The Book of Disquietude, by Fernando Pessoa, trans. Richard Zenith (Carcanet, £9.95 in UK)

Inside the last decade and a half, Pessoa has become a posthumous culture hero, as well as a poet with a European reputation. His virtual anonymity during his lifetime has added to the legend; though born in South Africa, he spent almost all his life in Lisbon, scraping a living by writing the English and French correspondence for Portuguese businessmen, while compulsively turning out both prose and verse, most of it unpublished while he lived. Pessoa had no worldly sense and seemingly very little worldly ambition, he had few friends and his love life appears to have been virtually non existent. He also seems to have - been a case of An Author in Search of a Character - he wrote often under the pseudonyms Alberto Citeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Alvaro de Campos, while the present book was largely written under the name Bernardo Soares. It is not an easy work to label part private journal, partly a collection of reflections, epigrams and dicta, partly a kind of confessional or self examination (sometimes self mockery) in which Pessoa records his isolation, his intellectual - curiosity and philosophic nihilism, his dreams and moments of imaginative release. The original manuscript is apparently difficult to decipher, so that there are words missing here and there, and some passages are rather fragmentary. As a whole, however, it is a remarkable and utterly original document, showing an acute, ultra modern sensibility - which has something in common with Existentialism and with the "black" aspect of Surrealism.