I found him by chance in early 2007 when I found the Richard Zenith translation of The Book of Disquiet at a bookstore. It became my bedside book the rest of the year. The rest was on purpose. I quickly got the poetry collection by the same translator, A Little Larger Than The Entire Universe. Since then I've read almost every major translated volume by him (I think Mensagem, excerpted in other volumes, is the exception). I also bought a few book-length secondary works, along with some recently published juvenilia and miscellany, sadly little of which I've gotten around to reading yet.
Anyway, the line "We take the credit for what isn't ours - ourselves." had a distinctly Pessoan ring to me. He seems to be popping up more and more these days in book blurbs and reviewers' and essayists' asides, doesn't he? I feel like he should be more of a household name but I kind of get why he isn't. Even though he's not what I'd call a "difficult" writer like some other modernists, he's tough to explain to the average intellectually curious reader. I wrote a paper on him in a class long ago (I got to choose pretty much any topic) but it focused mostly on The Book of Disquiet and relied heavily on Zenith's scholarship, serving as little more than a cursory introduction. So I end up saying "Just read him!"
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2016-09-29 04:12 pm (UTC)Anyway, the line "We take the credit for what isn't ours - ourselves." had a distinctly Pessoan ring to me. He seems to be popping up more and more these days in book blurbs and reviewers' and essayists' asides, doesn't he? I feel like he should be more of a household name but I kind of get why he isn't. Even though he's not what I'd call a "difficult" writer like some other modernists, he's tough to explain to the average intellectually curious reader. I wrote a paper on him in a class long ago (I got to choose pretty much any topic) but it focused mostly on The Book of Disquiet and relied heavily on Zenith's scholarship, serving as little more than a cursory introduction. So I end up saying "Just read him!"