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with perhaps half as many pages, and perhaps half as much genius. Purged of whatever was fragmentary and incomplete, the book would have gained novelistic virtues such as plot and dramatic tension, but it would have run the risk of becoming just another book, instead of what it remains: a monument as wondrous as it is impossible.
    Pessoa published twelve excerpts from
The Book of Disquiet
in literary magazines and left, in the famous trunk that contained his extravagant written life, about 450 additional texts marked
L. do D.
and/or included in a large envelope labelled
Livro do Desassossego
. Most of this material was incorporated in the first edition of the work, published only in 1982, forty-seven years after Pessoa’s death. It was a heroic effort, since Pessoa’s archives are notoriously labyrinthine and his handwriting often virtually illegible, and it was doomed – for these very reasons – to be seriously flawed. A new edition, published in 1990–91 (the first volume of which was republished, with extensive revisions, in 1997), presented improved readings and over one hundred previously unpublished texts, most of which were not explicitly identified with
The Book of Disquiet
, although the majority of them could have been penned or typed with Bernardo Soares in mind.
    My own edition of the
Livro do Desassossego
(Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998) – which is the source text for this translation – makes further improvements in the readings, filling in most of the remaininglacunas and correcting several hundred errors in previous transcriptions. I was more cautious about embracing material not specifically marked or set aside by Pessoa for inclusion. The borders of this work are fuzzy, but they exist. They exclude, for instance, the reams of political theory written by Pessoa. Nor is there a place for his writings in pure philosophy and literary criticism. But there are a number of stray and unidentified texts – my edition includes about fifty – that do seem to belong here. Seem to me, that is. It is impossible to avoid subjectivity when editing and publishing such a fragmentary
œuvre
as Pessoa’s.
    This subjectivity tends to sheer arbitrariness when it comes to organizing this book, whose passages were scattered across the years and pages of Pessoa’s adult life. Chronological order? About a hundred passages written between 1929 and 1934 are dated, but only five during the first sixteen years of
Disquiet
’s existence. To attempt a chronology for the undated texts on the basis of stylistic or thematic affinities is treacherous or even foolhardy, as we can understand by looking at several dated texts, such as the aforementioned ‘sequel’ to ‘In the Forest of Estrangement’, which we would confidently situate in 1913 or 1914, if we didn’t know it was written on 28 November 1932. Text 429, conversely, is dated 18 September 1917 but reads exactly like Soares from the 1930s. An exhaustive analysis of paper and ink types and of Pessoa’s handwriting would probably yield a reasonably chronological order, but would that be a good way to publish the material? Pessoa had a few ideas on how to organize
The Book
, but chronological order wasn’t one he ever mentioned. It is true that many passages from the final phase were dated, but even then not the majority, and Pessoa never suggested that these be published as a group apart, separately from the older material.
    What Pessoa did suggest shows only what a loss he was at to organize his
Book
. ‘Alternate passages like this with the long ones?’ he asked himself at the top of a passage (Text 201) that isn’t particularly short. Another passage (Text 124) carries the heading (written in English)
Chapter on Indifference or something like that
, suggesting a thematic organization. In the ‘note’ already cited, Pessoa mulled over whether it was better to publish ‘Funeral March for Ludwig II’ in a separate book, with other ‘Large Texts’ that had