Richard Zenith Explained

Richard Zenith (born 23 February 1956, Washington, D.C.) is an American-Portuguese writer and translator, winner of the Pessoa Prize in 2012.

Life

Richard Zenith graduated from the University of Virginia in 1979.^[1] He has lived in Colombia, Brazil, France and, since 1987, in Portugal. He is a naturalised Portuguese citizen.^{[2] [3]}

Zenith is widely considered^[4] to be one of the foremost experts on the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa.^[5] Zenith has translated many of Pessoa's works into English, including The Book of Disquiet, and he has written extensively about Pessoa's poetry, prose and life. He has also translated Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Antero de Quental, Sophia de Mello Breyner, Nuno Júdice, António Lobo Antunes, and Luís de Camões, amongst other Portuguese-language writers.^[6]

Zenith curated, together with Carlos Felipe Moisés, the much acclaimed exhibition Fernando Pessoa, Plural como o Universo, dedicated to Pessoa's life and heteronyms, at Lisbon's Gulbenkian Foundation,^[7] São Paulo's Museum of Portuguese Language^{[8] [9]} and Rio de Janeiro's Centro Cultural Correios.^[10]

In 2021 Zenith published Pessoa: An Experimental Life, a 1,055-page biography.^[11] In the United States it was published as .

Awards

• 1987 – Guggenheim Fellowship^[12]
• 1999 – PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
• 2006 – Harold Morton Landon Translation Award
• 2012 – Prémio Pessoa
• 2022 – Finalist for Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his book ^[13]

Works

Translations

• Book: The Book of Disquiet. Fernando Pessoa. Translator Richard Zenith. Penguin Classics. 2002. 978-0-14-118304-6 . Fernando Pessoa. (Carcanet 1991 edition)
• Book: Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems. Fernando Pessoa. Translator Richard Zenith. Grove Press. 1999 . 978-0-8021-3627-5 .
• Book: The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa. Fernando Pessoa. Translator Richard Zenith. Grove Press. 2002 . 978-0-8021-3914-6 .
• Book: The Natural Order of Things. Antonio Lobo Antunes. Translator Richard Zenith. Grove Press. 2001 . 978-0-8021-3813-2 . Antonio Lobo Antunes.
• Book: The Inquisitors' Manual. Antonio Lobo Antunes. Translator Richard Zenith. Grove Press. 2004 . 978-0-8021-4052-4 .
• Book: Act of the Damned. Antonio Lobo Antunes. Translator Richard Zenith. Grove Press. 1996 . 978-0-8021-3476-9 .
• Book: The Implacable Order of Things. José Luís Peixoto. Translator Richard Zenith. Random House, Inc. 2008 . 978-0-385-52446-9 . José Luís Peixoto.
• Book: 113 Galician-Portuguese troubadour poems. Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Translator Richard Zenith. Carcanet. 1995. 978-1-85754-207-3. Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.
• Book: Education by stone: selected poems. João Cabral de Melo Neto. Translator Richard Zenith. Archipelago Books. 2005. 978-0-9749680-1-8 . João Cabral de Melo Neto.
• Book: Log Book: Selected Poems. Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1997). Translator Richard Zenith. Carcanet. 978-1-85754-364-3 . January 1997.
• Book: The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive. Fernando Pessoa . Translator Richard Zenith. D.A.P. 2005 . 978-1-878972-40-8 .
• Book: The Feeling of Immortality: Selected Writings. Antero de Quental. Translator Richard Zenith. Mermaid Turbulence. 1998. 978-1-901776-05-8 . Antero de Quental.
• Book: Meditation on Ruins. Nuno Judice. Translator Richard Zenith. Archangel. 1997. 978-80-901800-8-6 . Nuno Judice.
• Book: Multitudinous Heart: Selected Poems: A Bilingual Edition. Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Translator Richard Zenith. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2015. Carlos Drummond de Andrade.

Biography

• Pessoa: An Experimental Life (2021). Allen Lane (London), released in the U.S. as , W. W. Norton (New York).

Reviews

As a result, there can be no definitive edition of The Book of Disquiet. Written on and off over a period of more than 20 years, seemingly beginning as a book by another of Pessoa's heteronyms, Vicente Guedes, and slowly evolving into the imaginary testament of Soares, it is a dishevelled album of thoughts, sensations and imagined memories that can never be fully deciphered. Any version is bound to be a construction. In his notes on the text, Richard Zenith recognises this and suggests that readers "invent their own order or, better yet, read the work's many parts in absolutely random order". Despite this disclaimer, readers of Zenith's edition will find it supersedes all others in its delicacy of style, rigorous scholarship and sympathy for Pessoa's fractured sensibility.^[14]

Notes and References

1. "Richard Zenith", Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2009.
2. News: se tornou cidadão de Portugal por dedicação e louvor a uma obra, a de Fernando Pessoa, uma literatura, a nossa, e uma língua, a portuguesa. Portuguese . Publico newspaper online. December 14, 2012. December 14, 2012.
3. News: he has had Portuguese nationality. Up Magazine. November 1, 2010. December 14, 2012.
4. News: Inês Pedrosa's statement, director of Fernando Pessoa's House, on Zenith's award . Portuguese . TSF . December 14, 2012 . December 14, 2012.
5. News: um dos melhores . Portuguese . Francisco Jose Viegas' blog "Origem das espécies" post . December 14, 2012. December 14, 2012.
6. News: Archived copy . Portuguese . Instituto de Estudos sobre o Modernismo, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa . December 14, 2012 . January 14, 2013 . https://web.archive.org/web/20130114073329/http://www.fcsh.unl.pt/iemodernismo/richard%20zenith.htm .
7. Web site: Archived copy . December 14, 2012 . February 15, 2018 . https://web.archive.org/web/20180215083855/http://www.gulbenkian.pt/index.php?article=1520&&langId=1 .
8. News: Archived copy . Portuguese . December 14, 2012 . January 14, 2013 . https://web.archive.org/web/20130114073328/http://www.visitefernandopessoa.org.br/index2.html .
9. News: Archived copy . Portuguese . Museu da Língua Portuguesa . December 14, 2012 . January 14, 2013 . https://web.archive.org/web/20130114073328/http://www.museudalinguaportuguesa.org.br/agenda_interna.php?id_agenda=446 .
10. News: EBC . Agência Brasil . Portuguese . December 14, 2012.
11. News: Sexton . David . 2021-08-01. Pessoa by Richard Zenith review — a forgotten modernist genius? . en . The Sunday Times. 0140-0460.
12. Web site: Richard Zenith - John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation . www.gf.org . https://web.archive.org/web/20110603235739/http://www.gf.org/fellows/16311-richard-zenith . 2011-06-03.
13. Web site: Pulitzer Prize in Biography . 2022-11-19 . Pulitzer Prize . en.
14. News: John Gray. 28 May 2001. Assault on authorship. Fernando Pessoa invented at least 72 fictive identities. His jostling aliases, argues John Gray expressed his belief that the individual subject – the core of European thought – is an illusion. The New Statesman.