Fernando Pessoa

The writing of Fernando Pessoa reveals a mind shaken by intense inner suffering. In these poems he adopted four separate personae: Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis and himself, using them to express 'great swarms of thought and feeling'. While each personae has its own poetic identity, together they convey a sense of ambivalence and consolidate a striving for completeness. Dramatic, lyrical, Christian, pagan, old and modern, Pessoa's poets and poetry contribute to the 'mysterious importance of existence'.

The Book of Disquietude is the 'factless autobiography' of Bernardo Soares, one of the 72 literary personae with which Fernando Pessoa created the theatre of himself. Conceived in 1916, Soares is, Pessoa declares, 'a mutilation' of his own personality. This is the first, and only complete, English edition. Other versions are abridgements. The translator and scholar Richard Zenith includes all the 'fragments' which made up the 1982 edition, 48 additional fragments and some from the Pessoa archive never previously published. He provides a full introduction and notes.