More than fifty novelists, poets, translators, and editors participate in a virtual exchange of their favorite foreign-language books as part of a forum which appears in PEN America 14: The Good Books. Below are some of the contributors to the forum:

Rabih Alameddine • Maurice Berger • Michael F. Moore
Srikanth Reddy • Terese Svoboda • David Shields

Every writer in the world will meet in Lisbon, of course—lovely Lisbon, with its uncertain winds. We’ll stay in some old hotel overlooking the Tagus, its lifeblood; from our windows, we’ll be able to see the Belém Tower at the mouth of the river and the restless wings of its gulls. We’ll arrive in the late afternoon when we can gaze at the sun as it bathes the sprawling mass of rooftops in a tawny farewell. The hotel will be both beautiful and broken down, like the city itself—well, like the city as I imagine it, since I’ve never been there. In the drawer of the nightstand next to the left side of each bed in every room, the writer will find not Gideon’s childish scribblings, but The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, one of life’s great miracles.

Now, if Pessoa were alive today, he’d probably object to the attribution. Even though most editions of the book, and there are quite a few, list him as the author, he didn’t write it. One of his creations, Bernardo Soares, did. Pessoa invented numerous literary alter egos, what he called “heteronyms.” Arguably, the four greatest poets in the Portuguese language were all Fernando Pessoa using different names. One invented poet was a doctor and classicist, a royalist who emigrated to Brazil. A second was an unlettered genius who lived in the country, a paesano. A third was a naval engineer, a bisexual dandy who traveled the world. The fourth was Fernando Pessoa, another invention, according to the author.

Pessoa, like Cavafy and Kafka, was a clerk. A loner. A nobody. With no friends, no love, no family. He gave up his life not just for his poetry, but for the poetry of the other three as well, and for other poets. Pessoa created distinct writers, each with his own character and background, his own style, his own interests, his own intent. Each idiosyncratically brilliant. He created poets who wrote in French and in English—one of them wrote sonnets described by The Times of Londonas more Shakespearean than Shakespeare. He not only created poets but gave them a champion: a prolific critic whose writings in English promoted Portuguese literature. He didn’t stop there. His creations critiqued each other. He lived in his own world of literature.

Pessoa invented short-story writers, translators, philosophers, an astrologer, a baron who committed suicide, and a hunchbacked, lovelorn woman by the name of Maria José—more than seventy-two creations by some accounts. He wrote, “Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves.”

The poets may have been Pessoa’s best creations, but his greatest literary achievement is The Book of Disquiet, a “factless” autobiography made up of observations, aphorisms, ruminations, musings, dreams, moods, and the keenest revelation of an artist’s soul. What makes this fictional diary transcendent is that it deals with eternal quests: the meaning of life and of death, the existence of God, good and evil, love, reality, consciousness, and the soul’s disquiet. It can quench a thirsty mind and flood an arid heart.

A book tells you quite a bit about its author; a great book tells you quite a bit about you. When I first encountered Disquiet, I felt like laundry. The book dunked me in pristine water, battered and wrung me, hung me out to dry in unobstructed sunshine, rejuvenated me. I was forced to examine the choices I’d made, the beliefs I’d held, the loves I’d forsaken, the gods I’d worshipped.

The Disquiet manuscript, like most of Pessoa’s work, was found in a trunk after his death—he published hardly anything while alive. The translator Margaret Jull Costa says, “Perhaps appropriately, there is no one version, because each edition of the book represents a selection of the papers found in the trunk and put together in a different order or according to different criteria by different people. In English alone, there are four different versions; it is as if Pessoa continued to fragment into further heteronyms beyond death and we, the translators, were those heteronyms.”

Pessoa lived most of his life in a single room in Lisbon, his literary alter egos and their writing his only companions. He chose not to publish, to interact as little as possible with the world, to rarely leave his room except to walk to his small office and back. He died in obscurity, a virgin and a recluse, in 1935.

Whenever a writer in this old hotel feels her ego on the move, in either direction—I am a fraud / I am a genius / I am the best writer / I am the worst writer—she’ll open the nightstand drawer and pick up The Book of Disquiet. The writer, alone as she has always been, alone as she will always be, will read to remember that she is neither, that she is a mere speck in this world. Claudio Magris said that Pessoa journeys “not to the end of the dark night, but of a night of a colorless mediocrity that is even more disturbing, and in which one becomes aware of being only a peg to hang life on, and that at the bottom of that life, thanks to this awareness, there may be sought some last-ditch residue of truth.”

I remind myself that I am a peg, that I should aspire to be nothing, like Pessoa:

I am nothing.
I shall never be anything.
I cannot wish to be anything.
Aside from that, I have within me all the dreams of the world.

Copyright © 2011 by Rabih Alameddine. All rights reserved.