Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #123235 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

About the Author
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.

Customer Reviews

The zenith of Pessoa
The new selection of Pessoan texts translated by Richard Zenith is marvellous in almost every respect. It comes with an informative introduction and an authoritative set of notes: in short, it provides a new, perhaps a definitive, presentation of Pessoa's extraordinary poetic acheivement.

My only reservation is that the text is not bilingual, since it is notoriously hard to translate any poet, and without the cadences of Pessoa's strange Portuguese it is often hard to think of these texts as poetry at ll. I have also found (so far) one typo - a bad one, in a crucial text, "Ela canta, pobre ceifeira". On p.284 of Zenith, the 4th stanza has "In me what feels is always is always / Thinning...", when the last word should clearly be "Thinking" (translating "Pensando"). This slip threatens to make a nonsense of the poem, which is unfortunate to say the least. If I find any more such howlers, I'll report directly.

Dr Luke Thurston,
University of Wales Aberystwyth

Well worth reading
An excellent introduction to the works of Fernando Pessoa. The slightly quirky concepts and philosophical musings of Pessoa make refreshing reading in these English translations. However, not having read them in orginal Portuguese, I cannot comment on the quality of the translation. For the main part the concepts seem to flow well and are very readable. Not for those who like their poetry rhyming or fully rounded, but the range of Pessoa's writing as different personas, with different points of view, makes an interesting book to dip into again and again. Would recommend to anyone looking for something a little quirky but strangely uplifting.