Released:
5 September 2007

Cover Graphics:
Ágnes Cserháti with photographs by Mark Knight

Printing:
Gaspereau Press, Kentville, Nova Scotia | jacket cover: processed colour on Domtar Natural | inside cover: letterpress on Strathmore Komono Red | inside: offset on Zephyr Antique Book Laid | composed in Lisboa Sans OSF Light | Smyth-sewn and perfect bound

Table of Contents | Poems | Author Page

With these translations into English of the poems of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym Alberto Caeiro, Michael Lee Rattigan matches the simple directness, naturalness, and at times deliberate naivety of the original. The shepherd’s distinct philosophy is faithfully rendered in these subtly re-worked poems that preserve the form of unrhymed free verse and the concision of the Portuguese language. The balance between anticipation and lived reality in the moment – a key note to the poetry written in the heteronym – is expressed with great tenderness and clarity. Maintained in Rattigan’s careful and sensitive translations, the assertion of rightness is given a characteristic kind of repetition as if the poet were pointing out basic fact in the most common sense. Any effort to over-think this sensitivity toward the originality of things is brushed off with stone-cold directness. The “shocking reality” that everything in nature is individual and distinct runs through every one of the poems. Perhaps the clearest exposition of the approach to life and nature expressed in the heteronym, the “joy” experienced in this perception is given dramatic power: “To exist is enough to be complete”.

Thomas Crosse, a lesser-known English heteronym of Pessoa’s, was entrusted the task of gathering the poems of Caeiro into one. To our benefit, capturing Caeiro’s unique voice with an immediacy that is true to the original, Michael Lee Rattigan’s UK publication has at last successfully carried out Crosse’s task.