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The poetry of “the greatest twentieth century writer you have never heard of ” (Los Angeles Times) Writing obsessively in French, English, and Portuguese, Fernando Pessoa left a prodigious body of work, much of it under “heteronyms”—fully fleshed alter egos with startlingly different styles and points of view. Offering a unique sampling of all his most famous voices, this collection features poems that have never before been translated alongside many originally composed in English. In addition to such major works as “Maritime Ode of Campos” and his Goethe-inspired Faust, written in blank verse, there are several stunning poems that have only come to light in the last five years. Selected and translated by leading Pessoa scholar Richard Zenith, this is the finest introduction available to the breadth of Pessoa’s genius.
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fernando pessoa A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe selected poems Edited and Translated by richard zenith
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A LITTLE LARGER THAN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE: SELECTED POEMS fernando pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888 and spent most of his childhood in Durban, South Africa. In 1905 he returned to Lisbon to enroll in college but eventually dropped out, preferring to study on his own. He made a modest living translating the foreign correspondence of various commercial firms, and wrote obsessively—in English, Portuguese, and French. He self-published several chapbooks of his English poems in 1918 and 1921, and regularly contributed his Portuguese poems to literary reviews. Mensagem, a collection of poems on patriotic themes, won a prize in a national competition in 1934. Pessoa wrote much of his greatest poetry in the guise of his three main “heteronyms”—Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis—whose fully fleshed biographies he invented, giving them different writing styles and points of view. He created dozens of other writerly personas, including the assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares, fictional author of The Book of Disquiet. Although Pessoa was acknowledged as an intellectual and a poet, his literary genius went largely unrecognized until after his death in 1935. richard zenith lives in Lisbon, where he works as a freelance writer, translator, and critic. His translations include Galician–Portuguese troubadour poetry, novels by António Lobo Antunes, Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and Fernando Pessoa and Co.—Selected Poems, which won the 1999 American PEN Award for Poetry in Translation.
fernando pessoa A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe selected poems Edited and Translated by richard zenith
penguin books
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Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in Penguin Books 2006 Translation, introduction, and notes copyright © Richard Zenith, 2006 All rights reserved Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint “My gaze is clear like a sunflower,” “I’m a keeper of sheep,” “I got off the train,”