The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa

by Fernando Pessoa

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802159151
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	03/15/2022
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	982,458
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

FERNANDO PESSOA was born in Lisbon and spent his adult life there, earning a modest living as a commercial translator. Most of his vast body of work was published posthumously.

A writer and renowned translator, RICHARD ZENITH has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Table of Contents

	General Introduction	xi
	Fernando Pessoa the Man and Poet	xi
	Fernando Pessoa, Prose Writer	xiv
	Fernando Pessoa, English Writer	xvii
	About This Edition	xviii
	Thanks	xxi
	Aspects	1
	The Artist as a Young Man and Heteronym	6
	Introduction	6
	"I was a poet animated by philosophy ..."	9
	"The artist must be born beautiful ..."	10
	"I have always had in consideration ..."	10
	Three Prose Fragments	11
	"Ten thousand times my heart broke ..."	11
	"I saw the little children ..."	11
	"I, Charles Robert Anon ..."	12
	"I am tired of confiding in myself ..."	12
	[An Unsent Letter to Clifford Geerdts]	14
	Two Prose Fragments	15
	"Bond entered into by Alexander Search ..."	15
	"No soul more loving or tender ..."	15
	Rule of Life	17
	The Mariner	18
	Introduction	18
	The Mariner--A Static Drama in One Act	20
	To Fernando Pessoa	35
	The Master and His Disciples	36
	Introduction	36
	Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro	38
	from Translator's Preface to the Poems of Alberto Caeiro	50
	[On Alvaro de Campos]	55
	[On the Work of Ricardo Reis]	56
	Sensationism and Other Isms	58
	Introduction	58
	Preface to an Anthology of the Portuguese Sensationists	61
	"All sensations are good ..."	64
	[Intersectionist] Manifesto	65
	Sensationism	66
	Ultimatum	69
	Translator's Preface to Ultimatum	69
	Ultimatum	72
	from "What Is Metaphysics?"	88
	Letter to Mario de Sa-Carneiro	89
	Riddle of the Stars	92
	Introduction	92
	[Letter to His Aunt Anica]	98
	[30 Astral Communications]	103
	from Essay on Initiation E	120
	Treatise on Negation	121
	Letter to Two French Magnetists F	124
	Selected Letters to Ophelia Queiroz	128
	[Phase 1: Pessoa in Love?] (March-November 1920)	129
	[Phase 2: Pessoa Insane?] (September-October 1929)	139
	Neopaganism	147
	from The Return of the Gods	147
	"Without yet going into the metaphysical foundations ..."	148
	"Humanitarianism is the last bulwark ..."	149
	"Only now can we fully understand ..."	150
	"We are not really neopagans ..."	151
	from Preface to the Complete Poems of Alberto Caeiro	153
	"The work of Caeiro represents the total reconstruction ..."	153
	"When I once had occasion ..."	154
	"Alberto Caeiro is more pagan than paganism ..."	155
	"For modern pagans, as exiles ..."	156
	Portugal and the Fifth Empire	158
	Introduction	158
1.	"Any Empire not founded on the Spiritual Empire ..."	161
2.	"The Fifth Empire. The future of Portugal ..."	162
3.	"The promise of the Fifth Empire ..."	162
4.	"Only one kind of propaganda can raise the morale ..."	163
5.	"What, basically, is Sebastianism?"	164
6.	"To justify its present-day ambition ..."	164
7.	"An imperialism of grammarians?"	165
8.	"A foggy morning."	166
	The Anarchist Banker	167
	Pessoa on Millionaires	197
	from An Essay on Millionaires and Their Ways	197
	from American Millionaires	198
	Environment	200
	[Self-Definition]	201
	Erostratus: The Search for Immortality	202
	Introduction	202
	from Erostratus	205
	On the Literary art and its Artists	213
	[The Task of Modern Poetry]	213
	Shakespeare	215
	[On Blank Verse and Paradise Lost]	216
	From Charles Dickens--Pickwick Papers	217
	From Concerning Oscar Wilde	218
	[The Art of James Joyce]	222
	[The Art of Translation]	222
	From Essay on Poetry	224
	From France in 1950	231
	Random Notes and Epigrams	234
	Two Letters to Joao Gaspar Simoes	239
	[Letter of 11 December 1931]	239
	[Letter of 28 July 1932]	247
	Three Letters to Adolfo Casais Monteiro	250
	[Letter of 11 January 1930]	250
	[Letter of 13 January 1935]	251
	[Another Version of the Genesis of the Heteronyms]	261
	[Letter of 20 January 1935]	262
	The Book of Disquiet	265
	Introduction	265
	From The Book of Disquiet	270
	From the Education of the Stoic (Baron of Teive)	300
	From the Preface to Fictions of the Interlude	311
	Letter from a Hunchback Girl to a Metalworker	314
	Notes	319
	Bibliography	341

Editorial Reviews

"Zenith's selection is beautifully translated, compact while appropriately diverse." —Benjamin Kunkel, Los Angeles Times

"[Pessoa] is one of those writers as addictive, and endearing, as Borges and Calvino." —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

From the Publisher