With the horrors of the second wave, this Covid lockdown journal acquires a fresh poignancy
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee’s ‘A Town Slowly Empties’ is a meditation on urban life during the pandemic. Manjunath Kiran / AFP
There is perhaps nothing more personal than the act of writing a journal. It is, after all, one of the few forms of without that don’t carry consequences, where one is not only vivacious and intensely humane but also honest about oneself and the world. But journals can also be something more: texts that offer relief not only to the one writing them but also to those reading the entries.
Book: ‘Pessoa: A Biography’ by Richard Zenith – Editor’s Note
Like Richard Ellmann’s
Pessoa immortalizes the life of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.
Eighty-five years after his wrenching death in a cramped Lisbon apartment, where he left more than 25,000 manuscript sheets in a wooden trunk, Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) remains one of the most enigmatic and underappreciated poets of the twentieth century. Celebrated for writing in dozens of different poetic voices, known as heteronyms, Pessoa has finally found his definitive biographer in renowned translator Richard Zenith.
Setting the story of Pessoa’s life against the nationalistic currents of early twentieth-century European history, Zenith charts the depths of Pessoa’s explosive imagination and literary genius. Much as José Saramago brought one of Pessoa’s heteronyms to life in
Bookshop Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888â1935) contained a multitude of adventurous personalities despite his staid lifestyle, according to translator Zenith (
The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa) in this gloriously labyrinthine biography. Zenith recaps the outwardly uneventful existence of Pessoa, who published only a fraction of his writing before his death, had one brief romance, extolled the virtue of âdoing nothing in life,â and ended one of his last poems with the summation, âGive me more wine, because life is nothing.â But while Pessoa may have been light on worldly experience, Zenith proves he had an exuberant intellectual life that played out through the various pen-name personae he used to adopt radically diverging poetic styles, explore homoerotic themes, invent literary movementsâincluding âsensationismâ and âswampismââand mock himself in print. Zenith elegantly conveys Pessoaâs eccentricity (he i
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The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things.” Lao Tzu in The Tao Te Ching
73 Morning is an abstract thing, it exists, but is not a thing. Here, at this hour, we’re beginning to see the sun. If the morning light on the trees is beautiful, It’s just as beautiful whether we call the morning “beginning to see the sun” That’s why there’s no advantage in giving things the wrong name, Or indeed giving them names at all.
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