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A Biography
by Richard Zenith
Like Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, Richard Zenith's Pessoa immortalizes the life of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers.
Nearly a century after his wrenching death, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) remains one of our most enigmatic writers. Believing he could do "more in dreams than Napoleon," yet haunted by the specter of hereditary madness, Pessoa invented dozens of alter egos, or "heteronyms," under whose names he wrote in Portuguese, English, and French. Unsurprisingly, this "most multifarious of writers" (Guardian) has long eluded a definitive biographer―but in renowned translator and Pessoa scholar Richard Zenith, he has met his match.
Relatively unknown in his lifetime, Pessoa was all but destined for literary oblivion when the arc of his afterlife bent, suddenly and improbably, toward greatness, with the discovery of some 25,000 unpublished papers left in a large, wooden trunk. Drawing on this vast archive of sources as well as on unpublished family letters, and skillfully setting the poet's life against the nationalist currents of twentieth-century European history, Zenith at last reveals the true depths of Pessoa's teeming imagination and literary genius.
Much as Nobel laureate José Saramago brought a single heteronym to life in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Zenith traces the backstories of virtually all of Pessoa's imagined personalities, demonstrating how they were projections, spin-offs, or metamorphoses of Pessoa himself. A solitary man who had only one, ultimately platonic love affair, Pessoa used his and his heteronyms' writings to explore questions of sexuality, to obsessively search after spiritual truth, and to try to chart a way forward for a benighted and politically agitated Portugal.
Although he preferred the world of his mind, Pessoa was nonetheless a man of the places he inhabited, including not only Lisbon but also turn-of-the-century Durban, South Africa, where he spent nine years as a child. Zenith re-creates the drama of Pessoa's adolescence―when the first heteronyms emerged―and his bumbling attempts to survive as a translator and publisher. Zenith introduces us, too, to Pessoa's bohemian circle of friends, and to Ophelia Quieroz, with whom he exchanged numerous love letters. Pessoa reveals in equal force the poet's unwavering commitment to defending homosexual writers whose books had been banned, as well as his courageous opposition to Salazar, the Portuguese dictator, toward the end of his life. In stunning, magisterial prose, Zenith contextualizes Pessoa's posthumous literary achievements―especially his most renowned work, The Book of Disquiet.
A modern literary masterpiece, Pessoa simultaneously immortalizes the life of a literary maestro and confirms the enduring power of Pessoa's work to speak prophetically to the disconnectedness of our modern world.
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"[A] gloriously labyrinthine biography...Zenith's dynamic prose, deep erudition, and incisive readings of Pessoa's poetry make for a meticulous portrait of one artist's brilliant and bewildering inner world." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Zenith delivers careful readings of Pessoa's works and examines with sensitivity his varied intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic proclivities as well as his longing for posthumous fame, which he amply accrued. Impressive research and evident enthusiasm inform a definitive biography." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Blending research with literary analysis, Zenith is quick to acknowledge when archives offer limited information. Essential to academic collections, this biography is also accessible to general audiences interested in the potential of art that does not imitate life." - Library Journal (starred review)
"Finally! A brilliant biography that places Pessoa where he should have always belonged, with Joyce, Proust, and Musil―true giants, none of whom were Nobel laureates." - André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name
"When you consider the fantastically vivid details of Fernando Pessoa's curious life contained in this biography, and the energetic and elegant quality of the writing, you might wonder if this book is actually a just discovered autobiography, written by one of Pessoa's heteronyms, 'Richard Zenith.' No one, it seems, could know so much or relate it so marvelously unless they had lived inside Pessoa's head. Zenith's Pessoa is magnificent." - Forrest Gander, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Be With
"Fernando Pessoa was an enigmatic genius with protean powers whose name belongs next to Cervantes, Rabelais, Borges, and Márquez. Richard Zenith is his genius biographer who has given him fresh life. No one on earth knows more about Pessoa. With its historical sweep and novelistic execution, this biography will never be bested." - William Giraldi, author of American Audacity
This information about Pessoa was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Richard Zenith is an acclaimed translator and literary critic. His translations include Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet and Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems, which won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. The recipient of Portugal's Pessoa Prize, Zenith lives in Lisbon, Portugal.
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