----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, June 29, 2007 10:48 AM
Subject: Re: "Notes for the Baron of Teive"
> History, biography, just story? This one travels, frederick. And has that
> older sardonic tone one attaches to certain writings from a century or
> more ago, in certain other worlds.
>
> Which of Pessoa's Pessoas was this? Not a translation but a turning into
> narrative?
>
> Whichever, I liked it.
>
> Doug
Thanks, Doug! The Education of the Stoic is a very short text of Pessoa's,
translated by Richard Zenith and published by Exact Change, Cambridge, in
'05. Its subtitle is The Only Manuscrapt of the Baron of Teive. The core
of it is a 29-page notebook, the Baron's only completed writing, which is
his suicide note. There are also some brief auxiliary texts, including two
of the most beautiful things Pessoa ever wrote: an imaginary discourse by
Epictetus, and a meditation on The Man from Porlock. Thinly sketched as he
is, the Baron lay in Pessoa's mind from 1913 on and is as memorable a figure
as his loquacious petty-bourgeois antitype Bernardo Soares, the diarist of
The Book of Disquietude. Zenith's afterword is very useful. -- Great
description of Pessoa by Paz in a jacket blurb: "that humorist who never
smiles and who makes our blood run cold."
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