Richard Zenith

Richard Zenith
File:Richard Zenith, Os Dias do FOLIO 2016.png Richard Zenith in 2016
Born	February 23, 1956 Washington, D.C.
Nationality	American-Portuguese
Occupation	Writer and translator

Richard Zenith (born February 23, 1956, Washington, D.C.) is an American-Portuguese writer and translator, winner of the Pessoa Prize in 2012.

Life

Zenith graduated from the University of Virginia in 1979. He has lived in Colombia, Brazil, France and Portugal since 1987 and holds Portuguese citizenship.

Considered by many an expert on Fernando Pessoa (former Secretary of Culture Francisco José Viegas called him "one of the greatest"), he has translated the poet's works into English and has written extensively about Pessoa's poetry and prose. He has also translated Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Antero de Quental, Sophia de Mello Breyner, Nuno Júdice, António Lobo Antunes, and Luís de Camões, among other writers.

Zenith organized, together with Carlos Felipe Moisés, the hugely successful exhibition Fernando Pessoa, Plural como o Universo, dedicated to Pessoa's life and heteronyms, at Lisbon's Gulbenkian Foundation, São Paulo's Museum of Portuguese Language and Rio de Janeiro's Centro Cultural Correios.

In 2021 he published An Experimental Life, a 1,050 page biography of Pessoa.

Awards

• 1987 – Guggenheim Fellowship
• 1999 – PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
• 2006 – Harold Morton Landon Translation Award
• 2012 – Prémio Pessoa

Works

Translations

• (Carcanet 1991 edition)

Reviews

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.