Overview

Like Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, Richard Zenith's Pessoa (a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Biography) immortalizes the life of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Nearly a century after his wrenching death, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) remains one of our most enigmatic writers. Believing he could do ""more in dreams than Napoleon,"" yet haunted by the specter of hereditary madness, Pessoa invented dozens of alter egos, or ""heteronyms,"" under whose names he wrote in Portuguese, English, and French. Unsurprisingly, this ""most multifarious of writers"" (Guardian) has long eluded a definitive biographer--but in renowned translator and Pessoa scholar Richard Zenith, he has met his match. Relatively unknown in his lifetime, Pessoa was all but destined for literary oblivion when the arc of his afterlife bent, suddenly and improbably, toward greatness, with the discovery of some 25,000 unpublished papers left in a large, wooden trunk. Drawing on this vast archive of sources as well as on unpublished family letters, and skillfully setting the poet's life against the nationalist currents of twentieth-century European history, Zenith at last reveals the true depths of Pessoa's teeming imagination and literary genius.

Full Product Details

9798212284691

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Richard Zenith is an acclaimed translator and literary critic. His translations include Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet and Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems, which won the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. The recipient of Portugal's Pessoa Prize, Zenith lives in Lisbon, Portugal. British audiobook narrator and AudioFile Earphones Award winner Nigel Patterson has many credits as a stage, screen, and voice-over actor that influence his powerful characterization across a broad range of genres. AudioFile commented ""his keen ear and impeccable diction give insights into the prevailing attitudes of the period . . . his wholly credible characters stay with you long after you unplug."" A graduate linguist of the University of Oxford, he is fluent in French and Spanish, has lived and worked in the U.S. for fifteen years, and knows many different accents and dialects from around the world. Hannibal Hills has been a ""performer"" from the beginning. At school, he trained in acting and theater arts at Southampton College, and also received a diploma in television. Although he performed in many stage plays (by Lorca, Brecht, Stoppard, Pinter, and, of course, Shakespeare), he also helped produce original works, and soon found himself mostly in the directing role. More recently, in March of 2020, he won the ""Best Newcomer"" award (no small feat for this middle-aged guy!) as part of his regional media's annual theater awards. In March of 2021, he was thrilled to receive three Independent Audiobook Award nominations. Hannibal was also a top wedding and memorial celebrant, before he could no longer fight the urge to leap into audiobook performance. It's a supreme pleasure for Hannibal to bring good writing off the page and into the minds and hearts of listeners. As a professional narrator, he devotes himself to understanding a text, and giving a book life with his voice-in a way that creates true entertainment, enlightenment, or merely an escape. Hannibal's vocal style is warm, clear, and sophisticated, with a depth of emotion from connecting with each project he takes on. Although he specializes in dramatic fiction, especially involving complex plots and highly charged emotion, his nonfiction is performed in a way that brings the truth of the text to both the heart and mind of the reader.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available