The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis

About this book

Here is the fourth in a series of volumes by Fernando Pessoa's celebrated "heteronyms." Fernando Pessoa did not simply write under pseudonyms--he created a coterie of imagined authors, each with a fully realized biography, distinct temperament, singular style, and governing philosophy. Among them, Ricardo Reis stands as the most poised and classical presence in this literary cosmos: an exiled monarchist physician, and avowed Hellenist who answers modern restlessness with lucid form, stoic restraint, and a pagan sense of measure. Reis contemplates the world as if it were a chessboard--serene, exacting, unsentimental. His odes move among jugs of wine, ivy leaves, destiny, and the austere pleasure of self-command, yet beneath their composure runs a quiet existential unease--the intuition that "within us live innumerable others." Born in the early twentieth century, between the rise of Cubism and the emergence of Dada, Ricardo Reis embodies antiquity within modernity--his paradoxical poise marking a distinctly modern classicism. Based on the definitive Tinta-da-china edition (Portugal) and introduced by Jerónimo Pizarro, this bilingual volume--beautifully translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari--reveals Pessoa's most measured voice: intellectually rigorous, emotionally contained, and quietly radical in its resistance to the noise of its age. The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis is a must-have collection by Pessoa's most refined heteronym.