MICHAEL LEE RATTIGAN (UK/Ireland)

Michael Lee Rattigan was born in Croydon, England of Irish and Anglo-Indian parentage. After studying at The John Fisher and Whitgift schools in Surrey, he took a literature degree at The University of Kent. He went on to complete postgraduate studies at Trinity College Dublin where he published his first poems and later at the University of London. Between years of study he lived and taught in Cancun, Mexico, and Palma de Mallorca, Spain, where he began translating the poems of Fernando Pessoa's heteronym, Alberto Caeiro.

Now based in Caterham, he is currently working on various translations including revisions of Fernando Pessoa's heteronym Alberto Caeiro and works from Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, some of which have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Asymptote Magazine, The Fiend Journal, The Black Herald Magazine, and The Smelting Process. Original poems have appeared in OtherPoetry, And/Or Magazine, Phati'tude Literary Magazine, Saltwater Press, and The Black Herald Magazine, some of which will be included in a full-length collection, Between Places, upcoming with rufus books in 2012.

---

Alberto Caeiro: The Complete Poems / Poesia Completo

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.

Publisher's Note:
A new Alberto Caeiro poem was discovered penciled on the flyleaf of a book in Pessoa's personal library, dating probably from around 1920. Richard Zenith first brought this discovery to Michael Lee Rattigan's attention on 22 June 2010 and the poem was subsequently translated on 20 August 2010. It was published in leaflet form by rufus books on 2 September 2010 and is now available gratis as an insert to the book within the 'Detached Poems' segment, ensuring that the collection remains truly complete. (For anyone who purchased a copy of this book prior to 2 September 2010, the leaflet can be obtained free of charge. Please email for further details.)

---

---

---