Addendum to The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis (New Directions, 2026)

This companion publication to The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis (New Directions, 2026) gathers sixty-nine prose texts by Fernando Pessoa under the name of his heteronym Ricardo Reis as a digital extension to the printed volume. The fourteen texts appearing in the print edition, along with those in this digital addendum, constitute the first complete presentation in English of the known prose attributed, or plausibly attributable, to Ricardo Reis. All texts were translated from the first complete Portuguese critical edition of Reis prepared by Tinta-da-china (Portugal), edited by Jerónimo Pizarro and Jorge Uribe in 2016. As with the texts in the printed volume, these were translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari.

If Álvaro de Campos is Pessoa’s most voluble—his most sardonic and incendiary— heteronym, Ricardo Reis, by contrast, stands as the most deliberate and composed. Campos speaks to modernity in Whitmanian, ironic tirades, whereas Reis expresses his mind with a measured, orderly, and stoic resignation. In this sense, his prose acts not as a complement to his Odes but as their philosophical scaffolding.* The present collection highlights Reis’s prefatory texts to Caeiro’s The Keeper of Sheep, as well as his concern with aesthetics, ethics, and metaphysics—especially the program of “rebuilding paganism,” a recurring subject in the longer essays and fragments. These prose writings illuminate the intellectual project that underpins Reis’s verse, articulating his reverence for discipline, natural equilibrium, and classical restraint, and his opposition to Christian sentimentalism, mysticism, and moral excess.

Several of the earlier prose texts introduce the fundamental tenets of this philosophical worldview, often addressed to or invoking Alberto Caeiro, the master of Pessoa’s fictional coterie. Others reflect on the function of art and the nature of literature, frequently invoking Greco-Roman paradigms while explicitly rejecting the Romantic, Christian, and modern sensibilities of Pessoa’s time. Reis argues, with remarkable consistency, for an aesthetics of lucidity, form, and detachment. These principles extend to his conceptions of civilization and ethics, which he casts in contrast to what he diagnoses as the disintegration and decadence of Christianized Europe. Like poets and critics before him—Matthew Arnold, for instance, whose writings are extant in Pessoa’s private library—Reis engaged in comparative reflections on Shakespeare and Milton.

Whether in the printed selection or in the larger body of prose presented here, Reis’s voice remains recognizable for its composure and lexical precision, even as the prose ventures into polemic and aphorism. The longer essays present arguments of striking erudition and philosophical reach, most notably on the nature of paganism and its misinterpretation by modern readers. The author of the Odes distinguishes true Greco-Roman paganism—defined by its objectivism, natural order, and human-centered ethics—from the vague mysticisms and sensationalisms of both northern pagan traditions and Christian culture. Rebuilding paganism, as Reis envisions it, means reclaiming an ethics of discipline and an aesthetic of equilibrium, not merely substituting one mythology for another.

Also included in this dossier are numerous fragments and unfinished texts—some no more than a paragraph in length—which nonetheless capture Reis’s intellectual consistency and rhetorical poise. Even in fragmentary or draft form,** his writing enacts a style of thought: one that privileges detachment over emotion, contained expression and form over rhetorical excess, and formal restraint over confession. These textual remains, far from incidental, offer a privileged view into the workshop of a heteronym who conceived literature as an exercise in ethical and formal discipline.

None of these prose texts were published in Pessoa’s lifetime. The editorial principles governing this edition follow those of the Tinta-da-china edition, attributing authorship based on Pessoa’s own indications, internal stylistic consistency, and material evidence. The majority of the pieces included here—some accompanied by their respective facsimiles from the Pessoa Archive held at the National Library of Portugal in Lisbon—were written between 1914 and 1918. They coincide with the same period during which Reis composed his Odes. A smaller handful overlap with the second phase of The Book of Disquiet (New Directions, 2018), namely those dated or datable to 1928-1931. Taken together, Reis’s poetry and prose form a cohesive corpus within Pessoa’s heteronymic universe.

This addendum serves not only to complete the English edition of Ricardo Reis’s works but also to foreground the often-overlooked prose dimension of this heteronym—here rendered in English in its entirety for the first time. While furnishing numerous footnotes indicating sources in Pessoa’s private library, the translations seek to preserve the rhetorical gravity, lexical precision, and philosophical cadence that define Reis’s prose voice—a voice whose diction, less archaic here than in the odes and therefore comparatively less lexically forbidding, reveals a writer whose quiet authority arises not from effusion but from intellectual discipline, and whose modernity resides in his refusal to capitulate to it.

Patricio Ferrari

April 2026, New York City

To assist readers of both the Portuguese and English editions, the following chart provides the corresponding texts in the Tinta-da-china edition (original Portuguese) and the New Directions edition (English translation).

No. Tinta-da-China (Port. orig.) No. New Directions (Print English trans.)

220 — 1 Text to introduce Odes (c. 1914)

222 — 2 Text to introduce Odes (c. 1915)

226 — 3 Text to introduce the poems of Caeiro (c. 1916)

240 — 4 Text to introduce the poems of Caeiro (c. 1916-1917)

251 — 5 Text to introduce the poems of Caeiro (c. 1917)

253 — 6 Text to introduce the poems of Caeiro (c. 1917)

256 — 7 Text to introduce the poems of Caeiro (1917-1918)

257 — 8 Text to introduce the poems of Caeiro (1917-1918)

260 — 9 Text to introduce the poems of Caeiro (1923-1924) (only p. II partially included)

265 — 10 Other Texts | The Return of the Gods (c. 1914)

279 — 11 Other Texts (1914-1915)

290 — 12 Other Texts (c. 1915)

293 — 13 Other Texts | General Program of Portuguese Neo-

Paganism (1916-1917)

300 — 14 Other Texts (c. 1930)

Download the dossier here

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*It should be noted that, unlike his disciples, Alberto Caeiro—master of the coterie—left no prose texts. His only “prose” consists of the replies he gave in an interview, as well as the words recalled by Campos in his well-known text written in Caeiro’s memory. (See The Complete Works of Álvaro de Campos, New Directions)

** Readers will notice that many of the texts contain passages marked […], indicating sentences left unfinished by the author. The English edition does not include project lists, more fragmentary texts, or items of dubious attribution; these may be found in the annexes of the Tinta-da-China edition published in 2016.