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. Having returned to Croydon, he is currently revising a full-length collection of his own poems and has finished work translating the first complete collection of Alberto Caeiro into English, to be published in a bilingual edition in the autumn of 2007.

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.