Poetry Pleiade
2 total works
There is something profligate in the range and quality of Morgan's work as a translator. He does the labour of ten writers, and with blithe sprezzatura, partly at least because his own work nourishes itself from the poetry of other lands and ages. It is part of the necessary mechanism that Morgan, as a Scot, employs to define his place as a European, to escape the tonal and cultural limitations which England can imply. "Collected Translations" includes six decades of work. Readers will find here Morgan's celebrated Mayakovsky done into Scots, his Voznesensky, Pasternak and Vinokurov. There are the Italians and the FrenchLeopardi, Quasimodo, Montale, Guillevic, Provert and Michaux; and there is Heine, andLorca, Cernuda and Brecht and Enzensberger and Braga. And much, much more."
To catch "in full sight" is Edwin Morgan's ambition. That fullness he achieves in lyric epiphanies, in the cumulative focuses and refocuses of sequences, in the reification of words in concrete poems, in the rhythms of sound poems. He hears and transcribes voices. Even the sonnet form remains an experiment for the poet questing for vision and unwilling to rest on rules. This volume includes Edwin Morgan's "Poems of Thirty Years" (1982) and "Themes on a Variation" (1988), together with some 50 uncollected poems from 1939 to 1982.