Texts for Translation 2005:
  Edwin Morgan

The old story of the tower of Babel tries to assure us that the variety of languages is a sort of curse, a punishment for human pride and manic self-assertiveness. Exasperated international travellers may well fell inclined to agree. But it is possible to see it in the very opposite light: the glory of difference, the almost infinite subtlety of the nuances of human expression, saying things differently even when trying not to.

Translation. Particularly of poetry, stretches the mind in wonderful ways, and its very ‘impossibility’ (if you are thinking of one-to-one correspondence) is the golden apple held out to the runner. A language, if it can be translated, is in essence universal, but it is also intensely native and local, and its preservation has often been a rallying-call for the soul of a people, just as its attempted suppression can be brutal and viscous beyond the bounds of linguistics.

Michael Kerins has waved his magnet to gather together more than forty languages in this book, where two short poems have been translated from English, not by professional translators but by people using their mother tongue to react to the fairly direct meaning and thrust of the poems. An irony lies behind the exercise, in that the ‘English’ originals were written by a young Russian, whose bilingualism sets the ball rolling on its amazing course, from Arabic and Amharic to Urdu and Ukrainian, taking in Maltese and Laori by the way and including Gaelic, Scots and Glaswegian. The fact that these translations exist at all is a tribute to the strange cohesiveness-in-diversity of human experience and human speech. Without out being mystical, the mother of all mother-tongues seems to be brooding with a kind of heavy benevolence in the background, never seen, but senses, lolling and breathing and murmuring, shaking an ancient bangle.

Edwin Morgan

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