Here, in Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari's splendid new
translations, are the complete poems of Alberto Caeiro, the imaginary
"heteronym" coterie created by Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese modernist
master. Pessoa conceived Caeiro around 1914 and may have named him
loosely after his friend, the poet Mário de Sa-Cárrneiro. What followed
was a collection of some of Fernando Pessoa's greatest poems, grouped
under the titles The Keeper of Sheep, The Shepherd in Love, and
Uncollected Poems. This imaginary author was a shepherd who spent most
of his life in the countryside, had almost no education, and was
ignorant of most literature; yet he (Pessoa) wrote some of the most
beautiful and profound poems in Portuguese literature. This edition of
The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro is based on the magnificent
Portuguese Tinta-da-China edition, published in Lisbon in 2016, and
contains an illuminating introduction by the Portuguese editors Jerónimo
Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari, some facsimiles of the original Portuguese
texts, and prose excerpts about Caeiro and his work written by Fernando
Pessoa well as his other heteronyms Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis,
and other fictitious authors such as Antonio Mora and I. I. Crosse.