Pessoa himself recognized that they did not easily fit into Soares’s ‘Factless Autobiography’ (one of various self-descriptive epithets found in the assistant bookkeeper’s scattered journal of thoughts), which is why he considered taking the even more radical step of removing them to a separate book.

For no other reason than to facilitate consultation and referral, I have assigned numbers to the passages in the first section (most of which are untitled), and arranged the texts from the second section by their titles, alphabetically. Pessoa left over six hundred alternate words or phrasings in the margins and between the lines of the manuscripts that constitute The Book of Disquiet. For the purposes of this translation, I have usually preferred the first word or phrasing. Only those few alternate wordings that might interest a general reader are recorded in the Notes, which also provide archival references, composition and publication dates, and explanations of the cultural, historical and literary references. My edition of the original text, Livro do Desassossego, offers more detailed information about the editorial procedures followed (with regard to the transcriptions, for example) and includes, in an Appendix, some fragmentary material not found here.

Many of the manuscripts that Pessoa labelled for inclusion in The Book of Disquiet were really just notes or sketches for longer, polished pieces that he never finally wrote. This is especially evident in passages where the paragraphs are separated by spaces, as in Text 14 or Text 18. Even fluent, well-articulated passages are sometimes pocked, as it were, by blank spaces for words or phrases that Pessoa never got around to supplying. Often these lacunas correspond to a missing adjective or non-essential connective and could be smoothed over in a translation – made to disappear, that is – without being unfaithful to the meaning of the original sentence. But this ‘smoothing’ would entail an unfaithfulness to the book’s general spirit of fragmentation and disconnectedness. The text presented here reflects the blips and roughness of the original but aims, at the same time, to be reader-friendly. This explains the presence of two different symbols to indicate lacunas left by the author in the original manuscripts; the five-dot ellipsis is the ‘friendlier’, less obtrusive symbol, but is used only where it will not induce the reader to make a false bridge between the words that precede and follow it, as if it stood for a mere rhythmic pause. In a few cases, where the basic sense of the missing word(s) seems obvious to the point of being inevitable, a word (or two) with that sense has been inserted in square brackets.

Verbal repetition is part of Pessoa’s style and has been respected, except where the effect seems too mannered for English to bear. The translation is also generally faithful to the use (or not) of capital letters in the original. This usage is noticeably erratic when it comes to the ‘gods’ or ‘Gods’, with the two forms sometimes coexisting in the same passage, as in Text 87.

The translated edition of this work that I published in 1991 as The Book of Disquietude (Carcanet Press) informs important aspects of the Portuguese edition I produced in 1998 and of this revised, reorganized and expanded English edition. Some of the discrepancies between this and other English translations (including my first effort) are due to the rather different source text that has emerged as I and other researchers have re-examined the original manuscripts.

SYMBOLS USED IN THE TEXT

Image – blank space left by the author for one or more words within a sentence

.…. – place where a sentence breaks off, space left for an unwritten sentence or paragraph, or blank space inside a sentence where the hiatus does not interrupt a phrasal unit

[?] – translation based on a conjectural reading of the author’s handwriting

[…] – illegible word or phrase

[ ] – word(s) added by translator

* – find note at the back of the volume, under the appropriate Text number or title.

Acknowledgements

I’m grateful to Maria Aliete Galhoz for having broken the ground, with her patient work in the Pessoa archives; to José Blanco for his enthusiasm, support and friendship; to Michael Schmidt for believing in Pessoa when few had heard of him; to Hermínio Monteiro and Lú cia Pinho e Melo for their good work and encouragement; to Jennifer Hengen and Simon Winder for having, in a certain way, gone out on a limb; to Ellah Allfrey and Sarah Coward for their inspired suggestions; and to the staff workers at the National Library of Lisbon and the Casa Fernando Pessoa for their gracious assistance.

I especially thank Teresa Rita Lopes and Manuela Parreira da Silva for their generous help in deciphering the original manuscripts; Manuela Neves and Manuela Rocha for their similar generosity in helping me interpret difficult passages; and Martin Earl for his insightful critique of my Introduction.

The Book of Disquiet

by Bernardo Soares,
assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon

Preface

FERNANDO PESSOA

Lisbon has a certain number of eating establishments in which, on top of a respectable-looking tavern, there’s a regular dining room with the solid and homey air of a restaurant in a small trainless town. In these first-floor dining rooms, fairly empty except on Sundays, one often comes across odd sorts, unremarkable faces, a series of asides in life.

There was a time in my life when a limited budget and the desire for quiet made me a regular patron of one of these first-floor restaurants. And it happened that whenever I ate dinner there around seven o’clock, I nearly always saw a certain man who didn’t interest me at first, but then began to.

Fairly tall and thin, he must have been about thirty years old. He hunched over terribly when sitting down but less so standing up, and he dressed with a carelessness that wasn’t entirely careless. In his pale, uninteresting face there was a look of suffering that didn’t add any interest, and it was difficult to say just what kind of suffering this look suggested. It seemed to suggest various kinds: hardships, anxieties, and the suffering born of the indifference that comes from having already suffered a lot.

He always ate a small dinner, followed by cigarettes that he rolled himself. He conspicuously observed the other patrons, not suspiciously but with more than ordinary interest. He didn’t observe them with a spirit of scrutiny but seemed interested in them without caring to analyse their outward behaviour or to register their physical appearance. It was this peculiar trait that first got me interested in him.

I began to look at him more closely. I noticed that a certain air of intelligence animated his features in a certain uncertain way. But dejection – the stagnation of cold anguish – so consistently covered his face that it was hard to discern any of his other traits.

I happened to learn from a waiter in the restaurant that the man worked in an office near by.

One day there was an incident in the street down below – a fist fight between two men. Everyone in the first-floor restaurant ran to the windows, including me and the man I’ve been describing. I made a casual remark to him and he replied in like manner. His voice was hesitant and colourless, as in those who hope for nothing because it’s perfectly useless to hope. But perhaps it was absurd to see this in my supper-time peer.

I don’t know why, but from that day on we always greeted each other.