The Book of Disquiet Read Online Free PDF

the character of a book, a life one reads. Whatever I feel is felt (against my will) so that I can write that I felt it. Whatever I think is promptly put into words, mixed with images that undo it, cast into rhythms that are something else altogether. From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I. I plumbed myself and dropped the plumb; I spend my life wondering if I’m deep or not, with no remaining plumb except my gaze that shows me – blackly vivid in the mirror at the bottom of the well – my own face that observes me observing it.
(Text 193, dated 2 September 1931)
    No other writer ever achieved such a direct transference of self to paper. The Book of Disquiet is the world’s strangest photograph, made out of words, the only material capable of capturing the recesses of the soul it exposes.
Richard Zenith, 2001
    NOTES
    It is in his Notes for the Memory of my Master Caeiro that Álvaro de Campos apprises us of Pessoa’s non-existence. Reis was described as ‘a Greek Horace who writes in Portuguese’ in a letter Pessoa wrote to an Englishman on 31 October 1924. The fragmentary passage titled ‘Diary of Vicente Guedes’ was transcribed by Teresa Rita Lopes for her Pessoa por Conhecer (Lisbon: Estampa, 1990), where a list specifying Guedes’s translating duties was alsopublished. Guedes’s unpublished ‘O Asceta’ (‘The Ascetic’) is catalogued in the Pessoa Archives under the number 2720V 3 /1. The translated excerpt of the Campos poem dated 9 August 1934 is taken from Fernando Pessoa & Co. – Selected Poems (New York: Grove Press, 1998). The list of ten short stories attributed to Bernardo Soares is catalogued under 144 G/29, the publication programme that identifies Soares as a short-story writer under 144 G/38. The typed inventory of Soares’s literary production, on the Rua dos Douradores, is reproduced in my Introduction to the Livro do Desassossego . The Afterword to my edition of Teive’s A Educação do Estóico ( The Education of the Stoic ) (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1999) undertakes a thorough comparison of the Baron and Bernardo Soares.

Notes on the Text and Translation
    Had Pessoa prepared his Livro do Desassossego ( The Book of Disquiet ) for publication, it would have been a smaller book. He planned to make a ‘rigorous’ selection from among all the texts he had written, to adapt the older ones to the ‘true psychology’ of Bernardo Soares, and to undertake ‘an overall revision of the style’ (see the ‘note’ in Appendix III). This operation would have resulted in a smooth, polished book with perhaps half as many pages, and perhaps half as much genius. Purged of whatever was fragmentary and incomplete, the book would have gained novelistic virtues such as plot and dramatic tension, but it would have run the risk of becoming just another book, instead of what it remains: a monument as wondrous as it is impossible.
    Pessoa published twelve excerpts from The Book of Disquiet in literary magazines and left, in the famous trunk that contained his extravagant written life, about 450 additional texts marked L. do D. and/or included in a large envelope labelled Livro do Desassossego . Most of this material was incorporated in the first edition of the work, published only in 1982, forty-seven years after Pessoa’s death. It was a heroic effort, since Pessoa’s archives are notoriously labyrinthine and his handwriting often virtually illegible, and it was doomed – for these very reasons – to be seriously flawed. A new edition, published in 1990–91 (the first volume of which was republished, with extensive revisions, in 1997), presented improved readings and over one hundred previously unpublished texts, most of which were not explicitly identified with The Book of Disquiet , although the majority of them could have been penned or typed with Bernardo Soares in mind.
    My own edition of the Livro do Desassossego