Teresa Sobral Cunha considers there to be two versions of The Book of Disquiet. According to Cunha, who edited the first version with Jacinto do Prado Coelho and Maria Aliete Galhoz in 1982, there are two authors of the book: Vicente Guedes in the first phase (in the 1910s and 20s), and the aforementioned Bernardo Soares (late 1920s and 30s).
However, António Quadros considers the first phase of the book to belong to Pessoa himself. The second phase, more personal and diary-like, is the one credited to Bernardo Soares.
Richard Zenith, editor of a new Portuguese edition in 1998, took the option of presenting a single volume, as in his English translation of 1991. In his introduction, he writes that "if Bernardo Soares does not measure up to the full Pessoa, neither are his diary writings the sum total of Disquietude, to which he was after all a johnny-come-lately. The Book of Disquietude was various books (yet ultimately one book), with various authors (yet ultimately one author), and even the word disquietude changes meaning as time passes."[2]
George Steiner on The Book Of Disquiet:
"The fragmentary, the incomplete is of the essence of Pessoa's spirit. The very kaleidoscope of voices within him, the breadth of his culture, the catholicity of his ironic sympathies – wonderfully echoed in Saramago's great novel about Ricardo Reis – inhibited the monumentalities, the self-satisfaction of completion. Hence the vast torso of Pessoa's Faust on which he laboured much of his life. Hence the fragmentary condition of The Book of Disquiet, which contains material that predates 1913 and which Pessoa left open-ended at his death. As Adorno famously said, the finished work is, in our times and climate of anguish, a lie.
"It was to Bernardo Soares that Pessoa ascribed his Book of Disquiet, first made available in English in a briefer version by Richard Zenith in 1991. The translation is at once penetrating and delicately observant of Pessoa's astute melancholy. What is this Livro do Desassossego? Neither 'commonplace book', nor 'sketchbook', nor 'florilegium' will do. Imagine a fusion of Coleridge's notebooks and marginalia, of Valéry's philosophic diary and of Robert Musil's voluminous journal. Yet even such a hybrid does not correspond to the singularity of Pessoa's chronicle. Nor do we know what parts thereof, if any, he ever intended for publication in some revised format."[3]
