4 - Translations and Collaborations

Summary

Defending ‘place’, Tomlinson's career has yet been an exercise in the creative effects of cultural hybridization. In the introduction to Renga, Octavio Paz observes that

the poets of the English language … – particularly Eliot and Pound – have shown that translation is a process indistinguishable from poetic creation. Our century is the century of translations. Not only of texts but of customs, religions, dances, erotic and culinary arts, fashions, and, in short, all kinds of usages and practices, from the Finnish sauna to yoga exercises. (Ren. 19)

A considerable body of Tomlinson's work consists of translations, from poets as diverse in nationality and method as Apollinaire, Leopardi, Gozzano, Paz, Piccolo, Vallejo, Machado, Tyutchev, Khodase´vich, Bertolucci, and Ungaretti. The good fortune of encountering an excellent French teacher at school meant that Tomlinson was exposed early to the French poetry of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Verlaine. This awakened a sense of the need to approach the English language from a distance, a need partly met by the discovery of American poets. Tomlinson has also participated with Paz in two multi-lingual co-authored projects, the neglected classic Renga (composed 1969) and Airborn/Hijos del Aire (1981).

Tomlinson has been a major figure behind the strong interest in the UK since the 1960s in poetry in translation. In 1980 Tomlinson edited the Oxford Book of English Verse in Translation. The history of English poetry, he argues there, must no longer exclude the history of translated poetry. One could cite, for instance, Pope's translation of Homer or Shelley's work with Goethe and Dante. Equally important is the effect which engagement with foreign writers has had upon major writers in English. Chaucer, for instance, initiates a great deal of English literature and vocabulary through effects of translation and adaptation from French and Italian. Dryden, practising translation as an escape from being a court poet and playwright, remade himself through the work of Lucretius. Tomlinson also cites Shakespeare's translations of Ovid (The Tempest being full of Ovidian echoes). In Tomlinson's own case, the Italian poet Ungaretti, whom he was later to translate, gave him his first lessons in the use of the short line as a principle of composition, prior even to the discovery of Williams (MS 40). The latter's three-ply linewas in turn adapted to translate Antonio Machado (SA 16).