Read The Book of Disquiet for Free Online

relegated the dates to the Notes, lest readers who skip this paragraph suppose that the passages falling between the dated ones are contemporaneous. Some of them are, but others go back to the 1910s. As explained in the opening essay, the post-Symbolist texts (mostly from the teens) are the evidence – the visible, dreamed dreams – that the dreamer talks about in his ‘confessions’, and so it makes sense for the two kinds of texts to rub shoulders. They complement each other.
    But the ‘Large Texts’, as Pessoa denominated the early prose pieces that weren’t always that long but were large in their ambitions and sometimes had ‘grandiose titles’, have been placed in a separate section, called ‘A Disquiet Anthology’. Pessoa himself recognized that they did not easily fit into Soares’s ‘Factless Autobiography’ (one of various self-descriptive epithets found in the assistant bookkeeper’s scattered journal of thoughts), which is why he considered taking the even more radical step of removing them to a separate book.
    For no other reason than to facilitate consultation and referral, I have assigned numbers to the passages in the first section (most ofwhich are untitled), and arranged the texts from the second section by their titles, alphabetically. Pessoa left over six hundred alternate words or phrasings in the margins and between the lines of the manuscripts that constitute The Book of Disquiet . For the purposes of this translation, I have usually preferred the first word or phrasing. Only those few alternate wordings that might interest a general reader are recorded in the Notes, which also provide archival references, composition and publication dates, and explanations of the cultural, historical and literary references. My edition of the original text, Livro do Desassossego , offers more detailed information about the editorial procedures followed (with regard to the transcriptions, for example) and includes, in an Appendix, some fragmentary material not found here.
    Many of the manuscripts that Pessoa labelled for inclusion in The Book of Disquiet were really just notes or sketches for longer, polished pieces that he never finally wrote. This is especially evident in passages where the paragraphs are separated by spaces, as in Text 14 or Text 18. Even fluent, well-articulated passages are sometimes pocked, as it were, by blank spaces for words or phrases that Pessoa never got around to supplying. Often these lacunas correspond to a missing adjective or non-essential connective and could be smoothed over in a translation – made to disappear, that is – without being unfaithful to the meaning of the original sentence. But this ‘smoothing’ would entail an unfaithfulness to the book’s general spirit of fragmentation and disconnectedness. The text presented here reflects the blips and roughness of the original but aims, at the same time, to be reader-friendly. This explains the presence of two different symbols to indicate lacunas left by the author in the original manuscripts; the five-dot ellipsis is the ‘friendlier’, less obtrusive symbol, but is used only where it will not induce the reader to make a false bridge between the words that precede and follow it, as if it stood for a mere rhythmic pause. In a few cases, where the basic sense of the missing word(s) seems obvious to the point of being inevitable, a word (or two) with that sense has been inserted in square brackets.
    Verbal repetition is part of Pessoa’s style and has been respected, except where the effect seems too mannered for English to bear. The translation is also generally faithful to the use (or not) of capital letters in the original. This usage is noticeably erratic when it comes to the‘gods’ or ‘Gods’, with the two forms sometimes coexisting in the same passage, as in Text 87.
    The translated edition of this work that I published in 1991 as The Book of Disquietude (Carcanet Press) informs important aspects