Fernando Pessoa: Obras (1985/86)
[Acquired: Thursday, 5 July, 2018]:Bronwyn and I visited Portugal last month. To say that the place is saturated with Fernando Pessoa merchandise, artefacts, and other impedimenta would be to put it mildly.
Here are a few of the books I bought:
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Fernando António Nogueira de Seabra Pessoa (1888-1935)
- Pessoa, Fernando. Obra Poética e em Prosa. Ed. António Quadros & Dalila Pereira da Costa. 3 vols. Porto: Lello & Irmão - Editores, 1986.
- Pessoa, Fernando. Obras Escolhidas. Ed. António Manuel Couto Viana. Illustrated by Lima de Freitas. 3 vols of 4. Edição Comemorativa do Cinquentenário da Morte do Poeta. Lisboa & São Paulo: Editorial Verbo, 1985.
- Poesia lírica & épica
- Traduções de poesia & prosa / Teatro e ficção / Ensaio e crítica / Cartas
- Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis & Bernardo Soares
As well as these two sumptuous Portuguese editions, I also cannily stocked up on a few translations - as well as an edition of his own (dreadful) poems in English:
- Pessoa, Fernando. Poems of Fernando Pessoa. Trans. Edwin Honig & Susan M. Brown. 1971 & 1986. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998.
- Pessoa, Fernando. A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems. Ed. & trans. Richard Zenith. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2006.
- Pessoa, Fernando. English Poetry. Ed. Richard Zenith. Documenta poetica, 154. Assírio & Alvim. Porto: Porto Editora, 2016.
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[Update: 22 September 2021]:
Richard Zenith: Pessoa: A Biography (2021)
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Richard Zenith (1956- )
Richard Zenith: Pessoa: A Biography (2021)
[Fishpond - August 1, 2021]:
Richard Zenith. Pessoa: A Biography. Liveright Publishing Corporation. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2021.
Considered by many [my emphasis] an expert on Fernando Pessoa (former Secretary of Culture Francisco José Viegas called him "one of the greatest"), he has translated the poet's works into English and has written extensively about Pessoa's poetry and prose.
So what's that supposed to mean? Is Richard Zenith, or is he not, "an expert on Fernando Pessoa"? Surely the author of a thousand-page biography of the poet, and the English translator of so many volumes of his work could be described, quite simply, as "an expert on Pessoa"?
There's a pleasing air of intrigue about it, mind you. Has the fact that Zenith won the 2012 Pessoa Prize irritated certain powerful interest groups? They may not be ready to strike just yet, but they're preparing the ground for a proper take-down ...
Nothing seems surprising any more when it comes to the world of Fernando Pessoa. I wrote a blogpost about him a couple of years ago, when Brownyn and I visited his house in Lisbon.
I've decided to add a supplement to the above discussion of the warring editions of his work now, three years on, as the situation has changed somewhat in the meantime. For a start, I've begun to understand some of the reservations people have about Richard Zenith now, having made my way through his immense life of the poet.
Pessoa Bookends
I recall reading somewhere a comparison of S. T. Joshi's similarly monumental life of H. P. Lovecraft, I am Providence (1996 / 2010-11) with Boswell's immortal Life of Johnson. This seemed to me at the time an absurd juxtaposition: on the one hand, an acknowledged masterpiece of English literature, one of the great books of the world, on the other, the minutely detailed chronicle of a weird recluse who wrote a few horror stories now and then.
But then, as I read it, I began to see the point. Joshi is very good at recreating Lovecraft's world, both inner and outer, and his larger cultural context, too. And, given the massive influence he's had on popular culture in particular, his actual "importance" as a literary figure is no longer really up for debate.
Reading the not dissimilar comparisons of Zenith's Pessoa with such biographical landmarks as Richard Ellmann's Joyce (1959), I have to say that I was hoping for something similar: a window on the strange and wonderfully unlikely world of one of literature's weirdest prodigies.
No such luck, I'm afraid. The book is - to be sure - lavishly documented, immensely detailed, and profoundly useful to fans and scholars alike. But 300 pages in, Pessoa had yet to write anything of the slightest interest - and all the information about his school prizes and childhood role-playing games began to remind me instead of The Book of Iris (2002), a similarly verbose biography of New Zealand writer Robin Hyde, co-written by poet Gloria Rawlinson and Hyde's son Derek Challis.
Having said that, there's no doubt that the book improves as it goes along. Whether it really does Pessoa any favours is up for debate. The long discussions of his masturbatory habits and other unsavoury details of his dream life do have a tendency to weigh more heavily on a reader than the author's constant insistence on Pessoa's genius. One can't help feeling that Boswell was onto something when he laid the main emphasis of his narrative on the period after he himself first met Dr. Johnson, in late middle age.
Is Zenith's Pessoa a must-read? Not really, no. Nor is Joshi's Lovecraft, I suppose, but at least the latter brings a very unlikely biographical subject triumphantly to life. Somewhat surprisingly, it's harder to empathise as much with Pessoa and his almost equally eccentric literary aims. Not, then, a great biography, though it's certainly a most useful compendium of biographical data about the poet: and in the long run that may prove even more valuable.
Pessoa Bookends: left
Fernando António Nogueira de Seabra Pessoa
(1888-1935)
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Works in Portuguese:
- Obra Poética em um volume. Ed. Maria Aliete Galhoz. Biblioteca Luso-Brasileira: Série Portuguêsa, 5. 1960. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Aguilar S. A., 1990.
- Obra Poética e em Prosa. Ed. António Quadros & Dalila Pereira da Costa. 3 vols. Porto: Lello & Irmão - Editores, 1986.
- Obras Escolhidas. Ed. António Manuel Couto
Viana. Illustrated by Lima de Freitas. 3 vols of 4. Edição Comemorativa
do Cinquentenário da Morte do Poeta. Lisboa & São Paulo: Editorial
Verbo, 1985.
- Poesia lírica & épica
- Traduções de poesia & prosa / Teatro e ficção / Ensaio e crítica / Cartas
- Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis & Bernardo Soares
- Poems of Fernando Pessoa. Trans. Edwin Honig & Susan M. Brown. 1971 & 1986. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998.
- Pessoa: Selected Poems. Trans. Jonathan Griffin. Penguin Modern European Poets. Ed. A. Alvarez. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
- Œuvres poétiques. Ed. Patrick Quillier. Trans. Olivier Amiel, Maria Antónia Câmara Manuel, Michel Chandeigne, Pierre Léglise-Costa et Patrick Quillier. Préface de Robert Bréchon. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 482. Paris: Gallimard, 2001.
- The Book of Disquiet. Ed. Maria José de Lancastre. Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. 1991. Introduction by William Boyd. Serpent's Tail Classics. London: Profile Books Ltd., 2010.
- The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition. Ed. Jeronimo Pizarro. 2013. Trans. Margaret Jull Costa. New York: New Directions Publishing, 2017.
- [Trans.] The Book of Disquietude, by Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon. 1991. New York: Sheep Meadow Press, 1996.
- [Ed. & trans.] Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems. New York: Grove Press, 1998.
- [Ed. & trans.] The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa. New York: Grove Press, 2001.
- [Ed. & trans.] A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2006.
- [Ed.] English Poetry. Documenta poetica, 154. Assírio & Alvim. Porto: Porto Editora, 2016.
- Ed. & trans.] The Book of Disquiet. Penguin Modern Classics. London: Penguin, 2001.
- José Saramago. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. 1984. Trans. Giovanni Pontiero. 1991. The Harvill Press. London: The Random House Group Limited, 1999.
- Pessoa: A Biography. Liveright Publishing Corporation. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2021.
Works in translation:
[by Richard Zenith:]
Secondary:
Pessoa Bookends: right
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- category - Spanish and Latin-American Literature: Portugal
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