Ricardo Reis
Pessoa in 1914
Pessoa in 1914
Born(1887-09-19)19 September 1887
Oporto, Portugal
DiedBrazil, unknown date
OccupationDoctor, Poet
LanguagePortuguese, English
NationalityPortuguese

Ricardo Reis (Oporto 19 September 1887), was one of the most important heteronyms created by the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa.

""I have put all my mental discipline into Ricardo Reis, dressed in his own music."

— Fernando Pessoa, "Letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro", January 13, 1935. [1]

Born in Oporto in 1887, Ricardo Reis was one year younger than Fernando Pessoa who describes him as very little shorter and stronger, but slim and a vague matte brown. Reis was educated at a Jesuit boarding school becoming a Latinist by education and a semi-Hellenist by his own, thus writing better than Pessoa, but with a purism that his author considered exaggerated. He was a doctor and Neoclassical poet who wrote neopagan, epicurist and stoicist odes. Politically a monarchist, he went into exile to Brazil after the defeat of a monarchical rebellion in Oporto against the Portuguese Republic [lower-alpha 1] in 1919.[2]

"Around 1912, unless I make a mistake (which can never be a big one), I came up with the idea of writing some pagan poems. I sketched a few things in irregular verse (not in the Álvaro de Campos style, but in a half-regular style), and abandoned the case. I had, however, sketched a vague portrait of the person who was doing it (Ricardo Reis had been born, unbeknownst to me)."

— Fernando Pessoa, "Letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro", January 13, 1935.

Critical overview

Athena: Revista de Arta (1924–1925)
Issue Nr. 1.

Reis Odes were first published in 1924 in the Athena: Revista de Arte, founded by Fernando Pessoa and Ruy Vaz. Further eight odes were later published between 1927 and 1930 in the literary journal Presença. The remaining poems and prose were published posthumously.[3] In a letter to William Bentley, director of the journal Portugal, on October 31, 1924, to announce his journal Athena, Pessoa wrote that "a knowledge of the language would be indispensable, for instance, to appraise the 'Odes' of Ricardo Reis, whose Portuguese would draw upon him the blessing of António Vieira, as his stile and diction that of Horace (he has been called, admirably I believe, 'a Greek Horace who writes in Portuguese')".[4] Since Pessoa didn't determine the death of Reis, one can assume that he survived his author who died on November 30, 1935. In the novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984), the Portuguese writer José Saramago rebuilds, in his own personal outlook, the literary world of this heteronym after 1935, creating a dialog between Ricardo Reis and the ghost of his author.

"How I write on behalf of these three [ heteronyms ]... Caeiro out of pure and unexpected inspiration, without knowing or even calculating that he was going to write. Ricardo Reis, after an abstract deliberation, which suddenly materialized into an ode."

— Fernando Pessoa, "Letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro", January 13, 1935.

Notes

  1. ↑ The Portuguese Republic was declared on October 5, 1910.

References

  1. ↑ Pessoa, Fernando, Correspondência 1923–1935 (in Portuguese), Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim.
  2. ↑ Manuela Parreira da Silva, Ricardo Reis, MODERN!SMO - Arquivo Virtual da Geração de Orpheu.
  3. ↑ Amado, Nuno. FLUL - University of Lisbon (ed.). RICARDO REIS (1887-1936) (PDF) (Thesis). FLUL - Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa.
  4. ↑ Pessoa, Fernando, Correspondência 1923–1935 (in Portuguese), Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim.

Books

  • Zenith, Richard. Pessoa: A Biography. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2021, ISBN 9781324090779. Also published as Pessoa: An Experimental Life. London: Allen Lane, 2021.
  • Sadlier, Darlene J. An Introduction to Fernando Pessoa, Literary Modernist. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998.
  • Lancastre, Maria José de and Antonio Tabucchi. Fernando Pessoa: Photographic Documentation and Caption.Paris : Hazan, 1997.
  • Kotowicz, Zbigniew. Fernando Pessoa: Voices of a Nomadic Soul. London: Menard, 1996.
  • Lisboa, Eugénio and L. C. Taylor. A Centenary Pessoa. Manchester, England: Carcanet, 1995.
  • Green, J. C. R. Fernando Pessoa: The Genesis of the Heteronyms. Isle of Skye: Aquila, 1982.
  • Monteiro, George. The Man Who Never Was: Essays on Fernando Pessoa. Providence, RI: Gávea-Brown, 1982.
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