A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems

Description

New selection The largest and richest English-language volume of poetry from "the greatest twentieth-century writer you have never heard of" (Los Angeles Times) Edited, Translated, and with an Introduction by Richard Zenith, the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Pessoa- A Biography A Penguin Classic Writing obsessively in French, English, and Portuguese, poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) left a prodigious body of work, much of it credited to three"heteronyms"_x2015_Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Alvaro de Campos_x2015_alter egos with startlingly different styles, points of view, and biographies. Offering a unique sampling of his most famous voices, this collection features Pessoa's major, best-known works and several stunning poems that have come to light only in this century, including his long, highly autobiographical swan song. Featuring a rich body of work that has never before been translated into English, this is the finest introduction available to the stunning breadth of Pessoa's genius.

Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888 and was brought up in Durban, South Africa. In 1905 he returned to Lisbon where he matriculated at the University, and continued to read and write in English. He published in 1918 35 Sonnets and in 1922 the three parts of his English Poems, all composed many years before. The rest of his life passed uneventfully in Lisbon. The only book published in his lifetime was Mensagem, a collection of poems on patriotic themes which won a consolation prize in a national competition. Pessoa also wrote under three pseudonyms, Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis, whose biographies he invented. Richard Zenith lives in Lisbon, where he works as a freelance writer, translator, and critic. His translations include Galician-Portuguese troubadour poetry, novels by Antonio 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.

"Pessoa was one of the great, twentieth-century poets, the equal of Yeats, Rilke, Valery, Lorca, Pasternak, or Hart Crane. Here, at long last, is a copious selection, translated by the gifted poet and scholar Richard Zenith. It is cause for rejoicing." John Ashbery