A CRITICAL, DUAL-LANGUAGE EDITION OF QUADRAS AO GÔSTO POPULAR / QUATRAINS IN THE POPULAR STYLE BY PORTUGUESE WRITER FERNANDO PESSOA

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Year:
Pages:172
ISBN:0-7734-6586-3
978-0-7734-6586-2
Price:$159.95 + shipping
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Fernando Pessoa is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. This dual-language format makes Quadras ao Gôsto Popular/Quatrains in the Popular Style accessible to scholars who do not read Portuguese, and the preface and notes add a voice to the important, fruitful, ongoing debates about the role of the translator and the principles that should guide literary translation. Fernando Pessoa was himself a translator as well as a poet, translating Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, and Poe’s The Raven and Annabel Lee, among others. Most of the 325 quatrains were written in the last two years of Pessoa’s too-short life. They are not readily available now even in Portuguese, and this is the first English translation to appear, making this edition valuable to all literary scholars.

Reviews

“We should be grateful to Dr. Philip Krummrich for this bilingual edition of Fernando Pessoa’s quatrains ... The book is special not only because it is the first translation of Pessoa’s quatrains into English, but also because it is a book for all seasons. In it, the reader will find a plethora of feelings, emotions, social comment, celebration of special days, philosophical thought, paradoxes, word play, and so on. Once the reader picks up this collection of 325 quatrains it will be very difficult to put it down without reading several at a time. In the meantime, the reader will be amused by the simplicity of some quatrains, and puzzled by the complexity of others. The reader will also be intrigued by the knowledge that someone had to conscientiously strive to find a close rendition of Pessoa’s flowing lines, making them as musical and fluid in English as they were in the original Portuguese - no mean task.” – Professor Amélia Hutchinson, University of Georgia

“Contemporary readers are most likely to know the poetry of Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) from the 1984 work of fellow Portuguese writer and Nobel Prize laureate, Jose I. Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo, wherein Saramago imagines what happened to Reis, one of the many fictional poet-personae ('heteronyrns') which Pessoa created, after 1935, when Pessoa died. Or perhaps they have read the praise of another laureate, Octavio Paz, or a translation of The Book of Disquiet, 'written' by yet another heteronyrn, Bernardo Soares. Pessoa's many fully-developed personalities, complete and distinct artists with bodies of work unique to themselves, are just now receiving a full measure of critical attention for their own enigmatic creator ... For libraries and private collections of world literature and poetry, this is a worthy book.” – Kentucky Philogical Review

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
Dual-language text: Quadras ao Gôsto Popular/Quatrains in the Popular Style
Notes
Appendix I: Variant Readings
Appendix II: Dates of Individual Quatrains
Bibliography

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