Volume 45, Number 19 · December 3, 1998
Footprints of a Shadow
By W.S. Merwin
Fernando Pessoa: A Centenary Pessoa
edited by Eugénio Lisboa, with L.C. Taylor
Manchester: Carcanet, 335 pp., £12.95 (paper)
Poems of Fernando Pessoa
translated and edited by Edwin Honig, by Susan M. Brown
City Lights, 240 pp., $15.95 (paper)
Fernando Pessoa & Co.:Selected Poems
edited and translated by Richard Zenith
Grove, 290 pp., $25.00
Always Astonished: Selected Prose by Fernando Pessoa
edited, translated, and introduced by Edwin Honig
City Lights, 134 pp., $12.95 (paper)
The Keeper of Sheep
by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Edwin Honig, by Susan M. Brown
The Sheep Meadow Press, 119 pp., $12.95 (paper)
An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa: Modernism and the Paradoxes of Authorship
by Darlene J. Sadlier
University Press of Florida, 168 pp., $49.95
The Presence of Pessoa:English, American, and South American Literary Responses
by George Monteiro
University Press of Kentucky, 164 pp., $22.95
More than sixty years after his death, seven books by and about the poetry and prose of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa have been published in English, on both sides of the Atlantic, in close succession, a number of them in the same year. Edwin Honig, who with Susan M. Brown has collaborated on two of the recent volumes of Pessoa's poems, and who has translated a volume of Pessoa's prose by himself, has been working on Pessoa, translating and writing about him, since the Sixties. The present Honig-Brown edition of the Poems of Fernando Pessoa by City Lights is essentially a reissue of a 1986 Ecco Press edition, and their bilingual volume The Keeper of Sheep (the Sheep Meadow Press) reissues translations—some of them revised—that were first published at the beginning of the Seventies. In great part because of Honig's work (he published a bilingual Selected Poems by Fernando Pessoa with Swallow Press in 1971) and Honig's and Brown's collaborations, poets whose language is English have discovered and cherished Pessoa's powerful poetry for years.
Review, 3842 words
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