The Book of Disquiet, whose ultimate ambition was to reflect the jagged thoughts and fractured emotions that can inhabit one man, achieved this modest but genuine unity. There was perhaps, in the twentieth century, no other book as honest as this Book, which can hardly claim to be one.

Honesty. It went unmentioned until now, and it’s what most distinguishes The Book of Disquiet. It is probably fair to call honesty the pre-eminent virtue of great writers, for whom the most personal things become, through the alchemy of truth, universal. Strangely or not, it was precisely in his faking, in his self-othering – a profoundly personal process – that Pessoa was astonishingly true and honest to himself. By being so who he was, and so very Portuguese, he succeeded in being the most foreign and universal of writers. ‘My nation is the Portuguese language,’ he declared through Bernardo Soares (Text 259), but he also said: ‘I don’t write in Portuguese. I write my own self.’ And immediately before these words he exclaims: ‘What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life – me, so calm and peaceful?’ (Text 443).

In the lucidly felt prose of Bernardo Soares, Pessoa wrote himself, wrote his century, and wrote us – down to the hells and heavens we harbour, even if we’re unbelievers, like Pessoa. Soares called this implausible book his ‘confessions’, but they have nothing to do with the religious or literary variety. In these pages there is no hope or even desire for remission or salvation. There is also no self-pity, and no attempt to aestheticize the narrator’s irremediably human condition. Bernardo Soares doesn’t confess except in the sense of ‘recognize’, and the object of that recognition is of no great consequence. He describes his own self, because it is the landscape that is closest and most real, the one he can describe best. And what was flesh became word. Here is the assistant bookkeeper’s confession:

I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write… I’ve made myself into 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 also published. Guedes’s unpublished ‘O Asceta’ (‘The Ascetic’) is catalogued in the Pessoa Archives under the number 2720V3/1. 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).