Simon West

In the year leading up to his death, the poet Robert Adamson (1943-2022) gathered together a selection of his work that focused on one of his enduring passions: the birds and fish of the Hawkesbury River, beside which Adamson lived much of his life. Adamson was best known for exploring this passion in poetry, but the pieces collected in this new book are works of prose and include selections from Adamson’s autobiography Inside Out (2004), and from his late collection, Net Needle (2015). They also include material that is likely to be less familiar to readers, pieces published in the magazine Fishing World, and extracts from a journal Adamson kept between 2015 and 2018 titled ‘The Spinoza Journal’.

Too often poetry is valued as if it were prose, exclusively by virtue of its subject matter. Such discussions miss the poetry itself, which my wife calls ‘the speech that brings us to silence’, a kind of accuracy beggaring what we say about it. Simon West is a poet who understands this distinction. His essays collected in Dear Muses? (2019) explore ‘the uneasy way my allegiances lie with my language as much as they do with the places in which I dwell’. He knows how complicated such terms as language and place must be, so his landscapes – particularly riverine Victoria and Italy – never seem limitations. ‘The task of the poet is to scrutinize the actual world.’ I read him for the pleasures of both world and word.

In 1956, when this fourth volume of his collected prose begins, W.H. Auden (1907–73) was forty-nine and widely recognised as one of the most important English-language poets. He had been in the United States for seventeen years, having left, or, as some back home had seen it, abandoned England shortly before the outbreak of World War II; and he had been an American citizen since 1946. To me, he always remained an English poet, and the lexical flourishes such as ‘dives’ and ‘congress’ found in the second half of his oeuvre do little to hide a European sensibility.

In a 1995 interview for the Paris Review, Ted Hughes was asked if the 1960s boom in translated poetry in the United Kingdom, particularly with series such as the Penguin Modern European Poets, had had an effect on poetry written in English. ‘Has it modified the British tradition!’ he replied. ‘Everything is now completely open, every approach, with infinite possibilities. Obviously the British tradition still exists as a staple of certain historically hard-earned qualities if anybody is still there who knows how to inherit them. Raleigh’s qualities haven’t become irrelevant. When I read Primo Levi’s verse I am reminded of Raleigh. But for young British poets, it’s no longer the only tradition, no longer a tradition closed in on itself and defensive.’

Why does translation matter? Or does it? And who should care to know? The answers are more interesting than we might at first think. The filming of a novel, and a multinational company’s diverse advertising strategy for the one product in different countries, involve issues of translation just as much as an English version of a sonnet by Petrarch. These days, translation has outgrown its status as an illegitimate child of literature, to become a way of discussing any exchange between languages and cultures, and appropriately so, given that the word itself derives from the Latin translatio, which simply means ‘carried across’.