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The Book Of Disquietude

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The Book Of Disquietude or The Book of Disquiet (Livro do Desassossego in Portuguese), published posthumously, is one of the greatest works by Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), signed under the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares. It is a fragmentary lifetime project, left unedited by the author, that introduced it as a «factless autobiography».

Editions

Still studied by the pessoan critics, who have different interpretations about the way the book should be organized, it was first published in Portuguese in 1982, 47 year after Pessoa's death (the author died also at 47, in 1935). Published in Spanish (1984), German (1985), Italian (1986), French (1988), etc.. In 1991 the Book had four English editions from different translators. The Book is a bestseller, especially in German (16 editions, from different translators and publishers).

Interpretations

Teresa Sobral Cunha considers that there are two Books Of Disquietude. According to the expert that organized along with Jacinto do Prado Coelho and Maria Aliete Galhoz the first edition of this book only edited in 1982, there are two authors of this book: Vicente Guedes, in a first phase (in the 10's and the 20's) and the aforementioned Bernardo Soares (late 20's and the 30's).

However, António Quadros considers that the first phase of the book belongs to Pessoa. The second phase, more personal and diary-like, is the one belonging to Bernardo Soares.


George Steiner on The Book Of Disquiet

«The fragmentary, the incomplete is of the essence of Pessoa's spirit. The very kaleidoscope of voices within him, the breadth of his culture, the catholicity of his ironic sympathies - wonderfully echoed in Saramago's great novel about Ricardo Reis - inhibited the monumentalities, the self-satisfaction of completion. Hence the vast torso of Pessoa's Faust on which he laboured much of his life. Hence the fragmentary condition of The Book of Disquiet which contains material that predates 1913 and which Pessoa left open-ended at his death. As Adorno famously said, the finished work is, in our times and climate of anguish, a lie.

It was to Bernardo Soares that Pessoa ascribed his Book of Disquiet, first made available in English in a briefer version by Richard Zenith in 1991. The translation is at once penetrating and delicately observant of Pessoa's astute melancholy. What is this Livro do Desassossego? Neither 'commonplace book', nor 'sketchbook', nor 'florilegium' will do. Imagine a fusion of Coleridge's notebooks and marginalia, of Valery's philosophic diary and of Robert Musil's voluminous journal. Yet even such a hybrid does not correspond to the singularity of Pessoa's chronicle. Nor do we know what parts thereof, if any, he ever intended for publication in some revised format.[1] »

Bibliography

  • The Book of Disquietude, tr. Richard Zenith, Carcanet Press, 1991. ISBN 0-14-118304-7
  • The Book of Disquiet, tr. Iain Watson, Quartet Books, 1991. ISBN 0704301539
  • The Book of Disquiet, tr. Alfred Mac Adam, New York NY: Pantheon Books, 1991. ISBN 0679402349
  • The Book of Disquiet, tr. Margaret Jull Costa, London, New York: Serpent's Tail, 1991, ISBN 1852422041
  • Le Livre de l'Intranquillité de Bernardo Soares. Adapté par Antonio Tabucchi, sous la direction de Robert Bréchon e Eduardo Prado Coelho, introduction de Eduardo Louranço, traduction de Françoise Laye. Paris: Christian Bourgois Editeur, 1988. ISBN 2267005441
  • Das Buch der Unruhe das Hilfsbuchhalters Bernardo Soares, aus dem Portugiesischen übersetzt und mit einem Nachwort versehen von Georg Rudolf Lind. Zürich: Ammann, 1985. ISBN 3-250-10025-0
  • Livro do Desassossego por Bernardo Soares, 2 vol., prefácio e organização de Jacinto do Prado Coelho, recolha e transcrição dos textos de Maria Aliete Galhoz e Teresa Sobral Cunha, Lisboa: Ática, 1982, 287 p.

References

  1. ^ STEINER, George, «A man of many parts», The Observer, Sunday, 3 June 2001. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/jun/03/poetry.features1.