The Book of Disquiet

Fernando Pessoa drinking a glass of wine in a tavern in 1929.

The Book of Disquiet (Livro do Desassossego: Composto por Bernardo Soares, ajudante de guarda-livros na cidade de Lisboa) published posthumously, is a work by Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), signed under the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares. With a preface by Fernando Pessoa, orthonym, the book is a fragmentary lifetime project, left unedited by the author, who introduced it as a "factless autobiography".

Editions

In Lisbon there are a few restaurants or eating houses located above decent-looking taverns, places with the heavy, domestic look of restaurants in towns far from any rail line. These second-story eateries, usually empty except on Sundays, frequently contain curious types whose faces are not interesting but who constitute a series of digressions from life.

— Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet, tr. by Alfred Mac Adam.

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 years 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 by different translators: Richard Zenith (editor and translator), Iain Watson, Alfred Mac Adam and Margaret Jull Costa. The Book is a bestseller, especially in German (16 editions, from different translators and publishers).

The book was listed number 47, according to the Christian Science Monitor, on the Norwegian Book Clubs list of the 100 best works of fiction of all time, based on the responses of 100authors from 54 countries.

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.

Richard Zenith, editor of the a new Portuguese edition, in 1998, took the option of a single volume, as in his first translation, back in 1991. In his introduction, he wrote that «If Bernardo Soares does not measure up to the full Pessoa, neither are his diary writings the sum total of Disquietude, to which he was after all a johnny-comelately. The Book of Disquietude was various books (yet ultimately one book), with various authors (yet ultimately one author), and even the word disquietude changes meaning as time passes».

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. »

Bibliography

• The Book of Disquietude, tr. Richard Zenith, Carcanet Press, 1991, 323 p. ISBN 0-14-118304-7
• The Book of Disquiet, tr. Iain Watson, Quartet Books, 1991. ISBN 0-7043-0153-9
• The Book of Disquiet, tr. Alfred Mac Adam, New York NY: Pantheon Books, 1991. ISBN 0-679-40234-9
• The Book of Disquiet, tr. Margaret Jull Costa, London, New York: Serpent's Tail, 1991, ISBN 1-85242-204-1
• The Book of Disquiet, tr. Richard Zenith, Penguin Classics, 2002. ISBN 978-0-14-118304-6
• 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 2-267-00544-1
• 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. ISBN 972-617-069-9
• Livro do Desassossego: Composto por Bernardo Soares, ajudante de guarda-livros na cidade de Lisboa, edição e introdução de Richard Zenith, Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 1998, 534 p. ISBN 972-37-0476-5

References

• Article: Portugal Holds on to Words Few Can Grasp, New York Times, July 15, 2008