On Translating Ricardo Reis
Fernando Pessoa’s most formally disciplined heteronym.
Ricardo Reis, Fernando Pessoa’s most formally disciplined heteronym, emerged in 1914 as a doctor born in Oporto, shaped by Horace’s Latin lyricism—inflected by Stoic and Epicurean thought—and by the lapidary clarity of The Greek Anthology, particularly in Paton’s English translation held in Pessoa’s private library. His odes, composed between 1914 and 1935, include among their latest compositions ode “219”—marked simply “R.R.” at the top and center of the manuscript—written shortly before Pessoa’s death in November 1935 and published posthumously. The ode is conceived throughout in short lines, apt for sententious diction. This text deals with metaphysical multiplicity (“I have more than one soul”) and epistemic uncertainty (“I do not know/Who is thinking or feeling”); a longer line (say of ten or twelve metrical syllables) would invite discursiveness. The hexassílabo,* instead, forces aphoristic phrasing. Each line becomes a propositional unit, almost like a maxim.
The five odes selected for Poetry—all posthumous—trace two decades of verse that moves with lexical precision through the vanishing contours of temporality. Favoring transience over transcendence, Reis dignifies impermanence through formal rigor and philosophical detachment. In the odes, he stylizes Portuguese through lexical archaism and Latinate syntax, often combining lines of different lengths.
In the letter to the Portuguese literary critic Casais Monteiro, dated January 13, 1935, Pessoa said of his own heteronym, Ricardo Reis: “He writes better than I do, but with a purism I find excessive.” In translating Reis, we were conscious of a meticulous classical mind at work. The diction is not obscure, but Reis often expresses himself with a compactness that is hard to preserve in English. In ode “219,” for instance, the last two lines read: “...Nada dictam/A quem me sei: eu escrevo” (or, literally, “...Nothing (they) dictate/To who(m)(I) know (myself to be): I write.”) Portuguese is more concise than English because one can dispense with the personal pronoun, which also means that (in the last two words of the ode, for example) the “eu/I” carries more weight. The last line is so concise that it’s hard to resist the temptation to add that implied “I know myself to be,” and and we did go back and forth between keeping that concision: “To the me I know: I write” and the more explanatory: “To the me I know I am: I write.” In the end, we opted for the latter, but rereading it again now, that hesitation between those two possibilities remains. Both versions work, both convey the meaning, and both have a different and a pleasing rhythm. Ah, translation is always a lesson in compromise.
*Ode “219” is written in lines of six poetic syllables in the Portuguese original. In Portuguese prosody, the hexassílabo is one of the shortest meters that still allows a complete syntactic unit without sounding clipped. Curiously, Reis only wrote 12 out of 219 of his odes entirely in this meter. Neither Alberto Caeiro nor Álvaro de Campos, Pessoa’s two other main heteronyms, wrote poems relying solely on this meter.
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This note was updated by the translators on February 19, 2026.
Margaret Jull Costa has translated the work of numerous writers, including Javier Marías, José Saramago, Fernando Pessoa, and Ana Luísa Amaral.
Patricio Ferrari is a polyglot poet, literary translator, and editor. He holds an MAS from the Sorbonne, an MFA from Brown University, and a PhD from the University of Lisbon. As translator and editor, he has published more than twenty books, including the complete works of Fernando Pessoa’s three heteronyms—Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis—co-translated with Margaret Jull Costa,...