Richard Zenith

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Photo of Richard Zenith by Hanmin Kim

Richard Zenith (born 23 February 1956, Washington, D.C.) is an American-Portuguese writer and translator, winner of the Pessoa Prize in 2012.

Contents

Life

Richard Zenith graduated from the University of Virginia in 1979. [1] He has lived in Colombia, Brazil, France and, since 1987, in Portugal. He is a naturalised Portuguese citizen. [2] [3]

Zenith is widely considered [4] to be one of the foremost experts on the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. [5] Zenith has translated many of Pessoa's works into English, including The Book of Disquiet, and he has written extensively about Pessoa's poetry, prose and life. He has also translated Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Antero de Quental, Sophia de Mello Breyner, Nuno Júdice, António Lobo Antunes, and Luís de Camões, amongst other Portuguese-language writers. [6]

Zenith curated, together with Carlos Felipe Moisés, the much acclaimed exhibition Fernando Pessoa, Plural como o Universo, dedicated to Pessoa's life and heteronyms, at Lisbon's Gulbenkian Foundation, [7] São Paulo's Museum of Portuguese Language [8] [9] and Rio de Janeiro's Centro Cultural Correios. [10]

In 2021 Zenith published Pessoa: An Experimental Life, a 1,055-page biography. [11] In the United States it was published as Pessoa: A Biography .

Awards

Works

Translations

Biography

Reviews

As a result, there can be no definitive edition of The Book of Disquiet. Written on and off over a period of more than 20 years, seemingly beginning as a book by another of Pessoa's heteronyms, Vicente Guedes, and slowly evolving into the imaginary testament of Soares, it is a dishevelled album of thoughts, sensations and imagined memories that can never be fully deciphered. Any version is bound to be a construction. In his notes on the text, Richard Zenith recognises this and suggests that readers "invent their own order or, better yet, read the work's many parts in absolutely random order". Despite this disclaimer, readers of Zenith's edition will find it supersedes all others in its delicacy of style, rigorous scholarship and sympathy for Pessoa's fractured sensibility. [14]

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References

  1. "Richard Zenith", Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2009.
  2. "se tornou cidadão de Portugal por dedicação e louvor a uma obra, a de Fernando Pessoa, uma literatura, a nossa, e uma língua, a portuguesa". Publico newspaper online (in Portuguese). December 14, 2012. Retrieved December 14, 2012.
  3. "he has had Portuguese nationality". Up Magazine. November 1, 2010. Retrieved December 14, 2012.
  4. "Inês Pedrosa's statement, director of Fernando Pessoa's House, on Zenith's award". TSF (in Portuguese). December 14, 2012. Retrieved December 14, 2012.
  5. "um dos melhores". Francisco Jose Viegas' blog "Origem das espécies" post (in Portuguese). December 14, 2012. Retrieved December 14, 2012.
  6. "Archived copy". Instituto de Estudos sobre o Modernismo, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (in Portuguese). Archived from the original on January 14, 2013. Retrieved December 14, 2012.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  7. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on February 15, 2018. Retrieved December 14, 2012.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  8. "Archived copy" (in Portuguese). Archived from the original on January 14, 2013. Retrieved December 14, 2012.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  9. "Archived copy". Museu da Língua Portuguesa (in Portuguese). Archived from the original on January 14, 2013. Retrieved December 14, 2012.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  10. "EBC". Agência Brasil (in Portuguese). Retrieved December 14, 2012.
  11. Sexton, David (2021-08-01). "Pessoa by Richard Zenith review — a forgotten modernist genius?". The Sunday Times. ISSN   0140-0460.
  12. "Richard Zenith - John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation". www.gf.org. Archived from the original on 2011-06-03.
  13. "Pulitzer Prize in Biography". Pulitzer Prize. Retrieved 2022-11-19.
  14. John Gray (28 May 2001). "Assault on authorship. Fernando Pessoa invented at least 72 fictive identities. His jostling aliases, argues John Gray expressed his belief that the individual subject – the core of European thought – is an illusion". The New Statesman.