Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems

“One of the great originals of modern European poetry and Portugal’s premier modernist.”—Washington Post

“Pessoa has had many English-language interpreters but none better than Richard Zenith.”—New York Review of Books

Fernando Pessoa—a poet who lived most of his life in Lisbon, Portugal, and who died in obscurity there— is now recognized as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. In a newly updated and expanded edition of his celebrated 1998 Fernando Pessoa & Co., which Booklist hailed as “a beautiful one-volume course in the soul of the twentieth century,” translator and biographer Richard Zenith brings together Pessoa’s most memorable poetic works. Present here is poetry by Pessoa’s famous trio of alter egos—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos—as well as a varied selection of poems signed by Pessoa’s own name. From spare minimalism to revolutionary exuberance, Fernando Pessoa & Co. showcases the seminal poet’s timeless and innovative work in all of its extraordinary depth and poetic passion.

“Like Beckett, Pessoa is extremely funny. . . . His work is loaded with delights.”—Guardian

“Pessoa would be Shakespeare if all that we had of Shakespeare were the soliloquies of Hamlet, Falstaff, Othello and Lear and the sonnets. His legacy is a set of explorations, in poetic form, of what it means to inhabit a human consciousness.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review