The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa [Hardcover]

Fernando Pessoa (Author), Richard Zenith (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 9, 2001

Building on the wonderful Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems, acclaimed by Booklist as "a beautiful one-volume course in the soul of the twentieth century," preeminent translator Richard Zenith now delivers a superbly edited and translated selection from the prose work of a truly unique figure of early modernism. Though known primarily as a poet, Fernando Pessoa wrote prose widely, in several languages and in every genre -- fiction, drama, letters, and essays. Drawing from the huge body of work that Pessoa left behind, Richard Zenith has produced a volume that is full of delights. Pessoa and his many literary alter egos, or "heteronyms," experiment with the Surrealists' automatic writing and invent the movement "Sensationism" (whose adherents were all heteronyms). There are appreciations of Shakespeare, Dickens, Wilde, and Joyce, critical essays in which one heteronym derides the work of another, and a love letter by Pessoa's only known female heteronym. There is a selection from Pessoa's best-known work, The Book of Disquiet, retranslated from newly discovered materials. Like Fernando Pessoa & Co., Selected Prose is an important monument to one of the greatest exponents of modernism, a forgotten but crucial part of the literary canon.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 341 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (April 9, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802116949
• ISBN-13: 978-0802116949
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,018,064 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Notes of a genius, November 7, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (Hardcover)

This book is full of genius and madness, which are nearly indistinguishable from one another. Like Kafka, Pessoa stands above his peers for his profound sense of humanity. He is also as singular as Kafka. Pessoa is a mystery, and his notes and letters further illustrate this. I am sorry that he died before the world would honor him as one of the Twentieth Century's greatest writers. However, Pessoa was well aware of his genius and the admiration of the world would have done nothing to convince him of his worth. He was already convinced!
Pessoa published little during his lifetime, but it was because he never submitted much of his work for publication. Apparetnly, the Portugese publishers still haven't published all of his works, either, and that is a shame.
One thing that stands out about this book is that Pessoa does not engage in any of the posturing that one might find in the works of other writers convinced of their genius. One senses that Pessoa considers his genius not in boast, but as if it were as unavoidable as his own face. It is fact to him; he cannot change it. His is a sad genius, not a violent genius. But do not pity him; he knew what he was doing. Pessoa was a man who knew what it meant to be a writer (that is, a perpetual other, an individual who can describe the world because he stands apart from it).
Pessoa is a wonder. Buy this book. I only wish it were the "Collected Prose" of Pessoa rather than the "Selected Prose."

One more note, if you are interested in Portugese literature you must read Anotnio Lobo Antunes, also published by Grove Press. A few of his works have been also translated by Richard Zenith (to whom I am grateful for his translations). If you like madness, madness in the Faulknerian sense, then you will love Lobo Antunes.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An indispensable addition to the Pessoa oeuvre in English, August 23, 2001

By 

Jonathan Rimorin (Cormorant Island) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (Hardcover)

Richard Zenith is my favourite translator of Pessoa; in this collection, he brings the insight and perspective he brought to his transcendant "Pessoa & Co." and "Book of Disquietude." The puckish nature of Pessoa's heteronym project is put into sharp relief: those who know only Pessoa/Soares may have thought the subsumption into heteronymology a sad affaire.

This collection complicates and deepens that perspective, with selections ranging from the whole of Pessoa's life, from the childhood Alexander Search to the elderly and Stoic Baron of Tieve, yet remains (as Pessoa remains) wholly delightful and charming. A Maria José even appears, in a letter "From A Hunchbacked Girl To A Metalworker" (a heartbreaking letter, I may add). Pessoa's possibly affected eccentricities is in full evidence here: witness the "Riddle Of The Stars," a kind of proto-"Changing Light At Sandover," wherein Pessoa receives otherworldly communiqués via automatic writing and the spirits exhort him repeatedly to lose his virginity. Other kicks: his "static drama" "O Marinhero" and Alvaro de Campos' "Ultimatum," where he personally attacks everyone responsible for World War I (and I mean, _everyone_).

Zenith's notes are indispensable (though he peculiarly abandons his "Disquietude" for "Disquiet," and chooses American English as his idiom). All in all, a welcome addition to the Pessoan archive in English, and a breathtaking array of further complications.