Translating Fernando Pessoa’s Ricardo Reis
If a language is a mother tongue, a foreign language is an affair.
At the age of twenty-six, I moved to Paris with the ambition of becoming an exophonic French poet. The university graduate fees were laughably low compared to those in the United States, and I was eager to revise a manuscript of prose poems I had written years earlier while backpacking across Europe. Then Pessoa entered my life. His voice came off the shelves of the Sorbonne Library and settled somewhere down my spine.
In mid-March, before the spring rains, I packed my debts, my uncle’s hand-me-down suits, and a handful of books, and boarded a one-way bus to Lisbon. Not to learn Portuguese well enough to read Pessoa in the original, I could already do that as a speaker of other Romance languages, but because I lacked something more fundamental. Portuguese didn’t yet run through my body.
What began as a linguistic journey gradually became an archival one. First at the Casa Fernando Pessoa, which houses his private library, and later at the National Library of Portugal, where I spent years reading his papers—loose sheets, notebooks, envelopes, drafts, abandoned projects, and fragments that had emerged from the trunks after his death in 1935. The process transformed the way I read, write, and incorporate language. I learned to decipher Pessoa’s handwriting, trace the evolution of certain poems, and follow the routes to source texts—the voyages of a prolific mind: from lists and sketches to drafts in English, Portuguese, and French—all in the ebb and flow of poetic waters faster than I could find a mooring.
Those early years brought with them everything one could ask of an encounter with a poet: surprise, joy, and the rush of reading manuscripts and marginalia, only a small fraction of which had been published during Pessoa’s lifetime.
Among those papers were unpublished notes for a projected “Treatise on Prosody and Poetics,” a work Pessoa never completed. The manuscript predates the famous “Triumphal Day” of March 1914, when the heteronyms emerged. Throughout the archive, questions of meter, rhythm, and form appeared not as technical concerns but as central preoccupations. It was there, amid Pessoa’s reflections on poetic craft and his sustained engagement with the Classical tradition, that Ricardo Reis must have begun to take shape—as a Latinist and semi-Hellenist, as Pessoa described him, whose odes would be built upon literary models and the generative power of constraint.
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Fernando Pessoa was wary of unrestricted freedom. Or rather, both Pessoa and Ricardo Reis were wary of the modern notion of freedom unbound by aesthetic limits.
Among Fernando Pessoa’s major heteronyms, Reis is the poet of measure. If Alberto Caeiro seeks immediacy through the senses and Álvaro de Campos embraces geographic and existential excess, Reis cultivates symmetry. Equipoise. His odes aspire to a balance inherited from Horace and filtered through Pessoa’s modern reading of Paton’s Greek Anthology — still extant in his private collection with marginal notes in both the Greek text and the English translation. Governed by formal, intellectual, and emotional limits, the odes prioritize proportion over surplus, restraint over exuberance, and acceptance over complaint. Throughout them, Reis expresses composure before fate, time, and ephemerality. It is this classical restraint—touching Stoicism without wholly becoming it—that lends Reis’s voice its distinctive authority.
While translating his complete works with Margaret Jull Costa—after having worked on the complete works of Alberto Caeiro and Álvaro de Campos—it was clear from the outset that the very principle governing Reis’s poetry also governed the act of translating it. Repeatedly the odes taught the same lesson: constraint is not the enemy of creation. It is its condition.
From the outset, it was clear to us that Reis’s odes—like any poetry worth translating—cannot be rendered through meaning alone. His verses inhabit the pressure exerted by diction, syntax, and form upon thought.
The first translation issue we encountered appeared in the opening lines of Reis’s first ode, dated 12 June 1914, the day he first enters Pessoa’s literary universe:
Mestre, são plácidas
Todas as horas
Que nós perdemos,
(Master, how serene
Are all the hours
We waste)
The adjective seemed simple enough. The Portuguese plácidas has an obvious English cognate: placid. Behind the Portuguese word stands the Latin placidus, a word that appears in Horace, one of Reis’s principal models. Moreover, Reis himself returns to the lexical family of plácido elsewhere in the odes. Rhythmically, placid would have reproduced the stress pattern of the Portuguese (plácidas) more closely than our alternative. Yet we ultimately chose serene.
Translation is not a search for the most defensible equivalent but for the word that allows the poem to poem—as in the original.
The opening ode is not merely describing calm hours. It proposes an attitude toward time. In English, serene carries contemplative overtones. Take serene acceptance, serene wisdom, serene detachment. These are central Ricardian virtues. Placid felt slightly more static, more descriptive. Serene seemed closer to the contemplative stance the ode seeks to embody.
The lesson returned in matters of form.
Reis is a poet of compression. He says less than one expects, trusting suggestion more than assertion. In that same ode appears the phrase Sábios incautos, which we initially rendered as “Like innocent sages.” Nothing seemed wrong with it. The line was grammatical, idiomatic, and faithful to the sense. Yet the more we sat with it, the more the simile felt unnecessary.
The Portuguese phrase is compact and remarkably balanced, its stresses falling with the poise characteristic of the odes. Removing “like” restored not only the density of the original, but also its rhythmic pattern. “Innocent sages,” with stresses falling on the first and fourth positions, as in the original, stood more firmly on the line, carrying the measured authority that defines Reis’s voice.
Translation often advances not through addition, but through subtraction. Constraint, here, generated the solution. The fewer words the line possessed, the more completely it became itself. In one of the earliest notes for the projected “Treatise,” Pessoa writes:
“Em poesia vale o rhythmo tanto como a grammatica.” (In poetry, rhythm counts as much as grammar).
National Library of Portugal / Archive 3, Call number 122-2. Detail.
A third translation challenge emerged in matters of syntax.
Some modern readers may think of line breaks solely as visual features. For Reis, as well as for certain American poets of free verse (think of Robert Creeley), they often carry structural weight and surprise. In this ode, the line break after quasi creates a brief hesitation in thought. Meaning arrives through delay.
Later in the same ode, Reis writes:
Saibamos, quasi
Maliciosos,
In an early draft we had translated the passage of the fifth stanza as:
Let us learn then,
Almost playfully,
The solution was acceptable. Something essential, however, had disappeared—the pause after quasi (“almost”), one of the ode’s defining gestures. The adverb hangs in suspension before the adjective maliciosos arrives. Reis is not entirely playful, ironic, or detached. The line break creates a space in which qualification itself becomes meaningful.
We eventually decided on:
Let us learn, almost
Mischievously
What mattered most was rendering the hesitation. Before the thought (in a two-line stanza) completes itself, almost briefly appears to modify the act of learning.
The challenge was therefore not simply lexical. It was syntactic, rhythmic, and semantic. The ode asks the reader to dwell briefly in uncertainty. Preserving that suspension mattered as much as preserving any individual word. Here translation became an act of listening—not only to what the ode says, but to the manner in which it thinks.
Time and again, translating Reis led back to this question of limits.
But how do we reconcile such limitations with an author who went beyond his predecessors and contemporaries in the art of self-othering? Not just in numbers or through the concept of heteronymismo, which he finally coined in 1928, but as a layered crescendo of multiplicity—in genres, styles, influences, languages, and worldviews. In 1901, when Pessoa created his first fictitious other, he began his own journey toward a proliferation of selves.
In all, Fernando Pessoa created more than one hundred fictional authors, 136 to be precise. And though few inhabit constraint as completely as Reis, his worldview is structured by acceptance. Reis tells us that the future remains unknowable, death unavoidable, and the gods indifferent. Yet from these conditions he derives not despair, but a generative way of dwelling within form.
Perhaps that is why translating him proved so instructive. Every ode presented boundaries that could not be ignored: the etymology embedded in a word, the architecture of a line, the weight of a line break. Rather than restricting his literary universe, these boundaries clearly enlarged it. They forced attention. They demanded precision.
After co-translating Pessoa for nearly a decade, I can attest that translation is the closest form of reading. Through Reis, Pessoa teaches that literary freedom is rarely found in boundlessness. It emerges instead from a set of constraints—linguistic, stylistic, formal, philosophical, and biographical. The translator learns much the same lesson. Every ode is a negotiation with limits. And if one listens carefully enough, those limits reveal not what the poem cannot do, but what it has been trying to do all along.
