Pessoa's amazing personality is as beguiling and mysterious as his unique
poetic output. We cannot learn too much about him.
William Boyd

With Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) we get at least four writers for the price of one, and A Centenary Pessoa includes a broader selection of his poems than has previously appeared in English, and a hundred pages of his prose, much of it originally written in English. To this core, poet and critic
Eugenio Lisboa has added an essay-length introduction by Octavio Paz, a
photobiography, a critical anthology, two 'posthumous interviews', and
works of art inspired by the poet. In an age when poets spoke through
personae and masks, Pessoa invented 'heteronyms', complete with their own
styles and biographies. At the heart of this book are poems Pessoa wrote as
his quietly lyrical self, as the pagan and bucolic Alberto Caeiro, the
neoclassical dilettante Ricardo Reis, and the wildly confessional Alvaro de
Campos.
     
A Centenary Pessoa, a treat for committed Pessoans, is also a rich
introduction for those curious about his oeuvre. 'One of the evident
giants', George Steiner said of him; 'perhaps the greatest poet of the
twentieth century,' wrote Antonio Tabucchi. Pessoa during his lifetime
published in small circulation journals and left, at his death, a trunk of
over 25,000 pieces and fragments. Now in Portugal his portrait appears on
banknotes, a university bears his name, a Pessoa Foundation occupies his
final home, his body has been reburied near the remains of Camões and Vasco
da Gama. He is famous on his own terms.

Carcanet was the first English-language publisher of FERNANDO PESSOA in
1971. In 1992 Carcanet published Richard Zenith's translation of the The
Book of Disquietude.