Pessoa, Fernando: The Mariner

Sublunary Editions, paperback

Translated by Geoffrey Brock

Publication Date: November 27, 2025

Publisher Marketing: 

The Mariner: A Static Drama in One Act (1913), Fernando Pessoa’s only completed play, features three women in a circular room in an old castle keeping vigil over a dead body. As their conversation unfolds, the mystery of their situation deepens, and they circle around the knot at the heart of the play: the relation between dream and reality, memory and grief. Altogether, it is a strange, brief, and haunting work. This bilingual facing edition of the play includes an essay on the The Mariner by Antonio Tabucchi, as well as an afterword by translator Geoffrey Brock.

Fernando Pessoa (Jun. 13, 1888 – Nov. 30, 1935) was a Portuguese poet, translator, and literary critic. He is best known today for Livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet) and the poetry he wrote under the heteronyms Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis.

Geoffrey Brock is the author of three books of poems (most recently After), the editor of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, and the translator of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, prose, and comics, mostly from Italian. His translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti's Allegria received the 2021 National Translation Award in Poetry.