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Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
When Pessoa died in 1935, a few years short of 50, he left behind a trunk of mostly unpublished writing in a variety of languages; his Lisbon publishers and variously translators are still sifting them. This perpetually unclassifiable and unfinished book of self-reflective fragments was first published in Portuguese in 1982, and it is arguably Pessoa's masterpiece. Four previous English translations, all published in 1991, were compromised either by abridgement, poor translation or error-laden source texts. While he's now a Pessoa veteran-having edited and translated Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems, the 1999 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation winner-Zenith's first pass at this book was one of the four misses. He bases this new translation on his own Portuguese edition of 1998, and has done an admirable job in bringing out the force and clarity in Pessoa's serpentine and sometimes opaque meditations. Pessoa often wrote as various personae (as Pessoa & Co. carefully demonstrated); Disquiet is no exception, being putatively the work of "Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon." Thus it is impossible to ascribe the book's anti-humanist logophilia directly to the author: "I weep over nothing that life brings or takes away, but there are pages of prose that have made me cry." That is just one of many permutations of similar sentiments, but the genius of Pessoa and his personae is that readers are left weighing each and every such sentence for sincerity and truth value.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"This superb edition of The Book of Disquiet is . . . a masterpiece." --John Lanchester, The Daily Telegraph
"Pessoa's rapid prose, snatched in flight and restlessly suggestive, remains haunting, often startling. . . . There is nobody like him." --W. S. Merwin, The New York Review of Books
"Extraordinary . . . a haunting mosaic of dreams, autobiographical vignettes, shards of literary theory and criticism and maxims." --George Steiner, The Observer
"I plan to use this book every year in my course at Yale. Thanks for making it available." --K. David Jackson, Yale University
"Pessoa's rapid prose, snatched in flight and restlessly suggestive, remains haunting, often startling. . . . There is nobody like him." --W. S. Merwin, The New York Review of Books
"Extraordinary . . . a haunting mosaic of dreams, autobiographical vignettes, shards of literary theory and criticism and maxims." --George Steiner, The Observer
"I plan to use this book every year in my course at Yale. Thanks for making it available." --K. David Jackson, Yale University
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it - without knowing why. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it - without knowing why. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A book which will change the way you think,
By Alessandra (Fort Worth, Texas) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Penguin Classics Book Of Disquiet (Paperback)
It's not a book based on plot or persuasion; merely a book which presents incredible feelings and ideas in a fantastic way. Often we have all wondered about the true nature of simply BEING. Often we feel as though the world passes us by, or hunts us, or seeks to confuse us. Pessoa simply puts these feelings into beautifully flowing prose. Complex ideas and feelings are written of so skillfully that I feel as if we had been the same person. This book is well worth reading.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Change your life - read Pessoa,
By A Customer
This review is from: Penguin Classics Book Of Disquiet (Paperback)
This book is amazing. I had never heard of Pessoa before I spied the book at Shakespeare & Co here in Paris, read the attached reviews and thought it must be worth the 10 Euros to see what I was missing.Pessoa is unlike any other writer you will ever read. The closest match to this book that I can think of is Augustine's Confessions, albeit a more lovely written, more moving, post-modernist, secular version of that classic. It is existential philosophy, literary theory, diary, poetry, dream journal and confession all wrapped into one. A profound and profoundly moving book which will leave you wondering why such an incredible writer and thinker remains so obscure. The book is written in snatches, better to be dipped into at leisure than read straight thru. You'll find yourself annotating passages, writing down qoutes, rereading sections endlessly. You'll begin to question the reality of your existence, if not your own sanity, if you read it too thoroughly. This is truly Art of the highest order and should be read by every thinking person. I'd give it 6 stars if I could.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
the struggle to put into words,
By david (ALaMO usa) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Penguin Classics Book Of Disquiet (Paperback)
AKIN TO reading A DIARY, SUBMERGED, TURNED WRITTEN WITHIN, NOT NECCESARY easy.O THINKING[SPINNING] godlikea I AM ]}KING Ones own entity CUT OFFNESS TOLD IN MATTER OF FACTNESS, this is like a fresh aproach to the use of words to create an ACUTUALNESS THE I WISHES TO STIMULATE WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO WRITE A MORE REAL WORLD USING THE INTERNAL,what it would be like to have multiple LIVES IN THIS LIFE.
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