The Book of Disquiet
PENGUIN BOOKS
The Book of Disquiet
‘A Modernist touchstone… no one has explored alternative selves with Pessoa’s mixture of determination and abandon… In a time which celebrates fame, success, stupidity, convenience and noise, here is the perfect antidote, a hymn of praise to obscurity, failure, intelligence, difficulty and silence’ John Lanchester,
Daily Telegraph
‘His prose masterpiece… Richard Zenith has done an heroic job in producing the best English-language version we are likely to see for a long time, if ever’ Nicholas Lezard,
Guardian
‘
The Book of Disquiet
was left in a trunk which might never have been opened. The gods must be thanked that it was. I love this strange work of fiction and I love the inventive, hard-drinking, modest man who wrote it in obscurity’ Paul Bailey,
Independent
‘Fascinating, even gripping stuff… a strangely addictive pleasure’ Kevin Jackson,
Sunday Times
‘Must rank as the supreme assault on authorship in modern European literature… readers of Zenith’s edition will find it supersedes all others in its delicacy of style, rigorous scholarship and sympathy for Pessoa’s fractured sensibility… the self-revelation of a disoriented and half-disintegrated soul that is all the more compelling because the author himself is an invention… Long before postmodernism became an academic industry, Pessoa lived deconstruction’ John Gray,
New Statesman
‘Portugal’s greatest modern poet… deals with the only important question in the world, not less important because it is unanswerable: What am I?’ Anthony Burgess,
Observer
‘Pessoa’s rapid prose, snatched in flight and restlessly suggestive, remains haunting, often startling, like the touch of a vibrating wire, elusive and persistent like the poetry… there is nobody like him’ W. S. Merwin,
New York Review of Books
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fernanco Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888 and was brought up in Durban, South Africa. In 1905 he returned to Lisbon to enrol 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. He self-published several chapbooks of his English poems in 1918 and 1922, and regularly contributed his Portuguese poems to literary journals such as
Orpheu
and
Portugal Futurista
.
Mensagem
, a collection of poems on patriotic themes, won a consolation prize in a national competition in 1934. Pessoa wrote much of his greatest poetry under three main ‘heteronyms’, Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis, whose fully fleshed biographies he invented, giving them different writing styles and points of view. He created dozens of other writerly personas, including the assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares, fictional author of
The Book of Disquiet
. Although Pessoa was acknowledged as an intellectual and a poet, his literary genius went largely unrecognized until after his death in 1935.
Richard Zenith lives in Lisbon, where he works as a freelance writer, translator and critic. His translations include Galician–Portuguese troubadour poetry, novels by António Lobo Antunes and
Fernando Pessoa and Co. – Selected Poems
, which won the 1999 American PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
FERNANDO PESSOA
The Book of Disquiet
Edited and translated by Richard Zenith
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in Portuguese as
Livro do Desassossego
by Assírio & Alvim 1998
This translation first published in Great Britain by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 2001
Published in Penguin Classics 2002
1
Original text copyright © Assírio & Alvim and Fernando Pessoa’s heirs, 1998
Editorial matter, selection and translation copyright © Richard Zenith, 2001
All rights reserved.
The moral right of the translator has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Contents
Notes on the Text and Translation
Appendix I: Texts Citing the Name of Vicente Guedes
Appendix III: Reflections on
The Book of Disquiet
from Pessoa’s Writings
Introduction
I’m astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will’s surrender. I begin because I don’t have the strength to think; I finish because I don’t have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice. (Text 152)
Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888, died there in 1935, and did not often leave the city as an adult, but he spent nine of his childhood years in the British-governed town of Durban, South Africa, where his stepfather was the Portuguese consul. Pessoa, who was five years old when his natural father died of tuberculosis, developed into a shy and highly imaginative boy, and a brilliant student. Shortly after his seventeenth birthday, he returned to Lisbon to enrol in the university but soon dropped out, preferring to study on his own at the National Library, where he systematically read major works of philosophy, history, sociology and literature (especially Portuguese) in order to complement and extend the traditional English education he had received in South Africa. His production of poetry and prose in English during this period was intense, and by 1910 he was also writing extensively in Portuguese. He published his first essay in literary criticism in 1912, his first piece of creative prose (a passage from
The Book of Disquiet
) in 1913, and his first poems in 1914.
Living sometimes with relatives, sometimes in rented rooms, Pessoa supported himself by doing occasional translations and by drafting letters in English and French for Portuguese firms that did business
abroad. Although solitary by nature, with a limited social life and almost no love life, he was an active leader of Portugal’s Modernist movement in the 1910s, and he invented several of his own movements, including a Cubist-inspired ‘Intersectionism’ and a strident, quasi-Futurist ‘Sensationism’. Pessoa stood outside the limelight, however, exerting influence through his writings and in his conversations with more conspicuous literary figures. Respected in Lisbon as an intellectual and a poet, he regularly published his work in magazines, several of which he helped to found and run, but his literary genius went largely unrecognized until after his death. Pessoa was convinced of his own genius, however, and he lived for the sake of his writing. Although he was in no hurry to publish, he had grandiose plans for Portuguese and English editions of his complete works, and he seems to have held on to most of what he wrote.
Pessoa’s legacy consisted of a large trunk full of poetry, prose, plays, philosophy, criticism, translations, linguistic theory, political writings, horoscopes and assorted other texts, variously typed, handwritten or illegibly scrawled in Portuguese, English and French. He wrote in notebooks, on loose sheets, on the backs of letters, advertisements and handbills, on stationery from the firms he worked for and from the cafés he frequented, on envelopes, on paper scraps, and in the margins of his own earlier texts. To compound the confusion, he wrote under dozens of names, a practice – or compulsion – that began in his childhood. He called his most important personas ‘heteronyms’, endowing them with their own biographies, physiques, personalities, political views, religious attitudes and literary pursuits (see Table of Heteronyms,
pp. 505–9
). Some of Pessoa’s most memorable work in Portuguese was attributed to the three main poetic heteronyms – Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos – and to the ‘semi-heteronym’ called Bernardo Soares, while his vast output of English poetry and prose was in large part credited to heteronyms Alexander Search and Charles Robert Anon, and his writings in French to the lonely Jean Seul. The many other alter egos included translators, short-story writers, an English literary critic, an astrologer, a philosopher and an unhappy nobleman who committed suicide. There was even a female persona: the hunchbacked and helplessly lovesick Maria José. At the turn of the century, sixty-five years after Pessoa’s death,
his vast written world had still not been completely charted by researchers, and a significant part of his writings was still waiting to be published.
‘Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist.’ So claimed Álvaro de Campos, one of the characters invented by Pessoa to spare himself the trouble of living real life. And to spare himself the trouble of organizing and publishing the richest part of his prose, Pessoa invented
The Book of Disquiet
, which never existed, strictly speaking, and can never exist. What we have here isn’t a book but its subversion and negation: the ingredients for a book whose recipe is to keep sifting, the mutant germ of a book and its weirdly lush ramifications, the rooms and windows to build a book but no floor plan and no floor, a compendium of many potential books and many others already in ruins. What we have in these pages is an anti-literature, a kind of primitive, verbal CAT scan of one man’s anguished soul.
Long before the deconstructionists began to apply their sledgehammers to the conceptual edifice that sheltered our Cartesian sense of personal identity, Pessoa had already self-deconstructed, and without any hammer. Pessoa never set out to destroy himself or anything else. He didn’t attack, like Derrida, the assumption that language has the power to mean, and he didn’t take apart history and our systems of thought, in the manner of Foucault. He just looked squarely at himself in the mirror, and saw us all:
Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways. (Text 396)
The problem with
Cogito, ergo sum
, for Pessoa, wasn’t in the philosophical principle but in the grammatical subject. ‘Be what I think? But I think of being so many things!’ cried heteronym Álvaro de Campos in ‘The Tobacco Shop’, and those myriad thoughts and potential selves suggested anything but a unified I. Much more than a literary ploy, heteronymy was how Pessoa – in the absence of a stable and centred ego – could exist. ‘We think, therefore we are’ is what, in effect, he says. And even this form of self-affirmation is chancy, for in
his moments of greatest doubt and detachment, Pessoa looks within and whispers, with horror: ‘They think, therefore they are.’
Doubt and hesitation are the absurd twin energies that powered Pessoa’s inner universe and informed
The Book of Disquiet
, which was its piecemeal map. He explained his trouble and that of his book to a poet friend, Armando Cortes-Rodrigues, in a letter dated 19 November 1914: ‘My state of mind compels me to work hard, against my will, on
The Book of Disquiet
. But it’s all fragments, fragments, fragments.’ And in a letter written the previous month to the same friend, he spoke of a ‘deep and calm depression’ that allowed him to write only ‘little things’ and ‘broken, disconnected pieces of
The Book of Disquiet
’. In this respect, that of perpetual fragmentation, the author and his
Book
were forever faithful to their principles. If Pessoa split himself into dozens of literary characters who contradicted each other and even themselves,
The Book of Disquiet
likewise multiplied without ceasing, being first one book and then another, told by this voice then that voice, then another, still others, all swirling and uncertain, like the cigarette smoke through which Pessoa, sitting in a café or next to his window, watched life go by.