Fernando pessoa book of disquiet ebook

Fernando Pessoa, whose early life was spent in South Africa, lived almost exclusively in Lisbon from the age of 17 and even wrote a tourist guide about the city entitled simply Lisboa. The life of the heteronym Bernardo Soares as well as Guedes and the other heteronymic writers of The Book of Disquiet centres for the most part around the Rua Dos Douradores where Soares works and lives.

Text 74 in the Zenith editions is a typical example: A cold silence. The sounds from the street seemed to be cut by a knife. Then there was a long, cosmically held breath, a kind of generalized dread.

The entire universe had stopped dead. Moments, moments, moments… Silence blackened the darkness. All of a sudden, live steel…. How human the metallic peal of the trams! How happy the landscape of simple rain falling on the street resurrected from the chasm! Oh Lisbon, my home! The process of translating for the stage where theatre-making is by its very essence collaborative, involving a range of artists at different stages of its development such as set, lighting and costume designers , is far removed from the work of a literary translator working on a single end product such as a novel.

Performances are constantly remade, happening only in the present, and the process of developing a performance even in relation to an existing text is one that always opens up questions of possibility that can begin to be rationalised and resolved through a process of rehearsal. In this sense it is convenient to think about the translation process as itself a kind of performance on the source text, constantly making sense of and evaluating it, in relation to the here and now as well as the past.

For me these details adiante de mim. Para mim os pormenores are like things, voices, phrases. For me these details are really things — they are voices, whole phrases. I look at the dress of the girl sitting in front of me.

The delicate embroidery that trims the collar decomposes under my gaze into the silk thread with which it was embroidered and the work it took to embroider it. Or maybe it was a machine. Or perhaps a child. In one of the illegal factories you hear about in documentary films. I see the companies. The managers. The accountants of the companies in their offices balancing their books with their recently upgraded accountancy software.

I see beyond all this into the private lives of those who live their existence in factories and offices. And I go further. I see the loves, the secrets, the souls of all who laboured so that the woman in front of me on the Jubilee Line to Canary Wharf could wear, around her mortal neck, the sinuous banality of a dark-green silk trim on a darker green dress. I start to feel dizzy.

A panic attack. I wonder why no message has been relayed from the driver. And I start to look at the seats of the train. The close-woven, hard-wearing synthetic material. And then this takes me to distant places and these thoughts proliferate in the form of industries and workers and their houses and their lives and their lovemaking and their fights and their realities and — I get off the tube. I have just lived all of life. Rewriting The Book of Disquiet Fade to black.

The source text provides a basis for what might be called dramatic improvisation — an improvisation that arises on the page before it becomes embodied on the stage, a textual playfulness that later becomes reconstructed and embodied. Through a constant process of rehearsal, reflection, rehearsal and rewriting, the play eventually opened in London in with two relatively late but significant changes to the version of the text that was used at the outset of collaboration.

The interweaving of these locations and times throughout the play echoed the freeform multiplicity of the source text in new and exciting ways and allowed for the text to offer itself to audiences as a site for playful encounter with actors embodying characters that transcend time and space. While the city of Lisbon is central to Livro do Desassossego, there are occasional mental and physical forays out of the city.

The beach scene explores this anomie through the fractured relationship of a couple that communicate in words but are barely able to connect with each other. As these scenes are replayed through the piece they act like a score or recurring theme that served as the basis for dramatic improvisation that occurred at the point of writing or rewriting the work for the stage: He continues building the sand castles and looking around. I can see someone now. A woman. Walking her dog. Might be a child.

Well, which is it? Or maybe a bit of wood. Are we really the only ones here? Fade out. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. The Book of Disquiet. The Complete Edition. Margaret Jull Costa. A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. Translate PDF.

Pessoa invented nlrmerous alter egos. There is nobody like him. The gods must be It1 I trer perr f ect antidote. I Love this strange work of. Except for briefpassages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, Contents television, or website review, no. I Costa, Margaret Jull, translator. English Jull Cosra. First published in porruguese as Livro I do desassossego. In that same letter, he mentions a third date too: zo August lryo5, the day he left South Africa and returned to Lisbon for good.

And perhaps a third loss Ioo, that of his beloved Lisbon. During the second period, despite hrrowing only Portuguese when he arrived in Durban, Pessoa rap- ttlly became fluent in English and in French. I [e was clearly not the average student. When asked years larer, a lc llow pupil described Pessoa as: 'A little fellow with a big head. He wrrs brilliantly clever but quite mad.