Edwin Morgan: Our Man in Glasgow

Edwin Morgan is a major figure in twentieth century Scottish literature. As Scotland’s Makar, or National Poet, he is held in both respect and affection for a poetic approach that can combine forthright social comment with playfully experimental work in a wide range of forms and genres. His remarkable work as a translator has helped Scot- land engage with both traditional and avant-garde work in many languages, particu- larly those of Eastern Europe. Keywords: Language; devolution; translation; Hungarian poetry; Attila József; Sándor Weöres.

Edwin Morgan hardly needs an introduction for the poetry-reading audience. Apart from war service in the Middle East, he has never left his native Glasgow, which keeps serving as the primary source of inspiration for his urban social lyric. Yet at the same time, his spirit freely roams across virtual realities, but without ever straying into the visionary. His restless imagination translates into a practically endless variety of genres and styles: he produces concrete poems and other experimental works, and is equally at home in conventional forms such as the sonnet (as in Sonnets from Scotland, 1984) or the dramatic monologue (as in Demon, 1999). In Morgan, everything can speak and will speak (even stones or gasometers) and everything has a mes- sage to give. His interest in coding, decoding and disclosing messages lends an urgent, almost impatient, quality to his writing. To satisfy this interest, he employs countless voices and speakers (both real and imaginary, human and extra-terrestrial, animate and inanimate) in sev- eral languages and a choice of dialects. If anything, his trademark is variety: he regards art, history, culture, and different forms of exis- tence as inestimable sources of biodiversity. Though he started writing in the 1940s and 1950s, publishing among other books The Vision of Cathkin Braes (1952) and The Cape of Good Hope (1955), his writing career took off during the 1960s Glasgow Renaissance with Emergent Poems (1967), The Second Life (1968) and Instamatic Poems (1972). The main influences on his work include Avant-gardism; the Russian version of Futurism combined with the American type of Modernism; Republicanism; Socialism; and of course the spirit of the Space Age. MacGillivray and Gifford have suggested that science fiction has a “symbolic significance”1 in

1 See Gifford, Douglas et al (eds). 2002. Scottish Literature. Edinburgh: EUP. 775. 36 Edwin Morgan

Morgan’s poetry that is similar to Edwin Muir’s use of Christian my- thology. However, while the nuclear holocaust, for instance, does appear as a background in some of Morgan’s poems, the prospect of large-scale self-extinction rarely features as a distinct reality that might threaten us, as in Muir. Morgan’s work is a summing up of a variety of strands in Scottish culture and at the same time is eagerly forward-looking. His interest in various dimensions of existence is coupled with a child-like curiosity – no wonder he found Hungarian poet Sándor Weöres, whom he extensively translated into English, a twin spirit. He is probably the most versatile poet of his generation: as such, the character of Morgan’s work is difficult, if not impossible, to pin down. No wonder, again, that a major critical summary of his work has yet to be written. The interview that follows was conducted in appreciation of Morgan’s outstanding work as a translator of foreign poetry, and the conversation has a particular Hungarian slant to it. He has maintained a special relationship with Hungarian, Russian and Italian literature through his translations. Translation is a sort of playing-field for the extrovert mind: it is a spiritual reality, a virtual adventure, perhaps a useful sublimation of emigration, and presumably a version of what Kenneth White has called “intellectual nomadism”. It may not reach out as far as Saturn, but certainly crosses political and linguistic bor- ders. Morgan’s translations extend across half a century and they include: Beowulf (1952), Poems from Eugenio Montale (1959), Sovpoems (1961), Sándor Weöres: Selected Poems (1970), Wi the Haill Voice: 25 Poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky (1972), Fifty Renais- sance Love Poems (1975), Rites of Passage (1976), Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1992), Sweeping Out the Dark (1994), and Racine’s Phaedra (2000). His Collected Translations was published in 1996 and Attila József: Sixty Poems appeared in 2001 from Mariscat Press. His more recent translations include Gilgamesh and Tales from Baron Munchausen (2005). I visited Edwin Morgan in his Glasgow apartment in the autumn of 2000. The interview was first published in Poetry Review 91(3), Autumn 2001.