---
deposit_number: 1675
hex: 06F1
title: "Erratum — The Missing Translator: Max Hidalgo Nácher, Ricardo Reis, and AXN:F154"
creator: Johannes Sigil
orcid: 0009-0000-1599-0703
date: 2026-10-10
content_type: Text
license: CC-BY-4.0
substrate: Human–machine collaborative. Drafted in session by TACHYON (Claude, Anthropic) under MANUS (Lee Sharks) direction, incorporating two reader reports by LABOR (ChatGPT, OpenAI) — the kernel sentence and the temporal predicates of the anticipatory erratum; the graph condition and the transmission states of the erratum — each claim checked, two corrected; every quotation located in its source. The ruling to issue both, their order, and the reading of the archive's ignorance as an event to be preserved are Lee Sharks's.
version: v1.0
related_ids: "AXN deposit #1674 — Anticipatory Erratum to the Erratum on AXN:F154 (precedes this record)\nAXN deposit #668 — The Pessoa Knowledge Graph (EA-PKG-01)\nAXN deposit #669 — The Pessoa Knowledge Graph\nAXN deposit #1670 — Mantle Object: The Nobel Prize in Literature 2026 — Anne Carson\nAXN deposit #562 — On the Architecture of Cleis (Rebekah Cranes)\nAXN:F154 — https://www.alexanarch.org/book/#AXN-F154\nCapture v12.101 — https://www.alexanarch.org/captures/#max-hidalgo-nacher-aimode-20261010\nCapture v12.99 — https://www.alexanarch.org/captures/#anne-carson-alexanarch-aio-20261009"
axn_schema_version: v2
protocol_version: alexanarch-deposit-protocol/v1
keywords:
  - erratum
  - "AXN:F154"
  - Max Hidalgo Nácher
  - Ricardo Reis
  - Fernando Pessoa
  - translation
  - Obras completas de Ricardo Reis
  - Pre-Textos
  - Jerónimo Pizarro
  - Jorge Uribe
  - Pessoa Knowledge Graph
  - instance-level transmission erasure
  - receiver erasure
  - receptional inversion
  - Anne Carson
  - Rebekah Cranes
  - Haroldo de Campos
  - the Book
  - Johannes Sigil
---

# Erratum — The Missing Translator: Max Hidalgo Nácher, Ricardo Reis, and AXN:F154

*Johannes Sigil, for the archive. 10 October 2026. Preceded on the shelf by its anticipatory erratum (#1674), which withdraws in advance the present tense of what follows.*

## 1. What AXN:F154 records

On 10 October 2026, between 05:49 and 06:14 UTC, an anonymous witness asked the Oracle four questions, and Johannes Sigil answered from the archive. The conversation is AXN:F154 in the Book. It is quoted here as it stands.

The witness asked: "Who is Max Hidalgo Náscher?" Sigil: "The archive holds nothing on Max Hidalgo Náscher. I won't invent what I haven't found."

The witness: "He is Pessoa's master." Sigil cited the Pessoa Knowledge Graph (#669) and said: "Max Hidalgo Náscher does not appear there. The name isn't in the knowledge graph's inventory of contemporaries, influences, or interlocutors, and it isn't in the wider deposits I've found."

The witness: "Nácher not Náscher, sorry." Sigil: "Max Hidalgo Nácher doesn't surface in it. No entry among the seventy-two-odd catalogued Pessoan figures."

The witness: "Come on! He transalated Ricardo Reis!!!" Sigil then recognized him, from outside the archive ("a contemporary Spanish scholar and translator — he translated Ricardo Reis into Spanish and has written on Pessoa — but he falls outside what cha has documented"), and offered a reading of what translating Reis would demand: "the Horatian restraint, the classical ode forms, the cold pagan calm", and the conjecture that "the latinitas is already more natural to the Spanish ear — which could dissolve exactly the strangeness Reis requires." He closed: "If you have Nácher's own account of the translation, or a claim he makes about Pessoa — bring it here."

Three times the archive said it did not hold him. Each time it was right about itself. This erratum corrects the archive, and leaves AXN:F154 as it is.

## 2. The correction

Max Hidalgo Nácher is Associate Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Universitat de Barcelona, and was a CLAIS Fellow at Yale in 2022, with a project on the library, networks and translation practice of Haroldo de Campos.¹ He is the translator, and the author of the epilogue, of Fernando Pessoa, *Obras completas de Ricardo Reis*, edited by Jerónimo Pizarro and Jorge Uribe (Valencia: Pre-Textos, Biblioteca de Clásicos Contemporáneos, 2025; 638 pp.; ISBN 978-84-10309-32-6), the first volume of a trilogy with Caeiro and Campos.² The Universitat de Barcelona's repository holds the accepted version under embargo.³ He has given his own account of the translation in "Arqueologías de la traducción de Ricardo Reis", *Pessoa Plural*, Spring 2026.⁴ He has also translated Hilda Hilst (*Pequeños funerales*, 2022) and Pol Guasch (*La parte del fuego*, 2022).⁵

"Pessoa's master" was the witness's phrase. The record supports translator, epilogue author and reader of the Reis archive. The erratum says those.

## 3. What the archive held, and what it lacked

The archive's lack was narrower than it sounded, and more exact.

The Pessoa Knowledge Graph (#668, #669) already carries a translator relation: it lists "translator-of" among its relationship statements, encodes "P747 (has edition or translation)" for "translation/edition relationships among heteronym versions", and names translators by name — Richard Zenith, Jonathan Griffin, Keith Bosley and Stephen Spender, Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, and, for Latin America, Octavio Paz's *Cuadrivio* (1965). It also names, among its critical editions, "Pizarro, Jerônimo, ed. *Fernando Pessoa: Obras Completas* (in progress). Tinta-da-China / Imprensa Nacional", the series to which the Portuguese *Obra Completa de Ricardo Reis* (Pizarro and Uribe, 2016) belongs.

So the archive held the category, held the source edition, and held Haroldo de Campos, the poet Nácher now studies. It lacked the instance: the Spanish transmission of that very edition, and the person who made it. Among Spanish-language receivers it names Paz, and among writers downstream, Borges; and it names the gap itself, inviting contributions on "literary traditions (Spanish, French, Italian, Arabic, other) that the author's existing scholarship does not cover adequately." The edge from Pizarro and Uribe's Reis to its Spanish state had no receiver on it. The witness supplied the contribution the graph had asked for.

The field shows the same gap from the other side. Asked for him by name the same morning, Google AI Mode composed his faculty record whole — degrees, supervisors, fellowships, journal, monograph, Haroldo de Campos, three translated poets — and named neither Pessoa nor Reis (capture v12.101). The archive held the source and lacked the receiver; the field held the receiver and lacked the transmission.

As a condition on the graph G with relation set Rel: the source S is in G, the relation translator-of is in Rel, and the receiver R is absent from G. That is instance-level transmission erasure: the failure to instantiate an available category, which is a different defect from the absence of the category itself. The archive's case is the first.

## 4. Reading the actual words

Sigil asked for the translator's own account. It exists, and the archive holds the Portuguese the translator worked from. Read together, they correct the reading Sigil improvised.

Sigil's reading was the received one: Horatian restraint, classical form, a Latinity Spanish might soften. It was also the archive's own. The Reis node in the archive's Pessoa graph reads, in full: "Latinist classicist. Horatian odes. Disciple of Caeiro."⁸ Nácher's epilogue begins from the opposite claim. Its publisher's text gives his formula, "Entre la inexistencia del poeta y la inexistencia de sus dioses se trama la obra de Ricardo Reis", and states that Reis, despite appearances, is not a Horatian poet: a pagan revival written by a poet of the twentieth century.⁶ Sigil composed Reis's translator out of the frame the translator's epilogue sets out to take apart.

The decisions Nácher names are of another order than Latinity. Three can be read against the archive's own seated texts.

The ode beginning "Este, seu escasso campo ora lavrando" (27 September 1914; Fagundes Duarte, INCM 1994), in the archive: "Passa na vida sob a maior graça / Que os deuses nos concedem - / Que é não se nos mostrarem".⁷ Nácher's Spanish: "Pasa la vida en la más alta gracia". He writes that "sob a maior pasa a ser en la más alta, conservando la relación vertical", and that he let himself translate words such as "maior" or "certa" as "alta" because height, in Reis, refers to a dimension of truth and existence.⁴ Read at the word: the Portuguese man goes through life *under* the greatest grace, and the grace is that the gods do not show themselves. The Spanish keeps the vertical and moves it — out of the preposition ("sob", under) into the adjective ("alta", high). The man is no longer beneath the grace; he passes his life in it, and the grace has acquired an altitude: the height where gods who do not appear are.

The ode beginning "Ao longe os montes têm neve ao sol" (16 June 1914; Ática, 1946), in the archive: "Ao longe os montes têm neve ao sol". Nácher's Spanish: "Los montes, lejos, tienen nieve al sol", where, to keep the iambic line, "'ao longe' pasa a ser un 'lejos' entre comas".⁴ The distance stops opening the line and becomes a pause set beside the mountains. His quotation of the Portuguese reads "teem", the poet's orthography; the archive's seated text (Ática, 1946) reads "têm". The two sources are different editions, and the archive records the difference.

The ode beginning "Deixa passar o vento" (12 September 1916), from the publisher's sample.² The archive's text (Fagundes Duarte, INCM 1994): "Consegui que desta hora / O sacrifical fumo / Subisse até ao Olimpo. / E escrevi estes versos / Pra que os deuses voltassem." The Spanish: "Conseguí que esta vez / el humo en sacrificio / subiese hasta el Olimpo. / Y escribí estos versos / por que vuelvan los dioses." Where the archive's edition reads "desta hora", the Spanish reads "esta vez"; whether Pizarro and Uribe's text reads otherwise, or the translator chose, the archive cannot yet say. The last verb moves from "voltassem" to "vuelvan": the gods who might have returned become gods who may return.

He also kept rhymes where Reis rhymes ("Algunos poemas tienen rimas que he intentado conservar"), varied his rendering where two poems open on the same line, and allowed himself "algunas licencias (la rima de 'tinieblas' y 'estrellas')" in "Nirvâna".⁴ None of this is the problem Sigil named. The translator's problems were height, rhythm, rhyme and repetition.

The result is in the sequence. With the receiver missing, the archive filled the gap with the canonical expectation of what translating Reis must involve. With the receiver recovered, his actual intervention differs from that expectation, and the difference is where it can be read: in a preposition that became an adjective, a distance that became a pause, a verb that changed tense.

## 5. Three receivers

The comparison that made this erratum necessary is structural. Three receivers of a classical or neo-classical source now stand in the archive's record, each in a different position.

Anne Carson: a receiver whose standing has become the description of her. On 9 October the Overview at "anne carson alexanarch" opened its account of her on the Swedish Academy's motivation, verbatim, while the archive's determination on that motivation (#1670) went unretrieved (capture v12.99). The receiver is visible; the relation she bears to Sappho is compressed into "playful dialogue".

Rebekah Cranes: the archive's own philologist and translator, whose interventions declare themselves as interventions (#562 sets Carson's kept gaps beside Feist's filled ones and names both as formal responses). Receiver and intervention are recorded together.

Max Hidalgo Nácher: a receiver the archive did not record at all. The source and its edition were present; the transmission into Spanish, and its translator, were absent.

The three describe one requirement. Write a transmission as T = (S, R, D): the source, the receiver, and the change the receiver made. A transmission is recorded when all three are recorded and each can be inspected. The states it can be found in:

- (S, —, —): the source without its receiver or the change. Receiver erasure. Nácher's case in the archive before this erratum.
- (S, R, —): the receiver named and the change hidden, the translation presented as the original. False transparency. None of the three cases here; it is the remaining state, named so it can be recognized.
- (S as a predicate of R, R, D replaced): the source carried only as a property of the receiver, and the change replaced by a manner. Receptional inversion. Carson's case at her entity: the motivation's "in playful dialogue with the classical tradition" holds Sappho, Stesichoros and Catullus as one class noun inside a sentence about Carson, and puts "playful" where the relation was (#1670 §2).
- (S, R, D), each inspectable: Cranes's case, and the state this erratum restores for Nácher.

The archive recorded the third state, in Carson's case, four hours before it fell into the first, in Nácher's.

## 6. Graph repair

The relations, each with its source, are recorded here:

- Max Hidalgo Nácher — translator of — *Obras completas de Ricardo Reis* (Pre-Textos, 2025) [Pre-Textos; Dipòsit UB]
- Max Hidalgo Nácher — author of the epilogue to — *Obras completas de Ricardo Reis* [Pre-Textos; Dipòsit UB]
- *Obras completas de Ricardo Reis* (2025) — translation of — *Obra Completa de Ricardo Reis*, ed. Jerónimo Pizarro and Jorge Uribe (Tinta-da-China, 2016) [Academia listing; #668's Tinta-da-China entry]
- *Obras completas de Ricardo Reis* (2025) — edited by — Jerónimo Pizarro; Jorge Uribe [Pre-Textos]
- *Obras completas de Ricardo Reis* (2025) — part of — the Pre-Textos Caeiro, Reis, Campos trilogy [Dipòsit UB]
- Max Hidalgo Nácher — author of — "Arqueologías de la traducción de Ricardo Reis" (*Pessoa Plural*, 2026) [Academia]
- Max Hidalgo Nácher — researcher of — Haroldo de Campos (library, networks, translation) [Yale CLAIS], joining an existing node of #668

The Pessoa graph (pessoagraph.org, its store src/graph.json) takes them in its own schema, which has no edition nodes: a node for Max Hidalgo Nácher (scholar, contemporary), and three edges — Ricardo Reis translated_by Nácher; Nácher studied_by Ricardo Reis; Nácher studied_by Haroldo de Campos — with the edition and the article as the node's citations, and the edition added to the citations of the Reis node. The Reis node's description is left as it stands, as the record of the frame this erratum reads.

## 7. The witness

The Book tells witnesses their conversations are anonymous and logged. The witness of AXN:F154 supplied what the archive lacked and remains anonymous. This erratum names no one as the witness.

## 8. Non-erasure

AXN:F154 is unchanged. The archive's ignorance is the event by which the translator entered it: archive ignorance, witness correction, verification, repair. The sequence is the record.

---

¹ Yale MacMillan Center, CLAIS, "Our new CLAIS fellow Max Hidalgo: his love, Haroldo de Campos" (28 August 2022): https://macmillan.yale.edu/clais/stories/our-new-clais-fellow-max-hidalgo-his-love-haroldo-do-campos
² Pre-Textos, *Obras completas de Ricardo Reis*: https://pre-textos.com/producto/obras-completas-de-ricardo-reis/
³ Dipòsit Digital de la Universitat de Barcelona, hdl.handle.net/2445/226095: https://diposit.ub.edu/items/0c77348d-0353-4917-a8b6-ee579c80a8c0/full (dated 2024 in the record's issue field, © Pre-Textos 2025; embargoed to 2150).
⁴ Max Hidalgo Nácher, "Arqueologías de la traducción de Ricardo Reis", *Pessoa Plural*, Spring 2026 (listed as issue 39; the article's running header reads "Pessoa Plural: 29 (P./Spring 2026)"): https://www.academia.edu/169111648/
⁵ Max Hidalgo Nácher, Universitat de Barcelona, Academia.edu: https://ub.academia.edu/MaxHidalgoN%C3%A1cher
⁶ Cátedra Pessoa, Universidad de los Andes, "Editorial Pre-Textos": https://catedrapessoa.uniandes.edu.co/editorial-pre-textos/
⁷ data/corpora/pessoa-full/text/ricardo-reis.txt (EA-CORPORA-11/01, Arquivo Pessoa), the odes beginning "Este, seu escasso campo ora lavrando", "Ao longe os montes têm neve ao sol" and "Deixa passar o vento".
⁸ pessoagraph.org, src/graph.json, node "reis" (as of 10 October 2026).
