Getting Ready to Exist
Adam Phillips, 17 July 1997
A Centenary Pessoa
edited by Eugénio Lisboa and L.C. Taylor.
Carcanet, 335 pp., £25, May 1995,9780856359361 Show More
edited by Eugénio Lisboa and L.C. Taylor.
Carcanet, 335 pp., £25, May 1995,
The Keeper of Sheep
by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Edwin Honig and Susan Brown.
Sheep Meadow, 135 pp., $12.95, September 1997,1 878818 45 7 Show More
by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Edwin Honig and Susan Brown.
Sheep Meadow, 135 pp., $12.95, September 1997,
The Book of Disquietude
by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Richard Zenith.
Carcanet, 323 pp., £9.95, January 1997,1 85754 301 7 Show More
by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Richard Zenith.
Carcanet, 323 pp., £9.95, January 1997,
“... True originality,’ Cocteau, Pessoa’s contemporary, wrote, ‘consists in trying to behave like everybody else without succeeding.’ It was once characteristically modern to idealise originality, and to conceive of it as a form of failure. The fittest as those who didn’t fit. If there is nothing more compliant now than the wish to be original – to find one’s own voice etc – it is also assumed that originality and success can, and should, go together ... ”
