Publisher's Synopsis
Pessoa's amazing personality is as beguiling and mysterious as his uniquepoetic output. We cannot learn too much about him.
William Boyd
With Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) we get at least four writers for the price of one, and A Centenary Pessoa includes a broader selection of his poems than has previously appeared in English, and a hundred pages of his prose, much of it originally written in English. To this core, poet and critic Eugenio Lisboa has added an essay-length introduction by Octavio Paz, a photobiography, a critical anthology, two 'posthumous interviews', and works of art inspired by the poet. In an age when poets spoke through personae and masks, Pessoa invented 'heteronyms', complete with their own styles and biographies. At the heart of this book are poems Pessoa wrote as his quietly lyrical self, as the pagan and bucolic Alberto Caeiro, the neoclassical dilettante Ricardo Reis, and the wildly confessional Alvaro de Campos.
A Centenary Pessoa, a treat for committed Pessoans, is also a rich introduction for those curious about his oeuvre. 'One of the evident giants', George Steiner said of him; 'perhaps the greatest poet of the twentieth century,' wrote Antonio Tabucchi. Pessoa during his lifetime published in small circulation journals and left, at his death, a trunk of over 25,000 pieces and fragments. Now in Portugal his portrait appears on banknotes, a university bears his name, a Pessoa Foundation occupies his final home, his body has been reburied near the remains of Cames and Vasco da Gama. He is famous on his own terms.
Carcanet was the first English-language publisher of FERNANDO PESSOA in 1971. In 1992 Carcanet published Richard Zenith's translation of the The Book of Disquietude.
