Richard Zenith

Richard Zenith graduated from the University of Virginia in 1979."Richard Zenith", Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2009. He has lived in Colombia, Brazil, France and, since 1987, in Portugal. He is a naturalised Portuguese citizen.{{cite news|url=http://www.publico.pt/cultura/noticia/premio-pessoa-2012-para-richard-zenith-1577444|title=se tornou cidadão de Portugal por dedicação e louvor a uma obra, a de Fernando Pessoa, uma literatura, a nossa, e uma língua, a portuguesa|language=Portuguese |work=Publico newspaper online|date=December 14, 2012|access-date=December 14, 2012}}{{cite news|url=http://upmagazine-tap.com/en/pt_artigos/richard-zenith-american/|title=he has had Portuguese nationality|work=Up Magazine|date=November 1, 2010|access-date=December 14, 2012}}

Zenith is widely considered{{cite news|url=http://www.tsf.pt/PaginaInicial/Vida/Interior.aspx?content_id=2946772|title=Inês Pedrosa's statement, director of Fernando Pessoa's House, on Zenith's award |language=Portuguese |work=TSF |date=December 14, 2012 |access-date=December 14, 2012}} to be one of the foremost experts on the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa.{{cite news|url=https://origemdasespecies.blogs.sapo.pt/1356612.html|title=um dos melhores |language=Portuguese |work=Francisco Jose Viegas' blog "Origem das espécies" post |date=December 14, 2012| access-date=December 14, 2012}} Zenith has translated many of Pessoa's works into English, including The Book of Disquiet, and he has written extensively about Pessoa's poetry, prose and life. He has also translated Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Antero de Quental, Sophia de Mello Breyner, Nuno Júdice, António Lobo Antunes, and Luís de Camões, amongst other Portuguese-language writers.{{cite news |url=http://www.fcsh.unl.pt/iemodernismo/richard%20zenith.htm |language=Portuguese |work=Instituto de Estudos sobre o Modernismo, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa |access-date=December 14, 2012 |title=Archived copy |archive-date=January 14, 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130114073329/http://www.fcsh.unl.pt/iemodernismo/richard%20zenith.htm }}

Zenith curated, together with Carlos Felipe Moisés, the much acclaimed exhibition Fernando Pessoa, Plural como o Universo, dedicated to Pessoa's life and heteronyms, at Lisbon's Gulbenkian Foundation,{{Cite web |url=http://www.gulbenkian.pt/index.php?article=1520&&langId=1 |title=Archived copy |access-date=December 14, 2012 |archive-date=February 15, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180215083855/http://www.gulbenkian.pt/index.php?article=1520&&langId=1 }} São Paulo's Museum of Portuguese Language{{cite news |url=http://www.visitefernandopessoa.org.br/index2.html |language=Portuguese |access-date=December 14, 2012 |title=Archived copy |archive-date=January 14, 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130114073328/http://www.visitefernandopessoa.org.br/index2.html }}{{cite news |url=http://www.museudalinguaportuguesa.org.br/agenda_interna.php?id_agenda=446 |language=Portuguese |work=Museu da Língua Portuguesa |access-date=December 14, 2012 |title=Archived copy |archive-date=January 14, 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130114073328/http://www.museudalinguaportuguesa.org.br/agenda_interna.php?id_agenda=446 }} and Rio de Janeiro's Centro Cultural Correios.{{cite news|url=http://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/noticia/2011-03-26/rio-de-janeiro-recebe-exposicao-de-fernando-pessoa |work=Agência Brasil |language=Portuguese |access-date=December 14, 2012|title=EBC }}

In 2021 Zenith published [https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/445182/pessoa-by-zenith-richard/9780241534137 Pessoa: An Experimental Life], a 1,055-page biography.{{Cite news |last=Sexton |first=David |date=2021-08-01|title=Pessoa by Richard Zenith review — a forgotten modernist genius? |language=en |work=The Sunday Times|url=https://www.thetimes.com/culture/books/article/pessoa-by-richard-zenith-review-5ptvpsmm5 |issn=0140-0460}} In the United States it was published as Pessoa: A Biography.

• 1987 – Guggenheim Fellowship{{cite web |url=http://www.gf.org/fellows/16311-richard-zenith |title=Richard Zenith - John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation |website=www.gf.org |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110603235739/http://www.gf.org/fellows/16311-richard-zenith |archive-date=2011-06-03}}
• 1999 – PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
• 2006 – Harold Morton Landon Translation Award
• 2012 – Prémio Pessoa
• 2022 – Finalist for Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his book Pessoa: A Biography{{Cite web |title=Pulitzer Prize in Biography |url=https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/222 |access-date=2022-11-19 |website=Pulitzer Prize |language=en}}

• {{cite book| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=PbxzuKOzEJcC&q=Richard+Zenith| title=The Book of Disquiet

| author=Fernando Pessoa| others=Translator Richard Zenith| publisher=Penguin Classics| year=2002| isbn=978-0-14-118304-6 | author-link=Fernando Pessoa

}} (Carcanet 1991 edition)

• {{cite book| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=w7_O5QmBb7YC&q=Richard+Zenith| title=Fernando Pessoa and Co.: Selected Poems| author=Fernando Pessoa| others=Translator Richard Zenith| publisher=Grove Press| year=1999 | isbn=978-0-8021-3627-5 }}
• {{cite book| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=RQgrF4jkuboC&q=Richard+Zenith| title=The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa| author=Fernando Pessoa| others=Translator Richard Zenith| publisher=Grove Press| year=2002 | isbn=978-0-8021-3914-6 }}
• {{cite book| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=WMZDJfOUCXQC&q=Richard+Zenith| title=The Natural Order of Things| author=Antonio Lobo Antunes| others=Translator Richard Zenith| publisher=Grove Press| year=2001 | isbn=978-0-8021-3813-2 | author-link=Antonio Lobo Antunes}}
• {{cite book| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=HQp6Do-YfGAC&q=Richard+Zenith| title=The Inquisitors' Manual| author=Antonio Lobo Antunes| others=Translator Richard Zenith| publisher=Grove Press| year=2004 | isbn=978-0-8021-4052-4 }}
• {{cite book| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=khH0qGjptMsC&q=Richard+Zenith| title=Act of the Damned| author=Antonio Lobo Antunes| others=Translator Richard Zenith| publisher=Grove Press| year=1996 | isbn=978-0-8021-3476-9 }}
• {{cite book| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=iAbo3ZWB_a0C&q=Richard+Zenith| title=The Implacable Order of Things| author=José Luís Peixoto| others=Translator Richard Zenith| publisher=Random House, Inc| year=2008 | isbn=978-0-385-52446-9 | author-link=José Luís Peixoto}}
• {{cite book| title=113 Galician-Portuguese troubadour poems| author=Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian| others=Translator Richard Zenith| publisher=Carcanet| year=1995| isbn=978-1-85754-207-3| author-link=Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian}}
• {{cite book| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xCyhb2yhcZYC&q=Richard+Zenith |title=Education by stone: selected poems| author=João Cabral de Melo Neto| others=Translator Richard Zenith| publisher=Archipelago Books| year=2005| isbn=978-0-9749680-1-8 |author-link=João Cabral de Melo Neto}}
• {{cite book| title=Log Book: Selected Poems| author=Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (1997)| others=Translator Richard Zenith| publisher=Carcanet| isbn=978-1-85754-364-3 | date=January 1997}}
• {{cite book| title=The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive|author=Fernando Pessoa | others=Translator Richard Zenith| publisher=D.A.P| year=2005 | isbn=978-1-878972-40-8 }}
• {{cite book| title=The Feeling of Immortality: Selected Writings| author=Antero de Quental| others=Translator Richard Zenith| publisher=Mermaid Turbulence| year=1998| isbn=978-1-901776-05-8 | author-link=Antero de Quental}}
• {{cite book| title=Meditation on Ruins| author=Nuno Judice| others=Translator Richard Zenith| publisher=Archangel| year=1997| isbn=978-80-901800-8-6 | author-link=Nuno Judice}}
• {{cite book| title=Multitudinous Heart: Selected Poems: A Bilingual Edition| author=Carlos Drummond de Andrade| others=Translator Richard Zenith| publisher=Farrar, Straus and Giroux| year=2015| author-link=Carlos Drummond de Andrade}}

• [https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/445182/pessoa-by-zenith-richard/9780241534137 Pessoa: An Experimental Life] (2021). Allen Lane (London), released in the U.S. as Pessoa: A Biography, W. W. Norton (New York).

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.{{cite news|author=John Gray|date=28 May 2001|title=Assault on authorship. Fernando Pessoa invented at least 72 fictive identities. His jostling aliases, argues John Gray expressed his belief that the individual subject – the core of European thought – is an illusion|work=The New Statesman|url=https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2021/08/living-fernando-pessoa-s-world}}

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Category:1956 births

Category:Living people

Category:Writers from Washington, D.C.

Category:University of Virginia alumni

Category:Portuguese–English translators

Category:Portuguese-language American writers

Category:Translators of Fernando Pessoa

Category:Pessoa Prize winners

Category:20th-century translators

Category:American expatriates in Portugal