“Pessoa’s writing, the whole of his extraordinary opus, [is] a major presence in what has come to be known as ‘modernism’ in the European languages. . . . Ghostly, ironic, mercurial . . . Pessoa’s poetry continues to radiate in English.”

—The New York Review of Books

“Fernando Pessoa is probably the greatest twentieth-century writer you have never heard of. . . . Pessoa would be Shakespeare if all that we had of Shakespeare were the soliloquies of Hamlet, Falstaff, Othello and Lear and the sonnets. His legacy is a set of explorations, in poetic form, of what it means to inhabit a human consciousness. . . . What makes Pessoa’s thought and poetry compelling is not that he picks up and develops the forms and themes of Whitman and Emerson and retransmits our patrimony back to us—though this would be marvelous—but because in the poems and prose he has passed a judgment upon the twentieth-century rejection of individualism.”

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“If [Pessoa] never achieved such renown during his life, the years since he died have elevated him to a numinous status among European poets, and writers as idiomatically disparate as Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, and Antonio Tabucchi . . . have acknowledged his potent sway. . . . [Fernando Pessoa & Co.] is the most generous prospect in English so far of the Pessoan domain, with, at its center, a poet who, in the words of an English writer he surely knew, was ‘ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever’”

—The Times Literary Supplement

“When Jose Saramago won the Nobel Prize for Literature ... [it] reminded poets that another Portuguese writer, who should have received the prize in his lifetime, didn’t. Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is one of the great originals of modern European poetry and Portugal’s premier modernist. He is also a strange and original writer.”

—The Washington Post

“Pessoa [was] Portugal’s greatest poet since Camoëns. . . . Zenith not only edits wisely, he translates magnificently. . . . English readers can at long last appreciate the wide range of talent, craft, intellect, and poetic achievement present in Fernando Pessoa & Co.”

—The Boston Book Review

“One of the most extraordinary poetic talents the century has produced.”

—Microsoft Network’s Reading Forum

“The saddest of our century’s great literary modernists and perhaps its most inventive . . . the finest poet Portugal has ever produced ... we can only hope that this marks the introduction of this great modernist to a wide English-speaking audience.”

—The Boston Phoenix

“The greatest Portuguese poet since Camoëns... A worthy compilation of an individualistic yet undervalued modern poet . . . highly recommended.”

—Library Journal

“The amazing Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa ... as a fantastic invention surpasses any creation by Borges. . . . Pessoa was neither mad nor a mere ironist; he is Whitman reborn, but a Whitman who gives separate names to ‘my self,’ ‘the real me’ or ‘me myself,’ and ‘my soul,’ and writes wonderful books of poetry for all of them.”

— Harold Bloom, The Western Canon

“A leading figure of European modernism . . . Borges called him the Portuguese poet, but should, perhaps, have made that plural. . . . [Pessoa’s] work is never more profound than when it is most ludicrous, never more heartfelt than when it is most deeply ironic. . . . Like Beckett, Pessoa is extremely funny. . . . His work is loaded with delights.”

—The Guardian

“Mysterious and brilliant, Pessoa was a kind of pre-postmodernist.”

—Publishers Weekly

“There are in Pessoa echoes of Beckett’s exquisite boredom; the dark imaginings of Baudelaire (whom he loved); Melville’s evasive confidence man; the dreamscapes of Borges.”

—The Village Voice Literary Supplement