The Book of Disquiet

The prizewinning, complete and unabridged translation--＂the best English-language version we are likely to see for a long time, if ever＂ (The Guardian)--of a work of unclassifiable genius: the crowning achievement of Portugal’s modern master

Edited, Translated, and with an Introduction by Richard Zenith, the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Pessoa: A Biography

Winner of the Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Prize for Portuguese Translation

A Penguin Classic

Fernando Pessoa was many writers in one. He attributed his prolific writings to a wide range of alternate selves, each of which had a distinct biography, ideology, and horoscope. When he died in 1935, Pessoa left behind a trunk filled with unfinished and unpublished writings, among which were the remarkable pages that make up his posthumous masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, an astonishing work that, in George Steiner’s words, ＂gives to Lisbon the haunting spell of Joyce’s Dublin or Kafka’s Prague.＂

Published for the first time some fifty years after his death, this unique collection of short, aphoristic paragraphs comprises the ＂autobiography＂ of Bernardo Soares, one of Pessoa’s alternate selves. Part intimate diary, part prose poetry, part descriptive narrative, captivatingly translated by Richard Zenith, The Book of Disquiet is one of the greatest works of the twentieth century.

＂Pessoa is a genius.＂ --André Aciman

Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was born in Lisbon and brought up in Durban, South Africa. He returned to Lisbon in 1905. A prolific writer, ascribing his work to a variety of personas or heteronyms, Pessoa published little in his lifetime and supported himself by working as a commercial translator. Although acknowledged as an intellectual and a poet, his literary genius went largely unrecognized until after his death.

Richard Zenith (editor, translator) lives in Lisbon, where he works as a freelance writer, translator, and critic. His translations include Galician-Portuguese troubadour poetry; novels by Antonio Lobo Antunes; Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet; Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems, which won the 1999 American PEN Award for Poetry in Translation; and Education by Stone: Selected Poems, which won the Academy of American Poets’ Harold Morton Landon Translation Award in 2006.In 2012, he was awarded Portugal’s Pessoa Prize.