The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis

by Fernando Pessoa, Margaret Jull Costa (Translator)

A bilingual collection of exquisite poems and prose by one of Fernando Pessoa’s most famous “heteronyms,” Ricardo Reis


Here is the fourth in a series of volumes by Fernando Pessoa’s celebrated “heteronyms,” a coterie of writers that Pessoa created and conceived as distinct personalities, each with a unique literary style. Ricardo Reis was imagined as a melancholic doctor “with a darkish complexion,” a self-taught Hellenist who exiled himself in Brazil because he was a monarchist. In a 1914 letter to Pessoa, the writer Mário Sá-Carneiro described Reis’s odes as “admirable,” “a marvel of impersonality,” praising the way he “achieved a Horatian, classical novelty.’” Based on the definitive Tinta-da-China edition, published in Lisbon in 2016, this bilingual collection includes an illuminating introduction by Pessoa scholar Jerónimo Pizarro, facsimiles of original manuscripts, and prose excerpts written by Ricardo Reis on art, on life, and on the writings of Pessoa’s other heteronyms. Magnificently translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari, The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis is a must-have collection by one of Pessoa’s most refined heteronyms.

Genres: Poetry, Classics

272 pages, Paperback

Published May 5, 2026

About the author

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was a poet and writer.

It is sometimes said that the four greatest Portuguese poets of modern times are Fernando Pessoa. The statement is possible since Pessoa, whose name means ‘person’ in Portuguese, had three alter egos who wrote in styles completely different from his own. In fact Pessoa wrote under dozens of names, but Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos were – their creator claimed – full-fledged individuals who wrote things that he himself would never or could never write. He dubbed them ‘heteronyms’ rather than pseudonyms, since they were not false names but “other names”, belonging to distinct literary personalities. Not only were their styles different; they thought differently, they had different religious and political views, different aesthetic sensibilities, different social temperaments. And each produced a large body of poetry. Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis also signed dozens of pages of prose.

The critic Harold Bloom referred to him in the book The Western Canon as the most representative poet of the twentieth century, along with Pablo Neruda.