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Christian Dittus
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PESSOA

Richard Zenith

A Biography

Like Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, Richard Zenith's Pessoa immortalizes the life of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers.

Eighty-five years after his wrenching death in a cramped Lisbon apartment, where he left more than 25,000 manuscript sheets in a wooden trunk, Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) remains one of the most enigmatic and underappreciated poets of the twentieth century. Celebrated for writing in dozens of different poetic voices, known as heteronyms, Pessoa has finally found his definitive biographer in renowned translator Richard Zenith.

Setting the story of Pessoa's life against the nationalistic currents of early twentieth-century European history, Zenith charts the depths of Pessoa's explosive imagination and literary genius. Much as José Saramago brought one of Pessoa's heteronyms to life in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, Zenith traces the backstories of virtually all of Pessoa's imagined personalities, demonstrating how they were projections, spin-offs, or metamorphoses of Pessoa himself. Nothing less than a literary masterpiece, Zenith's monumental work confirms the power of Pessoa's words to speak prophetically to the disconnectedness of modern life.

Richard Zenith is an acclaimed translator and literary critic. His translations include Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet and Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems, which won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. The recipient of Portugal's Pessoa Prize, Zenith lives in Lisbon, Portugal.
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Published 2021-07-01 by Liveright (W.W. Norton)

Comments

The emergence of Fernando Pessoa as one of the world's great modern writers, one worthy of Richard Zenith's monumental new biography, has been nearly a century in the making...Zenith, an American resident of Lisbon, brought to the task a depth of scholarship gained through more than 30 years of publishing, translating and promoting his subject's work; Pessoa, who had few intimates in life, is lucky to have found this posthumous friend Unlike so many writers, who built a nicely furnished house or even a neighborhood, Pessoa really did build an entire city. Incomplete - hieratic- chaotic: but a city nonetheless. It was a city that needed a guide. Thanks to Zenith, it has one at last. ?Benjamin Moser in The New York Times Book Review Read more...

Brazil: Companhia Das Letras); Korea: Minumsa; Portugal: Quetzal; UK: Penguin UK;

Mammoth, definitive and sublime, Richard Zenith's new biography, Pessoa, gives us a group portrait of the writer and his cast of alternate selves --along with a perceptive reading of what it meant for Pessoa to multiply (or did he fracture?) like this. What problems did it solve -- and invite? Zenith has written the only kind of biography of Pessoa truly permissible, an account of a life that plucks at the very borders and burdens of the notion of a self. Was ‘Fernando Pessoa' the original heteronym?...Zenith reconstructs a life with supple scholarship and just the right kind of proportion, applying the right amount of pressure on those formative experiences of childhood, grief, sexual anxiety and humiliation, early ecstatic encounters with art --never losing sight of the fact that Pessoa's real life happened elsewhere, as for many writers, alone and at his desk ?Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Read more...