The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa
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Authors: Fernando Pessoa
Praise for
The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa:
“Imagine if, some day back in the 1950s, an American poet named John Ashbery had not only written a few of his own highly original poems, but in an ecstasy of creative surfeit, had invented three other poets—Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schyler—and then, over the years, proceeded to write poems
as
them, even entire books. It sounds fantastic, but that is what Pessoa actually did. Nor was it just a whimsical creative exercise. In
The Western Canon
, that ultimate literary proving ground, Harold Bloom named Caeiro and de Campos as ‘great poets’ in their own right.... Fascinating.”
—Brendan Bernhard, LA
Weekly
Praise for Fernando Pessoa:
“Portugal’s greatest poet since Camoëns... [with a] wide range of talent, craft, intellect, and poetic achievement.”
—Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno,
The Boston Book Review
“The saddest of our century’s great literary modernists and perhaps its most inventive ... the finest poet Portugal has ever produced.”
—The Boston Phoenix Literary Section
“Pessoa’s writing, the whole of his extraordinary opus, [is] a major presence in what has come to be known as ‘modernism’ in the European languages.... Almost any commentary of any length on Pessoa’s writings, sensibility, and imagination is bound to convey a glimpse, at least, of its intensity and elusiveness, its apparently endlessly unfolding hall of mirrors.”
—
The New York Review of Books
“If [Pessoa] never achieved such renown during his life, the years since he died have elevated him to a numinous status among European poets, and writers as idiomatically disparate as Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, and Antonio Tabucchi ... have acknowledged his potent sway.”
—
The Times Literary Supplement
“Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) is one of the great originals of modern European poetry and Portugal’s premier modernist. He is also a strange and original writer. Other modernists—Yeats, Pound, Eliot—invented masks through which to speak occasionally, from Michael Robartes, to Hugh Selwyn Mauberly to J. Alfred Prufrock. Pessoa invented whole poets.”
—Robert Hass, “Poet’s Choice.”
The Washington Post
and
San Francisco Examiner
“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.... What makes Pessoa’s thought and poetry compelling is not that he picks up and develops the forms and themes of Whitman and Emerson and retransmits our patrimony back to us—though this would be marvelous—but because in the poems and prose he has passed a judgment upon the twentieth-century rejection of individualism.”
—Richard Eder,
Los Angeles Times Book Review
“The amazing Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa ... as a fantastic invention surpasses any creation by Borges.... Pessoa was neither mad nor a mere ironist; he is Whitman reborn, but a Whitman who gives separate names to ‘my self,’ ‘the real me’ or ‘me myself,’ and ‘my soul,’ and writes wonderful books of poetry for all of them.”
—Harold Bloom,
The Western Canon
“[Pessoa’s] work is never more profound than when it is most ludicrous, never more heartfelt than when it is most deeply ironic.... Like Beckett, Pessoa is extremely funny.... His work is loaded with delights.”
—
The Guardian
(UK)
“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.”
—
The Village Voice Literary Supplement
The Selected Prose of FERNANDO PESSOA
ALSO BY FERNANDO PESSOA FROM GROVE PRESS
:
The Selected Prose of FERNANDO PESSOAFernando Pessoa
&
Co.: Selected Poems
Edited and translated by
RICHARD ZENITH
Translation copyright © 2001 by Richard Zenith
Introduction copyright © 2001 by Richard Zenith
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and
retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by
a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of
educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for
classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include
the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc.,
841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pessoa, Fernando, 1888–1935.
[Prose works. English. Selections]
The selected prose of Fernando Pessoa / edited and translated by Richard Zenith.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9850-1
1. Pessoa, Fernando, 1888–1935—Translations into English. I. Zenith, Richard.
II. Title.
PQ9261.P417 A288 2001
869.8′4108—dc 21 2001018997
Design by Laura Hammond Hough
CONTENTSGrove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
E = original of Pessoa in English
F = original of Pessoa in French
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
from
Translator’s Preface to the Poems of Alberto Caeiro (Thomas Crosse) E
Introduction
Preface to an Anthology of the Portuguese Sensationists (Thomas Crosse) E
Introduction
[30 Astral Communications] (Henry More, Wardour, Voodooist, etc.) E
from
Preface to the Complete Poems of Alberto Caeiro (Ricardo Reis)
Introduction
