Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935), the Portuguese poet, fiction writer, literary critic, and translator, is widely regarded as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century. After nearly a decade in Durban, South Africa (1895–1905), he returned to his native Lisbon at age 17, where he went on to create one of the most extraordinarily diverse bodies of work in Western literature. By the time of his death at 47, Pessoa had conceived nearly 140 fictional alter egos—what he later termed heteronyms—through whom he wrote poetry and prose. Among them were Karl P. Effield, Charles Robert Anon, Alexander Search, Jean Seul de Méluret, Vicente Guedes, Frederick Wyatt, and many others. Of these, three stand out: Alberto Caeiro, regarded as the central figure of the poetic constellation, and Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos, both of whom—along with Pessoa himself considered Caeiro their literary master. Outside Portugal, Pessoa is best known for Livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet), a fragmentary, posthumously published work written in Portuguese and first released in 1982. A foreign correspondent for commercial firms and an active contributor and editor for several Portuguese literary journals, Pessoa left behind a vast, multilingual oeuvre in Portuguese, English, and French—that continues to be edited, translated, and studied worldwide. He wrote his final line in English, the language of his formative years, just one day before his death in late 1935: “I know not what to-morrow will bring.”

Ricardo Reis lay latent in Pessoa’s soul until 1914, the year he was born and became the author of a sequence of Odes that continued to grow until 1935, when he wrote the poem “Inside us live innumerable others.” Within Reis, indeed, countless figures dwelled: the neoclassicist opposed to Lusitanian Integralism; the author of the preface to Caeiro; the defender of Milton’s perfect art; the essayist interested in sexuality, science, and religion; the critic of “Christianism”; the theorist who conceived the world as though it were a game of chess; the monarchist in exile; the physician and partial Hellenist; the poet of time’s transience and of the serene acceptance of fate. Born between Cubism and Dadaism, Reis embodies the ancient world within the modern one, and his modernity lies precisely in the paradox of his existence: Ricardo Reis belongs to his own age and yet does not belong to it, and his odes are deliberate anachronisms.