Fernando Pessoa: The Book Of Disquiet

[Mirabell]

The Truffle comments @ tabula rasa and raises legitimate concerns

Etant donn? que la premi?re version publi?e contait de nombreuses erreurs de lectures et qu?on aurait retrouv? d?autres textes appartenant au projet, Richard Zenith ?tablit en 1998 une nouvelle version. C?est cette ?dition de r?f?rence qui est commun?ment disponible chez Christian Bourgois. Elle est consid?r?e comme int?grale. Etrange ? plus d?un titre. ? Le livre de l?intranquillit? ? est un projet sur lequel Pessoa fit travailler Bernardo Soares jusqu?? sa mort. Il ne le termina jamais, ne rassembla pas les textes d?j? ?crits. Projet en cours d??laboration, sans cesse chang?, r?imagin?. Comme pourrait-il donc ?tre int?gral ? Bien s?r, on comprend que cette int?gralit? est fragmentaire, qu?on entend par l? que le livre rassemble tout ce qui est disponible. Il y a un autre aspect de cette d?nomination qui me d?range : est-elle vraiment utilisable lorsqu?on sait qu?une large partie des textes rassembl?s dans ? Le livre de l?intranquillit? ? n?ont jamais ?t? ?crits par Pessoa / Soares pour en faire partie. Sur un peu moins de 500 fragments, ? peu pr?s 185 ne comportent pas, sur le manuscrit, la mention ? Livre de l?intranquillit? ?. On suppose donc que c?est l??diteur qui a choisi de les y inclure, puisqu?ils ?taient de Soares et / ou partageaient esprit et ton de l?ouvrage. On fait confiance ? Zenith mais on peut quand m?me se demander si cette option ?tait la bonne. Aussi bien Zenith que Robert Br?chon et Eduardo Louren?o (qui pr?sentent l??dition fran?aise) soulignent ? raison que ? Le livre de l?intranquillit? ? est un livre qui n?existe pas et qui ne saurait donc ?tre fid?le au projet de son auteur. C?est tout ? fait juste, mais ne peux, ? mon sens, tout justifier. On pourrait au moins s?attendre ? une explication plus circonstanci?e du choix effectu?. J?aurais pour ma part pr?f?r? un texte compos? des seuls fragments sp?cifiquement destin?s au ? Livre de l?intranquillit? ?, avec, pourquoi pas, les passages suppl?mentaire en fin de volume plut?t que m?lang? au reste. Ce me semble a priori le plus sens? et le plus ?vident. Que Zenith ai choisi une autre option ne me pose sans doute de probl?me que parce que je ne sais pas pourquoi il a pris cette d?cision. Toujours est-il, et sans nier ni la qualit? du travail de Zenith ni, Dieu m?en garde, celle des textes de Pessoa, que chaque fois que je vois le livre, je me demande si sur la couverture, plut?t que Fernando Pessoa ? ? Le livre de l?intranquillit? ? - ?dition int?grale, il ne faudrait pas lire Robert Zenith ? ? R?invention du livre de l?intranquillit? de Fernando Pessoa ? - ?dition gonfl?e. Que ?a ne vous emp?che pas de le lire, ceci dit.

[Heteronym]

I fail to see the problem here.

What does it matter whether the unnamed fragments are in the main book or in an appendix at the end? The Book of Disquiet isn't a novel, there's no going from A-to-B-to-Z in it. The 481 fragments could support several orderings. After reading it once I concluded they would be better appreciated opening the book at random and reading one every day.

[Mirabell]

If Pessoa had labelled some fragments as belonging to the book and others not, what are they doing in the book? That's his point and its worth making, because by saying "integral edition" and writing Pessoa and the title on the cover the publisher is pretending that this is, basically, the book of disquiet. but a sizeable number of fragments were chosen by zenith, as was the sequence. It's, in a lot of ways, Zenith's book as well. Zenith's remix of the book, if you will. That should be acknowledged. That's all.

[Heteronym]

Zenith didn't edit the first version of The Book of Disquiet. Each version tends to have the name of the editor on the back. I actually own Zenith's and love it. His version is the internationally famous one because no Portuguese Fernando Pessoa scholar had managed to export him. If the French are not satisfied with it and want a new version, they can always send their own scholars to make a new version. I'm sure they'll be greeted with enthusiasm by the House of Fernando Pessoa.

Talking about an integral version is awkward, since Pessoa neither finished 'Disquiet' nor kept the fragments in order, although he left notes on the overall structure. I think there's a lot of charm in this. Like a museum collection, the book can be reordered in infinite ways for infinite readings. Some fragments can be removed or placed in an appendix. It's a living, breathing, interactive book, like the one Borges invented in "The Garden of the Forking Paths".

[Eric]

This book of fragments was translated by four different translators into English in 1991. Was it worth it? Things that can be read in any order remind me of Cort?zar's Rayuela (Hopscotch).

As Bernardo Soares was surely one of Pessoa's heteronyms, you have to decide whether it's legitimate to drag in fragments written by other Pessoa personas.

[fausto]

Heteronym,

Would you be so kind as to explain me what "the French" have to do with it?

[nnyhav]

Lotta disquiet over here.

Organization: Eric, everything in the book is "by" Soares and Soares alone. Fausto, I think your concern is misplaced: if it wasn't meant for the book, it ought to have been in another trunk. In this case editorship isn't supposed to reveal a canonical ordering, which never existed (though yes an annotation indicating explicit reference to being in the book would have been a plus, or an asterisk). Zenith is probably more inside Pessoa's head than anybody; Bourgois is probably right to follow that order. (Margaret Jull Costa's translation is well regarded, if partial: Anglophones should have both. And while I've read other Alfred Mac Adam work, he was apparently outshone here.)

Curiously, the book the I grabbed (or grabbed me) at Penn Station today is B.S. Johnson's book in a box, The Unfortunates: between the first and last chapters, all individually bound, the order is arbitrary.

[Eric]

My questions were really:

1) If Pessoa adopted several personas, is it legitimate to do an interpersona pick-'n-mix with fragments to fill up the book?

2) When there are so many books in the queue for translation, why are there four translations (assuming the translators aren't all the same person) of one book of fragments, which not many people are likely to read? It seems like overkill to me. Have they all been drawing stipends from the Gulbenkian, I wonder?

[nnyhav]

In Portugal, I took pictures in the bookshop ...

Eric:

1) Repeating to make more clear: None of the other heteronyms' writings appear in Zenith's or any other version of The Book of Disquiet; Zenith handles them in Pessoa & Co. and A Little Larger than the Entire Universe (poetry) and in The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (and the Baron Teive book, Education of a Stoic ).The point fausto made was that some of the writing by Soares was not specifically marked for inclusion in Pessoa's plan for the book, but since Pessoa never carried out that plan, I consider the point weak at its best. But I'm repeating myself again.

2) This book is that important (+). And has plenty of readers. Many of whom place it among their most important reading. Besides, this "book of fragments" was writ by an author of fragments, whilst the world was fragmenting, so what could be more representative?

[fausto]

nnyhav, I don't see how the point is weak. If a lot of texts were specifically identified by Pessoa himself as belonging to the disquiet project one can assume that those that were not specifically identified thus were not meant to be part of the project. So if Zenith thought it should be part of it, we might expect a justification of some sorts, more elaborate than "it fits the tone and the mood".

Furthermore, and to come back to your first comment, as far as I know, there wasn't a "disquiet trunk", there was atrunk with loads of stuff, including the diquiet think but not limited to it.

(And again this is not a dig at Zenith's work etc.)

[nnyhav]

[...] one can assume that those that were not specifically identified thus were not meant to be part of the project.

I disagree. There was no other project associated with Soares; as long as that heteronymic identification is secure, any such fragment is relevant to this project. I'll cede that it may have been background material, but whether Pessoa "meant to" integrate them or not, fitting them in to a design that Pessoa only outlined is surely to be preferred to segregating them into an appendix where all context is lost. Zenith's justification, "fits the tone and the mood", is appropriate to his ordering. It all becomes more problematic for fragments that are ambiguous, assigned to Soares instead of to one of the other known heteronyms, but Zenith wasn't just working off on his own in this. (Yes, I know you're not knocking Zenith, except in you're being unable to clearly differentiate amongst the above cases. As far as that goes, Margaret Jull Costa works from the selection of an Italian translator and includes the alternate ordering.)

[nnyhav]

Ray Davis has wrapped up his Barbellion Blog project (launched here) and made it available in proper (not reverse chronologic) order as promised (The Journal of a Disappointed Man, Enjoying Life and other Literary Remains, Last Diary; cf wiki on WNPB).

The affinities between this and The Book of Disquiet have occasionally been noted, but I wonder if there's more to it than that. Was Pessoa acquainted with these books, published 1919-20? Might they have prompted him to set aside Disquiet, or to return to it?

[cuchulain]

I first learned about Pessoa in the mid-80s. My mother sent me his selected poems after visiting Portugal. She was, at the time, living in Holland with my step-father. Portugal would remain her favorite country on the continent, after seeing most of Europe.

I took to Pessoa right away. I actually thought at the time, mistakenly, of course, that I was in rare company, an English reader of his works. It felt like a discovery, almost for myself alone.

Had at one time a copy of The Book of Disquiet, and lost it. Then I purchased Zenith's Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa. This thread is helpful, regarding what to go with when I purchase Disquiet again.

It also made Pessoa that much better for me to read Saramago's brilliant The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, which I'm guessing you folks have discussed here before. My second favorite Saramago novel, after Baltasar and Blimunda.

Pessoa was a giant.

[Heteronym]

The affinities between this and The Book of Disquiet have occasionally been noted, but I wonder if there's more to it than that. Was Pessoa acquainted with these books, published 1919-20? Might they have prompted him to set aside Disquiet, or to return to it?

The first fragment of 'Disquiet' was written in 1913; and Pessoa references this work in progress in his correspondence from 1914 onwards. Let's just accept that around the time WWI started, change was in the air and a group of kindred souls - Joyce, Pessoa, Musil, Kafka, Proust - working independently, shared similar aesthetic visions that would lead to modern literature. Much in the same way, Dada started in Zurich and New York at the same time, without the groups from each country knowing the other existed. It was the spirit of the age manifesting itself.

[nnyhav]

The first fragment of 'Disquiet' was written in 1913; and Pessoa references this work in progress in his correspondence from 1914 onwards.

But this progress was interrupted through the early 20s. My question and speculation is not in regard to the origin of the project, but to the discontinuity in it.

[Heteronym]

Zenith proposes that Bernardo Soares resurfaced in Pessoa's life around the same time Ricardo Reis and Alberto Caeiro started fizzling, circa 1930. Throughout most of the '20s Pessoa had developed his other heteronyms. Don't forget Pessoa couldn't turn on and off these personas at will. His first Caeiro poems came in a daze resembling a spiritual possession. For some reason, his mind in the '30s attuned itself to Soares and ?lvaro de Campos, who had similar intellectual visions to Pessoa's.

Zenith also notes that only 5 sections date from the '10s and around 100 from 1929-35. That leaves hundreds of sections undated. It's virtually impossible to know if Pessoa really didn't work on 'Disquiet' during the '20s, and if he didn't, why not. It's a literary mystery.