his life in Lisbon, Portugal, and who died in obscurity there-- is now recognized as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. In a newly updated and expanded edition of his celebrated 1998 Fernando Pessoa & Co., which Booklist hailed as a beautiful one-volume course in the soul of the twentieth century, translator and biographer Richard Zenith brings together Pessoa's most memorable poetic works. Present here is poetry by Pessoa's famous trio of alter egos--Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos--as well as a varied selection of poems signed by Pessoa's own name. From spare minimalism to revolutionary exuberance, Fernando Pessoa & Co. showcases the seminal poet's timeless and innovative work in all of its extraordinary depth and poetic passion.

Like Beckett, Pessoa is extremely funny. . . . His work is loaded with delights.--Guardian

Pessoa would be Shakespeare if all that we had of Shakespeare were the soliloquies of Hamlet, Falstaff, Othello and Lear and the sonnets. His legacy is a set of explorations, in poetic form, of what it means to inhabit a human consciousness.--Los Angeles Times Book Review

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.

Fernando Pessoa claimed to be inhabited by thousands of philosophies, all of which he intended to develop in his unfinished project of English-language Philosophical Essays. The resulting fragments were never published by Pessoa himself and almost the entirety of them are presented in this edition for the very first time in history. This volume exhibits Pessoa's musings and wild insights on the history of philosophy, the failures of subjectivity, and the structure of the universe to reveal an unexpectedly scholarly, facetious, and vigorous theoretical mind. Written under the pre-heteronyms of Charles Robert Anon and Alexander Search, these texts constitute the foundation for the fabrication of Pessoa's future heteronyms. They are the testimony of a writer who referred to himself as a poet animated by philosophy. Through editor Nuno Ribeiro's careful critical efforts, a new and fundamental facet of the work of one of modernity's most seminal geniuses has now been brought to light in a remarkably reliable and clear fashion.

Pessoa's trenchant complement to The Book of Disquiet

I transferred to Teive my speculations on certainty, which lunatics have in greater abundance than anyone. Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was a multitude of writers: his works were composed by heteronyms, alter egos with distinct biographies, ideologies, influences, even horoscopes. The Education of the Stoic is the only work left by the Baron of Teive, who, having destroyed all his previous attempts at literary creation, and about to destroy himself, explains the impossibility of producing superior art. The baron's manuscript is found in a hotel-room drawer--not unlike editor and translator Richard Zenith's own discovery, while conducting research in the Pessoa archives, of a small black notebook whose contents had never been transcribed. In it he found the missing pieces of this short but trenchant complement to Pessoa's major prose work, The Book of Disquiet. Pessoa himself noted that despite their dialectical differences, the middle-class author of The Book of Disquiet (assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares) and the aristocrat Teive, are two instances of the very same phenomenon--an inability to adapt to real life.

There are in Pessoa echoes of Beckett's exquisite boredom; the dark imaginings of Baudelaire (whom he loved); Melville's evasive confidence man; the dreamscapes of Borges -Voice Literary Supplement

The humorist who never smiles and makes our blood run cold, the inventor of other poets and self-destroyer, the author of paradoxes clear as water, and like water, dizzying, the mysterious one who doesn't cultivate mystery, mysterious as the moon at noon, the taciturn ghost of the Portuguese midday--who is Pessoa? -Octavio Paz

A Washington Post and Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year

Though known primarily as a poet, Fernando Pessoa, a writer of remarkable genius (Washington Post) wrote prose widely, in several languages and in every genre. Now newly expanded and revised by award-winning translator and Pessoa biographer Richard Zenith, The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa spans fiction and drama, playful intellectual inquiry, Platonic dialogue, and bitter intellectual scrapping between Pessoa and his many literary alter egos (heteronyms). In these pieces, the heteronyms launch movements and write manifestos, and one of them attempts to break up Pessoa's only known romantic relationship. Also included is a generous selection from Pessoa's masterpiece The Book of Disquiet. This is an important record of a crucial part of the literary canon.

A modern master to rank alongside Joyce, Kafka, Beckett.--Sunday Times (UK)

Beautifully translated, compact while appropriately diverse. --Los Angeles Times

[A] delightful collection . . . [Pessoa] is the modernist's modernist: an inspired amalgam of Lewis Carroll, Aristophanes, Erasmus, Voltaire. --Washington Times

A Washington Post and Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year

Though known primarily as a poet, Fernando Pessoa, a writer of remarkable genius (Washington Post) wrote prose widely, in several languages and in every genre. Now newly expanded and revised by award-winning translator and Pessoa biographer Richard Zenith, The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa spans fiction and drama, playful intellectual inquiry, Platonic dialogue, and bitter intellectual scrapping between Pessoa and his many literary alter egos (heteronyms). In these pieces, the heteronyms launch movements and write manifestos, and one of them attempts to break up Pessoa's only known romantic relationship. Also included is a generous selection from Pessoa's masterpiece The Book of Disquiet. This is an important record of a crucial part of the literary canon.

A modern master to rank alongside Joyce, Kafka, Beckett.--Sunday Times (UK)

Beautifully translated, compact while appropriately diverse. --Los Angeles Times

[A] delightful collection . . . [Pessoa] is the modernist's modernist: an inspired amalgam of Lewis Carroll, Aristophanes, Erasmus, Voltaire. --Washington Times

Pessoa's most famous work depicts a vast interior landscape laced with daily minutiae and aphoristic brilliance

The 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 1925, Fernando Pessoa wrote a guidebook to Lisbon for English-speaking visitors, and wrote it in English. The typescript was only discovered amongst his papers long after his death, but has not hitherto been made available in the UK or the USA. The book is fascinating in that it shows us Pessoa's view of his native city - and Pessoa, as an adult, rarely left Lisbon, and it figures large in his poetry. The book can still be useful to visitors today, given that the majority of the sights described are still to be found. A fascinating scrap from the master's table....

Writings on Art and Poetical Theory contains a selection of Fernando Pessoa's writings (or those of his heteronyms) on art and poetical theory, originally written in English. In Pessoa's oeuvre one finds not only literary and fictional works but also a multiplicity of theoretical texts on the most diverse subjects concerning artistic movements, literature, and writers.

In this book, we witness Pessoa explore, through various heteronyms, general theories on poetics, the poetries of other heteronyms, the uses and abuses of criticism, and more. Also included are essays on sensationism (an aesthetic movement Pessoa dubs a new species of Weltanschauung), translation, and a brief history of English literature, which is comprised of fragments on Shakespeare, Milton, the British Romantics, Dickens, Wilde, and others, as well as additional material, such as Pessoa's own poem Antinous.

This edition, prepared by Nuno Ribeiro and Cláudia Souza, allows us to have an overview of Pessoa's writings on art and poetic theory - most of which are presented here for the first time to English readers -, thus opening the way for future studies on one of the most significant authors of Portuguese modernism.

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.

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

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.

The Transformation Book, which belongs to Pessoa's pre-heteronymic period, contains a series of fragments written in English, Portuguese, and French, none of which were ever published during Pessoa's lifetime. Conceived by Pessoa in 1908, a year of great social and cultural transformation in Portugal, The Transformation Book was designed to reflect and advance social and cultural transformation in Portugal and beyond. Moving between a number of literary forms, including poetry, fiction, and satire as well as essays on politics, philosophy, and psychiatry, The Transformation Book marks one of the fundamental stages in Pessoa's elaboration of a new conception of literary space, one that he came to express as a drama in people. Alexander Search, Pantale o, Jean Seul de M luret, and Charles James Search are the four pre-heteronyms to which the texts of The Transformation Book are attributed. These four figures constitute a plural literary microcosm - a world that Pessoa makes, but that is occupied by a multiplicity of authors - and clearly anticipate the emergence of Pessoa's heteronyms. As the singular result of an intersection of Pessoa's personal intellectual trajectory with his hopes for fomenting cultural transformation, The Transformation Book makes for a unique contribution to Pessoa's ever-growing published oeuvre. Although some of the texts conceived as part of the Transformation Book have previously been published in isolation or as fragments, this is the first complete and critical edition of The Transformation Book, and most of the texts in this edition are published here for the first time. Through the critical efforts of Nuno Ribeiro and Cl udia Souza, a fundamental project of Fernando Pessoa's is now brought from the confines of the archive to the public in its most complete and accurate fashion. The Transformation Book should contribute to future studies on the work of one of the most distinctive geniuses of modernist literature.

Message (Mensagem) was the only book of verse in his own language that Pessoa saw through the press in his lifetime. On the face of it, a patriotic sequence steeped in 'Sebastianismo', the poems offer much more than this, the Kings and navigators of the Portugal's history standing as avatars of the poet's self, their explorations and heroic deeds projections of the poet's inner creative life. Although Pessoa is famous for the many heteronyms under which he composed verse in wildly different styles, this volume was published under his own name (the 'orthonym', as he defined it) and it remains one of his great masterpieces. This edition brings Jonathan Griffin's fine translation, originally published by the Menard Press in 1992, back into print, as part of Shearsman's Pessoa edition.

Fernando Ant nio Nogueira Pessoa, m s conocido como Fernando Pessoa (Lisboa, 13 de junio de 1888 - ib dem, 30 de noviembre de 1935) fue un poeta y escritor portugu s, considerado uno de los m s brillantes e importantes de la literatura mundial y, en particular, de la lengua portuguesa.

Sincerity is the one great artistic crime. Insincerity is the second greatest.

In addition to his literary and fictional works, Fernando Pessoa wrote a multiplicity of theoretical texts concerning literature and aesthetics. In Writings on Art and Poetical Theory we see Pessoa exploring, under the guise of various heteronyms, general theories on poetics, the poetry produced by his other heteronyms, and the uses and abuses of criticism. Also included are essays on translation, the sensationist movement, and the history of English literature.

This edition, prepared by Nuno Ribeiro and Cláudia Souza, provides a fascinating overview of Pessoa's writings on art and poetic theory--most of which are presented here for the first time to English readers--thereby opening the way for future studies on one of the most significant authors of Portuguese modernism.