Pessoa, Fernando

Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems

Poems of Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa is Portugal's most important contemporary poet. He wrote under several identities, which he called heteronyms: Albet Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, and Bernardo Soares. He wrote fine poetry under his own name as well, and each of his "voices" is completely different in subject, temperament, and style. This volume brings back into print the comprehensive collection of his work published by Ecco Press in 1986.

Book Of Disquiet, The

The rediscovery in the 1990s of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is reminiscent of the rediscovery of Kafka in the 1950s. Like Kafka, Pessoa left his work in disarray, much of it to be published posthumously. And Pessoa is fast becoming an icon of postmodernism, as Kafka was of modernism. Pessoa's mystique comes largely from his practice of writing under "heteronyms," each supplied with distinct biographies, life spans, even horoscopes. In The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa came as close as he would to autobiography. But this book is, like so much about Pessoa, an object of mystery. Left on disordered scraps of paper in a trunk, the fragments that make up The Book of Disquiet have no fixed sequence, and therefore each reader must make out of them a different text. This translation, published in hardcover by Pantheon in 1991, has been widely reviewed as the best available.

A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems (Penguin Classics)

The poetry of “the greatest twentieth century writer you have never heard of ” (Los Angeles Times)

Writing obsessively in French, English, and Portuguese, Fernando Pessoa left a prodigious body of work, much of it under “heteronyms”—fully fleshed alter egos with startlingly different styles and points of view. Offering a unique sampling of all his most famous voices, this collection features poems that have never before been translated alongside many originally composed in English. In addition to such major works as “Maritime Ode of Campos” and his Goethe-inspired Faust, written in blank verse, there are several stunning poems that have only come to light in the last five years. Selected and translated by leading Pessoa scholar Richard Zenith, this is the finest introduction available to the breadth of Pessoa’s genius.

Message

Message ("Mensagem") was the only book of verse in his own language that Pessoa saw through the press in his lifetime. On the face of it, a patriotic sequence steeped in 'Sebastianismo', the poems offer much more than this, the Kings and navigators of the Portugal's history standing as avatars of the poet's self, their explorations and heroic deeds projections of the poet's inner creative life. Although Pessoa is famous for the many heteronyms under which he composed verse in wildly different styles, this volume was published under his own name - the 'orthonym', as he defined it - and it remains one of his great masterpieces. This edition brings Jonathn Griffin's fine translation (originally published by the Menard Press in 1992) back into print, as part of Shearsman's Pessoa edition.

The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro

This is the only integral collection of Pessoa's Caeiro heteronym in English, and the poems are accompanied by the introductions of Ricardo Reis and a memoir by Alvaro de Campos, two of Pessoa's other major poetic heteronyms, as well as a poem dedicated to Caeiro by Coelho Pacheco, believed by many commentators to be another one-off heteronym. Ricardo Reis says: "Alberto Caeiro da Silva was born in Lisbon on April 16, 1889, and died of tuberculosis in the same city on (...), 1915. He spent nearly all his life in a village in Ribatejo, and only returned to the city of his birth in his final months. In Ribatejo he wrote nearly all his poems ..." Fernando Pessoa was educated in English in Durban, as the stepson of a Portuguese diplomat, and was completely bilingual. During his lifetime he was to publish only one collection of his poems in Portuguese, although many appeared in literary journals, under a number of alter egos, or heteronyms, chief amongst them Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis. At his death in 1935, Pessoa left more than 20,000 manuscripts - poetry and prose - in a large trunk, the contents of which are still being transcribed and deciphered to this day.He is the greatest modern poet in the Portuguese language, but always considered himself a poet in the English tradition.

Selected English Poems

Pessoa wrote a large number of poems in English, some of them in the guise of early heteronyms (such as Alexander Search and Charles Robert Anon) which prove to be fascinating precursors of the later, modernist work in Portuguese. While not the equal of the masterly Caeiro, Campos, Reis or Pessoa-himself, these poems deserve to be better known and at least available in the English-speaking world. Pessoa was educated in English in Durban, as the stepson of a Portuguese diplomat, and was completely bilingual. He translated several books from English for Portuguese publishing houses. The sometimes startlingly frank content of the earlier English poems - published privately in Lisbon - may well have prevented their wider dissemination in more prudish British circles. What is not so well-known is that Pessoa continued to write poetry in a bookish form of English throughout his life and this volume is an attempt to show the nature of that work to its originally intended audience - an anglophone readership.

The Keeper of Sheep (O Guardador de Rebanhos)

On a singular March day in 1914, "Fernando Pessoa felt his master appear inside him, "Alberto Caeiro, " the heteronym that stands over his epiphanic collection, composed that day "The Keeper of Sheep" -- the pivotal work in the career of Portugal's great modern poet. Of the poet's persona Octavio Paz declares, "his words strike us as truths from another age, that age in which everything was the same." "The Keeper of Sheep" is appears here in its original Portuguese beside its first English translation.

Antologia Esencial Edicion Bilingue

Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics)