Is it worth the read, /lit/?
Could you tell me what you think about it?
Yes. Pessoa is the best writer of the XXs.
>>7365286
It's good, some of it i thought a bit meh but overall nice.
>>7365286
It is definitely worth the read. I was surprised that when I went to Lisbon that Pessoa was so well advertised. Then I realised that it is deceptive, because obviously when you go to any country, they tend to throw their greatest literature in your face. I just ignorantly assumed Pessoa was a bit more obscure because I had never heard it mentioned in England.
In terms of what I thought about it, I thought it was fantastic if a bit dragged out at times. The language is great (I know I read a translation but that does not mean the language is bad by default). The description at points where the emotions become very intermingled with acute self-awareness as well as extreme external perception are fantastically good. It reads like a diary of a grandiloquent self-conscious, self aware, slightly schizophrenic literary master. So yeah, if you like that sort of shit, read it.
>>7365286
>Could you tell me what you think about it?
Mysteries, misgivings, tears and dreams and wonderment. Like nothing else.
Reading is not worth ever.
>>7365286
get a version with 200 pages or so
it's an unfinished work that consists of fragments, most editors try to include as many fragments as possible, leading to several attempts at the same fragment by the author that are pretty much identical weighing the book down
most people I've talked to seem to stop reading editions with 400+ pages half-way through
>>7365301
In Portugal, Pessoa (and his most known heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Alvaro de Campos) is taught to every high school student as a major author in the Portuguese literature. Besides, he's one of the major Portuguese authors, but you can argue who's the best, since we also have José Saramago, Luis de Camoes, Eca de Queiroz or even Gil Vicente.
>>7365353
Kill yourself tuguinha, only Camões ranks as high as Pessoa, the other's dont come even close.
Yes OP. It is that great. Read/get the Richard Zenith edition. You'll lose a lot with the translation, but you'll still be able to appreciate the genius of it. Book of Disquiet is one of those books you can read all your life, each day opening a new page at random.
>>7365286
Pessoa also wrote some poems in English, anon, try them.
>>7365332
>most people I've talked to seem to stop reading editions with 400+ pages half-way through
That was me. I couldn't stand the repetition any longer.
Pessoa is one of the greatest writers ever. I rate him above Shakespeare.
It's one of the best things ever, go for it.
The generation I belong to was born into a world where those with a brain as well as a heart couldn’t find any support. The destructive work of previous generations left us a world that offered no security in the religious sphere, no guidance in the moral sphere, and no tranquility in the political sphere. We were born into the midst of metaphysical anguish, moral anxiety and political disquiet. Inebriated with objective formulas, with the mere methods of reason and science, the generations that preceded us did away with the foundations of the Christian faith, for their biblical criticism – progressing from textual to mythological criticism – reduced the gospels and the earlier scriptures of the Jews to a doubtful heap of myths, legends and mere literature, while their scientific criticism gradually revealed the mistakes and ingenuous notions of the gospels’ primitive ‘science’. At the same time, the spirit of free inquiry brought all metaphysical problems out into the open, and with them all the religious problems that had to do with metaphysics. Drunk with a hazy notion they called ‘positivism’, these generations criticized all morality and scrutinized all rules of life, and all that remained from the clash of doctrines was the certainty of none of them and the grief over there being no certainty. A society so undisciplined in its cultural foundations could obviously not help but be a victim, politically, of its own chaos, and so we woke up to a world eager for social innovations, a world that gleefully pursued a freedom it didn’t grasp and a progress it had never defined.
But while the sloppy criticism of our fathers bequeathed us the impossibility of being Christians, it didn’t bequeath us an acceptance of the impossibility; while it bequeathed us a disbelief in established moral codes, it didn’t bequeath us an indifference to morality and the rules for peaceful human coexistence; while it left the thorny problem of politics in doubt, it didn’t leave our minds unconcerned about how to solve it. Our fathers blithely wreaked destruction, for they lived in a time that was still informed by the solidity of the past. The very thing they destroyed was what gave strength to society and enabled them to destroy without noticing that the building was cracking. We inherited the destruction and its aftermath.
Today the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. Today the right to live and triumph is awarded on virtually the same basis as admission into an insane asylum: an inability to think, amorality, and nervous excitability.
>>7366357
Memorial do Convento (Baltasar and Blimunda) is the mandatory novel in HS.
Trying to learn Portuguese with Pessoa or Saramago won't be very easy, I guess. I would say Felizmente Há Luar (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6018056-felizmente-h-luar), it's a play about the dictatorship period in Portugal, it's short and easy to read.
I guess you could also try Sophia de Mello Breyner, she wrote poems for kids (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1981273.O_Cavaleiro_da_Dinamarca)
>>7366594
Second link is wrong: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1981273.O_Cavaleiro_da_Dinamarca
>>7366599
I wouldn't recommend Felizmente há Luar because it's shit.
But I would recommend Sophia de Melo breyner?s poetry as a good starting point to learn Portuguese.
Pessoa, as the other anon said, is not a good starting point. Even though he was billingual, his writing is not easy to grasp.
You should start with Eça de Queirós, Almeida Faria or Miguel Torga, for example, but we portuguese do not have a tradition of good writers writing short stories.
For novels, try Almeida Faria, Vergílio Ferreira, Eça de Queirós (XIX century writer). Ignore today's author's. You might like Gonçalo M. Tavares but the majority of today's writers in Portugal are, unfortunately and in my opinion, subpar.
>>7366671
I disagree on today's writers; António Lobo Antunes is bretty good..
>>7365286
new meme book
>>7365332
>just ordered the 544 page penguin
Is it really that bad?
>>7365286
It is supremely beautiful. Melancholy like nothing else I've ever read, innovative, highly intelligent at times and genuinely moving.
Some poster called it slightly schizophrenic. I'm going to be anal retentive about it and say that Pessoa's character, Bernardo Soares is definitely a picture perfect representation of schizoid personality disorder. That can be scary at times, especially if you share more of those traits than you care to know.
>>7365286
His descriptions of tedium struck me right in the soul:
>"Tedium, yes, is boredom with the world, the nagging discomfort of living, the weariness of having lived; tedium is indeed the carnal sensation of the endless emptiness of things. But tedium, even more than all that, is a boredom with other worlds, whether real or imaginary; the discomfort of having to keep living, albeit as someone else, in some other way, in some other world; a weariness not only of yesterday and today but also of tomorrow and of eternity, if such exists, or of nothingness, if that's what eternity is. It's not only the emptiness of things and living beings that troubles the soul afflicted by tedium, it's also the emptiness of something besides things and beings - the emptiness of the very soul that feels this vacuum, that feels itself to be this vacuum, and that within this vacuum is nauseated and repelled by its own self"
THUNDERSTORM
The blue of the sky showing between the still clouds was smudged with transparent white.
The boy at the back of the office suspended for a moment the cord going round the eternal package.
‘I can only remember one other like this,’ he statistically remarked.
A cold silence. The sounds from the street seemed to be cut by a knife. Then there was a long, cosmically held breath, a kind of generalized dread. The entire universe had stopped dead. Moments, moments, moments… Silence blackened the darkness.
All of a sudden, live steel .....
How human the metallic peal of the trams! How happy the landscape of simple rain falling on the street resurrected from the chasm!
Oh Lisbon, my home!
>>7369934
Have you read it?
>>7369916
Recommend others contemporary authors, portuga.
t. fellow brazilian monkey
From Brazil I would say that O sonâmbulo amador, Divórcio from Lisias and O Paraíso é bem bacana are good recommendations.
>>7365286
Beautifully written angst and pessimism. If that's your thing, go for it.
>>7365286
I was talking to a homeless man about Portugal and I told him I had a book by Fernando Pessoa in my bag and showed it to him. He picked it up and started roughhandling it and I feel like it smells weird and I haven't touched it since.
>>7370346
t-thanks...
>>7369953
Bumping for this.
>>7370005
This is enough to make me read the book now.
