The Book of Disquiet (Penguin Classics)
Fernando Pessoa
Language: English
Pages: 544
ISBN: 0141183047
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Fernando Pessoa was many writers in one. He attributed his prolific writings to a wide range of alternate selves, each of which had a distinct biography, ideology. and horoscope. When he died in 935, Pessoa left behind a trunk filled with unfinished and unpublished writings, among which were the remarkable pages that make up his posthumous masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, an astonishing work that, in George Steiner's words, "gives to Lisbon the haunting spell of Joyce's Dublin or Kafka's Prague."
Published for the first time some fifty years after his death, this unique collection of short, aphoristic paragraphs comprises the "autobiography" of Bernardo Soares, one of Pessoa's alternate selves. Part intimate diary, part prose poetry, part descriptive narrative, captivatingly translated by Richard Zenith, The Book of Disquiet is one of the greatest works of the twentieth century.
interrupt a phrasal unit [?] – translation based on a conjectural reading of the author’s handwriting […] – illegible word or phrase [ ] – word(s) added by translator * – find note at the back of the volume, under the appropriate Text number or title. Acknowledgements I’m grateful to Maria Aliete Galhoz for having broken the ground, with her patient work in the Pessoa archives; to José Blanco for his enthusiasm, support and friendship; to Michael Schmidt for believing in Pessoa when
…where, curled up on a bench in a railway station, my contempt dozes in the cloak of my discouragement… …the world of dreamed images which are the sum of my knowledge as well as of my life… To heed the present moment isn’t a great or lasting concern of mine. I crave time in all its duration, and I want to be myself unconditionally. 15 Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I’d languished. I gave birth to my infinite being,
so as to write accurately; to know oneself through diplomacy and dissimulation; to become naturalized as a different person, with all the necessary documents; in short, to use all sensations but only on the inside, peeling them all down to God and then wrapping everything up again and putting it back in the shop window like the sales assistant I can see from here with the small tins of a new brand of shoe polish. All these ideals, possible or impossible, now end. Now I face reality, which isn’t
happens in life that a soul weighed down by living suddenly feels relief, for no apparent reason. I see us as climates over which storms threaten, before breaking elsewhere. The empty immensity of things, the tremendous oblivion in the sky and on earth… 193 I’ve witnessed, incognito, the gradual collapse of my life, the slow foundering of all that I wanted to be. I can say, with a truth that needs no flowers to show it’s dead, that there’s nothing I’ve wanted – and nothing in which I’ve
others of the identity we feel with them, without which there would be no communication and no need for it. I search for the ordinary human emotion that will have the colouring, spirit and shape of the emotion I’m feeling right now for the inhuman, personal reason of being a weary bookkeeper or a bored Lisboan. And I conclude that the ordinary emotion which in ordinary souls has the same characteristics as my emotion is nostalgia for one’s lost childhood. Now I have the key to the door of my