THE COMPLETE WORKS OF RICARDO REIS

A rhapsodic collection of poems attributed to one of the Portuguese author’s many alter egos.

Wildly prolific in both poetry and prose, Pessoa (1888-1935) (The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos, 2023, etc.) wrote pseudonymously as a network of fictional writers, and the translation and collation of this multifaceted oeuvre is the subject of a new publishing project by New Directions. In 1928, Pessoa explained that his “heteronymic work is done by the author outside his personality,” and compared his varied bibliography to the “sayings of characters in any of his dramas.” This bilingual collection compiles all the work of “Ricardo Reis,” a neoclassical, Whitman-esque odist in search of transcendental epiphanies. The poems trace a philosophical quest toward recognizing the power of the present, and a belief that those who look toward the future (or the afterlife) are doomed to unfulfillment. “Be fully yourself today,” he urges in one poem, “don’t wait. / You are your life.” Let us be what we are,” he writes in another. Despite each poem striving to reach this same sense of enlightenment, they rarely feel redundant and instead recapitulate like a recurring motif. Classical imagery courses through, imbuing the poems with Dionysian ecstasy. “Happy the man to whom life kindly / Granted a knowledge of the gods,” he writes in one poem, “So that, like them, he could see / In the earthly things among which he lives / A mortal reflection of immortal life.” An illuminating section of prose concludes the volume, including curious prefaces written by Reis for Alberto Caeiro, another of Pessoa’s heteronyms. Here, Reis writes of his intentions to usher in a “lucid re-visioning of the gods, the rebirth of ancient beliefs, which the whole troop of false Christian gods and saints had buried.” In this marvelous introduction to Pessoa’s multitudes, readers will find a wealth of material to explore among the subversive paganism of Reis’ odes.

A gem of literary history that will spark further exploration through the author’s canon.