Richard Zenith (born 23 February 1956, Washington, D.C.) is an American-Portuguese writer and translator, winner of the Pessoa Prize in 2012.
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 .
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)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]
Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher, and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language. He also wrote in and translated from English and French.
Antero Tarquínio de Quental was a Portuguese poet, philosopher, and writer. De Quental is regarded as one of the greatest poets of his generation and is recognized as one of the most influential Portuguese language artists of all time. His name is often mentioned alongside Luís Vaz de Camões, Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage, and Fernando Pessoa.
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen was a Portuguese poet and writer. Her remains have been entombed in the National Pantheon since 2014.
Gillian Clarke is a Welsh poet and playwright, who also edits, broadcasts, lectures and translates from Welsh into English. She co-founded Tŷ Newydd, a writers' centre in North Wales.
Margaret Elisabeth Jull Costa OBE, OIH is a British translator of Portuguese- and Spanish-language fiction and poetry, including the works of Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, Eça de Queiroz, Fernando Pessoa, Paulo Coelho, Bernardo Atxaga, Carmen Martín Gaite, Javier Marías, and José Régio. She has won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize more times than any other translator.
Álvaro de Campos was one of the poet Fernando Pessoa's various heteronyms, with a reputation for a powerful and angry style of writing. This alter ego is recounted to have been born in Tavira, Portugal.
Mísia is a Portuguese fado singer. Mísia is a polyglot. Despite singing mostly fado, she has sung some of her songs in Spanish, French, Catalan, English, and even Japanese.
The literary concept of the heteronym refers to one or more imaginary character(s) created by a writer to write in different styles. Heteronyms differ from pen names in that the latter are just false names, while the former are characters that have their own supposed physiques, biographies, and writing styles.
The Pessoa Prize, named after Fernando Pessoa, is recognized as the most important award in the area of Portuguese culture. Created in 1987 by the newspaper Expresso and the IT company Unisys, since 2008 the prize has been sponsored by Caixa Geral de Depósitos. It is granted annually to the Portuguese person who during this period, and in the course of previous activity, has distinguished him or herself as a figure in scientific, artistic, or literary life.
Portuguese poetry refers to diverse kinds of poetic writings produced in Portuguese. The article covers historical accounts of poetry from other countries where Portuguese or variations of the language are spoken. The article covers Portuguese poetry produced from the Middle Ages to the present era.
Alberto Caeiro is a heteronym which the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa began to use in 1914 and introduced in print in 1925. In his fictional biography, Caeiro was born in Lisbon on 16 April 1889, lived most his life in a village in Ribatejo and died in 1915. He was the leader and teacher of a group of neopagan poets and intellectuals that included Pessoa's other heteronyms António Mora, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos.
Katia Guerreiro is a South African-born Portuguese fado singer, who has released eight albums and has received several awards, including Order of Arts and Letters, Chevalier rank, from the French government and the Order of Prince Henry from the President of Portugal.
Mensagem is a book by Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. It is composed of 44 poems, and was called the "livro pequeno de poemas" or the "little book of poems". It was published in 1934 by Parceria António Maria Pereira. The book was awarded, in the same year, with the Prémio Antero de Quental in the poem category by the Secretariado Nacional de Informação of the Estado Novo.
The Book of Disquiet is a work by the Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935). Published posthumously, The Book of Disquiet is a fragmentary lifetime project, left unedited by the author, who introduced it as a "factless autobiography." The publication was credited to Bernardo Soares, one of the author's alternate writing names, which he called semi-heteronyms, and had a preface attributed to Fernando Pessoa, another alternate writing name or orthonym.
Edwin Honig was an American poet, playwright, and translator.
Alistair Elliot was a British librarian, poet and translator.
Patrick McGuinness FRSL FLSW is a British academic, critic, novelist, and poet. He is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, where he is Fellow and Tutor at St Anne's College.
35 Sonnets is a collection of sonnets by Fernando Pessoa published by the author in 1918.
Ricardo Reis, was one of the most important heteronyms created by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa.
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