Richard Zenith


Richard Zenith is an American-Portuguese writer and translator, winner of Pessoa Prize in 2012.

Life

Zenith graduated from the University of Virginia in 1979. He has lived in Colombia, Brazil, France and Portugal since 1987 and holds Portuguese citizenship.
Considered by many an expert on Fernando Pessoa, he has translated the poet's works into English and has written extensively about Pessoa's poetry and prose. Has also translated Antero de Quental, Sophia de Mello Breyner, Nuno Júdice, António Lobo Antunes, and Luís de Camões, among other writers.
Zenith organized, together with Carlos Felipe Moisés, the hugely successful exhibition Fernando Pessoa, Plural como o Universo, dedicated to Pessoa's life and heteronyms, at Lisbon's Gulbenkian Foundation, São Paulo's Museum of Portuguese Language and Rio de Janeiro's Centro Cultural Correios.

Awards

Translations

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.