Richard Zenith

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

Life

He graduated from the University of Virginia, in 1979.^[1] Has lived in Colombia, Brazil, France and Portugal since 1987. He has Portuguese citizenship.^[2][3]

Considered by many personalities^[4] a Fernando Pessoa's expert (former^[5] Secretary of Culture Francisco José Viegas called him "one of the greatest")^[6] has translated into English language the poet's works as much as defending Pessoa's poetry in English. Has also translated Antero de Quental, Sophia de Mello Breyner, Nuno Júdice, António Lobo Antunes, Luís de Camões among other writers.^[7]

Organized the hugely successful Fernando Pessoa, Plural como o Universo exposition, alongside Carlos Felipe Moisés, dedicated to Pessoa's life and heteronyms, in Lisbon's Gulbenkian Foundation,^[8] São Paulo's Museum of Portuguese Language^[9][10] and Rio de Janeiro's Centro Cultural Correios.^[11]

Awards

• 1987 – Guggenheim Fellowship^[12]
• 1999 – PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
• 2006 – Harold Morton Landon Translation Award
• 2012 – Prémio Pessoa

Works

Translations

• Fernando Pessoa (2002). The book of disquiet. Translator Richard Zenith. Penguin Classics. ISBN 978-0-14-118304-6.  (Carcanet 1991 edition)
• Fernando Pessoa (1999). Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems. Translator Richard Zenith. Grove Press. ISBN 978-0-8021-3627-5. 
• Fernando Pessoa (2002). The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa. Translator Richard Zenith. Grove Press. ISBN 978-0-8021-3914-6. 

• Antonio Lobo Antunes (2001). The Natural Order of Things. Translator Richard Zenith. Grove Press. ISBN 978-0-8021-3813-2. 
• Antonio Lobo Antunes (2004). The Inquisitors' Manual. Translator Richard Zenith. Grove Press. ISBN 978-0-8021-4052-4. 
• Antonio Lobo Antunes (1996). Act of the Damned. Translator Richard Zenith. Grove Press. ISBN 978-0-8021-3476-9. 

• José Luís Peixoto (2008). The Implacable Order of Things. Translator Richard Zenith. Random House, Inc. ISBN 978-0-385-52446-9. 
• Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (1995). 113 Galician-Portuguese troubadour poems. Translator Richard Zenith. Carcanet. ISBN 978-1-85754-207-3. 
• João Cabral de Melo Neto (2005). Education by stone: selected poems. Translator Richard Zenith. Archipelago Books. ISBN 978-0-9749680-1-8. 
• Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1997). Log Book: Selected Poems. Translator Richard Zenith. Carcanet. ISBN 978-1-85754-364-3. 
• Fernando Pessoa (2005). The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive. Translator Richard Zenith. D.A.P. ISBN 978-1-878972-40-8. 
• Antero de Quental (1998). The Feeling of Immortality: Selected Writings. Translator Richard Zenith. Mermaid Turbulence. ISBN 978-1-901776-05-8. 
• Nuno Judice (1997). Meditation on Ruins. Translator Richard Zenith. Archangel. ISBN 978-80-901800-8-6. 

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.^[13]

References