Annoted Cover 2010-full-correct spine.indd - Penguin Group

FerNaNdo pessoa
1888 – 1935, portuguese
The Book of Disquiet
Edited and Translated with an Introduction
by Richard Zenith
Winner of the Calouste Gulbenkian Prize for
Portuguese Translation
Part intimate diary, part prose poetry,
part descriptive narrative, The Book of
Disquiet is one of the greatest works of the
twentieth century.
544 pp. 978-0-14-118304-6 $16.00
186 penguin classics
A Little Larger than the
Entire Universe
Translated with an Introduction and Notes
by Richard Zenith
This edition is the largest volume of poetry
by Fernando Pessoa available in English.
It includes generous selections from the
Portuguese writer’s alter egos and from
the vast and varied work he wrote under
his own name.
400 pp. 978-0-14-303955-6 $17.00
“a cause for rejoicing . . . here at long last a
copious selection from pessoa’s vast poetic
oeuvre . . . the equal of Yeats, Rilke, Valery,
lorca, pasternak, or Hart crane.”
—j o h n ashbery
FerNaNdo pessoa
Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888 and was brought up in Durban,
South Africa. In 1905 he returned to Lisbon to enroll at the university, but soon
dropped out, preferring to study on his own. He made a modest living translating
the foreign correspondence of various commercial firms, and wrote obsessively—
in English, Portuguese, and French. Pessoa attributed his work to dozens of
literary alter egos that he called “heteronyms”—including Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro
de Campos, Ricardo Reis, and the fictional author of The Book of Disquiet, the
assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares—whose fully fleshed biographies he
invented, giving them different writing styles and points of view. Although Pessoa
was acknowledged as an intellectual and a poet, his literary genius went largely
unrecognized until after his death in 1935.