Michael Lee Rattigan

Michael Lee Rattigan was born in Croydon, Surrey of Irish and Anglo-Indian parentage. He took a degree in English and American literature 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 and work he lived and taught in Cancun, Mexico and Palma de Mallorca, Spain, where he began to translate the poems of Fernando Pessoa's heteronym, Alberto Caeiro. During his early years as a teacher, he continued translating the poems of Alberto Caeiro, helped along by the advice of the American-Portuguese writer and translator Richard Zenith. Zenith was later able to add a poem of the heteronym Caeiro, which was discovered pencilled on the flyleaf of a book in Pessoa's personal library in Lisbon. This poem was appended to Rattigan's complete translation of Pessoa's Caeiro poems, which was published by Rufus Books in 2007.

During his time in Mexico, Rattigan was strongly drawn to the work of Octavio Paz, Jaime Sabines, Juan Rulfo, and Rosario Castellanos, as well as to the work of other writers such as Pablo Neruda and Luis Cernuda. The discovery of César Vallejo's works quickened his interest in translating Vallejo's unpublished prose and poetry. This later came to fruition in his collaboration with the scholar Joseph Mulligan and the translation of several articles and letters that went into Selected Works of César Vallejo published by Wesleyan University Press in 2015. He has since been working on the collection Trilce and aims to complete a fresh translation with the poet and translator Mario Domínguez Parra in the near future.        

His first collection, a chapbook of poems, Nature Notes: Fragments for an Elegy, was published in 2006 while living in Godstone, Surrey. A full-length collection, Liminal, was later published in 2012, again through Rufus Books. The influence of poets of crucial importance to Rattigan can be identified in subtle and more overt ways throughout this collection: Gerard Manley Hopkins in "Minion;" Arthur Rimbaud in "O Clear Night;" and the tutelary influence of both D.H. Lawrence and Ted Hughes can be felt in "Tryst or Tarantula" and "Nocturne," both of which were written in Mexico in 2000, forming the earliest poems in the collection. Octavio Paz's poem "Solo for two voices" vitally impinges on "Unshadowed," and a translation of the poem "Thanatos" by the Guatemalan poet Alan Mills, quickens another poem of the same name. The following lines from the poem "Autre" were composed by Rattigan in a bookshop in Budapest, a direct response to the poetry of János Pilinszky: "Brilliance / of undiscerning sun— / verbal crater and gaping / presence, while shadowed / bodies drift beyond the page." Various paintings and sayings of his then three-year-old niece, Meadow Carr, also engendered a clutch of poems in the collection.

Rattigan read from Liminal at the Poetry Café in November 2012 and also at Senate House, The University of London in May of the following year.

Rattigan has also supported at readings for The Black Herald press, reading with the poets Paul Stubbs and Heller Levinson to launch the fifth issue of The Black Herald Literary Magazine in 2015. With the release of Hiraeth toward the end of 2016, he was invited by Poets Live to read from the collection, once more at the Berkeley Bookstore in Paris (VIDEO). This collection is bi-lingual, translated into French by Blandine Longre.

Rattigan was the recipient of a grant from the Society of Authors in 2017.