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titles, or to leave it ‘as it is’.And how was it? Mixed up with hundreds of other texts, large and small, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle without a discernible picture or pattern. Perhaps this would be the best way to go: an edition of loose pieces, orderable according to each reader’s fancy, or according to how they happen to fall.
    Since a loose-leaf edition is impractical, and since every established order is the wrong order, the mere circumstance of publication entails a kind of original sin. Every editor of this
Book
, automatically guilty, should (and I hereby do) (1) apologize for tampering with the original non-order, (2) emphasize that the order presented can claim no special validity, and (3) recommend that readers invent their own order or, better yet, read the work’s many parts in absolutely random order.
    In this edition, the dated passages from the last phase (1929–34) serve as a skeleton – an infallibly Soaresian skeleton – for articulating the body of the text. The hope is that the older passages, interspersed among the later ones, will be at least superficially coloured by the ‘true psychology’ of Bernardo Soares. I saw no reason to disrupt the chronological order of the passages forming the skeleton, as this makes for a certain objectivity in this otherwise subjective arrangement, but I 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