![]() ![]() ![]() Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888 and educated in South Africa. In an earlier selection of Pessoa’s poems in English, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe (Penguin, 2006), the Pessoa scholar and translator Richard Zenith provides a useful chronology. Can too much be made of the fact that in Portuguese pessoa means “person ”? What Artaud wrote in 1936, the year after Pessoa’ s death, speaks directly to the question: “For me, the essence of Surrealism was an affirmation of life against all caricatures.” Pessoa’s work, a fraction of it written by “himself,” the rest attributed to, at last count, 136 heteronyms, was in flight from the ultimate caricature, axiomatic now, that the purpose of life is to “be somebody. ” If this tome, not quite a doorstop-which claims to be the first translation of the “complete ” Book of Disquiet-could be said to have a subject, it is this paradox: How to be a “nobody” and leave any trace? ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
May 2023
Categories |