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

Life

Richard Zenith graduated from the University of Virginia in 1979. He has lived in

Colombia Colombia (, ; ), officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country in South America with insular regions in North America—near Nicaragua's Caribbean coast—as well as in the Pacific Ocean. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Car ...

, Brazil, France and, since 1987, in Portugal. He is a naturalised Portuguese citizen. Zenith is widely considered to be one of the foremost experts on the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. Zenith has translated many of Pessoa's works into English 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 Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (6 November 1919 – 2 July 2004) was a Portuguese poet and writer. Her remains have been entombed in the National Pantheon since 2014. Life and career Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen was born on 6 November ...

Nuno Júdice Nuno Judice (Mexilhoeira Grande, Algarve, 29 April 1949) is a Portuguese essayist, poet, writer, novelist and Professor. Poet and fiction writer, his literary debut was with the Concept of Poem in 1972. He graduated in Romance Philology from the U ...

António Lobo Antunes António Lobo Antunes, GCSE (; born 1 September 1942) is a Portuguese novelist and retired medical doctor. He has been named as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He has been awarded the 2000 Austrian State Prize, the 2003 Ovid ...

, and Luís de Camões, amongst other Portuguese-language writers. 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 Lisbon (; pt, Lisboa ) is the capital and largest city of Portugal, with an estimated population of 544,851 within its administrative limits in an area of 100.05 km2. Grande Lisboa, Lisbon's urban area extends beyond the city's administr ...

's Gulbenkian Foundation, São Paulo's Museum of Portuguese Language and Rio de Janeiro's Centro Cultural Correios. In 2021 Zenith publishe
''Pessoa: An Experimental Life''
','' a 1,055-page biography. In the United States it was published as '' Pessoa: A Biography''.

Awards

* 1987 –

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

* 1999 – PEN Award for Poetry in Translation * 2006 –

Harold Morton Landon Translation Award The Academy of American Poets is a national, member-supported organization that promotes poets and the art of poetry. The nonprofit organization was incorporated in the state of New York in 1934. It fosters the readership of poetry through outreach ...

* 2012 – Prémio Pessoa * 2022 – Finalist for

Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography The Pulitzer Prize for Biography is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes that are annually awarded for Letters, Drama, and Music. It has been presented since 1917 for a distinguished biography, autobiography or memoir by an American author o ...

for his book Pessoa: A Biography

Works

Translations

* (Carcanet 1991 edition) * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Biography

*
Pessoa: An Experimental Life
' (2021). Allen Lane (London), released in the U.S. as '' Pessoa: A Biography'', W.W. Norton (New York).

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.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Zenith, Richard 1956 births Living people Writers from Washington, D.C. University of Virginia alumni Portuguese–English translators Translators of Fernando Pessoa Pessoa Prize winners 20th-century translators American expatriates in Portugal