Nearly a century after his wrenching death, the Portuguese poet
Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) remains one of our most enigmatic
writers. Believing he could do "more in dreams than Napoleon," yet
haunted by the specter of hereditary madness, Pessoa invented
dozens of alter egos, or "heteronyms," under whose names he wrote
in Portuguese, English, and French. Unsurprisingly, this "most
multifarious of writers" (Guardian) has long eluded a definitive
biographer-but in renowned translator and Pessoa scholar Richard
Zenith, he has met his match. Relatively unknown in his lifetime,
Pessoa was all but destined for literary oblivion when the arc of
his afterlife bent, suddenly and improbably, toward greatness, with
the discovery of some 25,000 unpublished papers left in a large,
wooden trunk. Drawing on this vast archive of sources as well as on
unpublished family letters, and skillfully setting the poet's life
against the nationalist currents of twentieth-century European
history, Zenith at last reveals the true depths of Pessoa's teeming
imagination and literary genius. Much as Nobel laureate Jose
Saramago brought a single heteronym 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. A
solitary man who had only one, ultimately platonic love affair,
Pessoa used his and his heteronyms' writings to explore questions
of sexuality, to obsessively search after spiritual truth, and to
try to chart a way forward for a benighted and politically agitated
Portugal. Although he preferred the world of his mind, Pessoa was
nonetheless a man of the places he inhabited, including not only
Lisbon but also turn-of-the-century Durban, South Africa, where he
spent nine years as a child. Zenith re-creates the drama of
Pessoa's adolescence-when the first heteronyms emerged-and his
bumbling attempts to survive as a translator and publisher. Zenith
introduces us, too, to Pessoa's bohemian circle of friends, and to
Ophelia Quieroz, with whom he exchanged numerous love letters.
Pessoa reveals in equal force the poet's unwavering commitment to
defending homosexual writers whose books had been banned, as well
as his courageous opposition to Salazar, the Portuguese dictator,
toward the end of his life. In stunning, magisterial prose, Zenith
contextualizes Pessoa's posthumous literary achievements-especially
his most renowned work, The Book of Disquiet. A modern literary
masterpiece, Pessoa simultaneously immortalizes the life of a
literary maestro and confirms the enduring power of Pessoa's work
to speak prophetically to the disconnectedness of our modern world.
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