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 neoclassical Stoic, shaped by Horace’s Latin lyricism—filtered through 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, culminate in 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. In 15 hexassílabos (six-syllable metrical lines), the evanescence of thought and identity is distilled: “Sou sòmente o logar/Onde se sente ou pensa.”
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 modulating between longer lines such as the decassílabo (ten metrical syllables) and shorter measures like the hexassílabo—as in Ode 112.
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 very conscious of a meticulous mind at work. The language is not difficult, but Reis often expresses himself with a compactness that is hard to preserve in English. In Ode 219, the last two lines read: Nada dictam/A quem me sei: eu escrevo, or: 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, for example) the “eu/I” carries more weight. The opening words of the last line are so concise that it’s hard to resist the temptation to add that implied know myself to be, and we did toy with To the me I know I am, but that would have meant losing the concision. In the end, we opted for: To the me I know, which is only one word longer than the Portuguese. Translation is always a lesson in compromise.
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,…