Fower Pessoas by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Colin Bramwell PRE-ORDER
Published 27th February 2025. Available for pre-order.
Fower Pessoas is the most original work of translation that you will read this year: a bold reimagining of Fernando Pessoa's poetry, done by an exciting next-generation poet from Scotland. Following its subject's unique approach to composition, Colin Bramwell puts all four of Pessoa's main poetic personae into a present-day Scots-language vernacular, and so creates a parochial Pessoa for our own times. The language of the work is designed to reflect contemporary speech in Scotland - ”a mixture of Scots and English - while pointing towards forms of autonomy of Scots from English. The resulting reading experience will be both uncanny and illuminating for English-speaking readers. Scots is well-matched with Pessoa: the language, with all its orthographical idiosyncrasies on the page, also presents readers with an authentic form of inauthenticity. Fower Pessoas is certainly not the kind of translation most readers will be used to. Rather than carrying over meaning directly, Bramwell matches his subject's restless lyricism within a new linguistic/temporal context: in other words, he goes toe-to-toe with Pessoa as a poet. The resulting entanglement makes for some astonishing full-throated poetry. By turns wise, empathetic, anxious, frustrated, moody, depressive and hilarious, readers will be delighted by this reinterpretation of an indispensable European poet, which not only celebrates Pessoa's extraordinary range of modes, moods, styles and ethics, but also heralds the arrival of a major new talent in Scottish poetry.
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