Raw Material is a collection of ‘adaptations’ in the spirit of Adaptations (2006).
Derek Mahon’s previous translation work includes plays by Sophocles, Euripides, Racine and Rostand; Words in the Air (Gallery Books, 1998), a selection of poems by Philippe Jaccottet; Birds (Gallery, 2002), a version of Oiseaux by Saint-John Perse, and Adaptations (Gallery, 2006), comprising a wide range of European poets ancient and modern.
These new adaptations include work based on Propertius, the principal T’ang poets, Rimbaud, Jorge Guillén and the fictitious ‘Gopal Singh’. Also represented here, in a striking new departure, are the Haitian poet Jean-F. Brière, and an African group translated from French. Some of these versions are quite literal; others try only to ‘recreate the spirit’ of their originals.
An extension of Adaptations (The Gallery Press, 2006), the present volume adds new versions of Propertius and the principal T’ang poets, previously published, and of Rimbaud and Guillén, published here for the first time, and includes, as an appendix, a sequence ‘translated’ from the Hindi of Gopal Singh, my own invention. These owe so much to real Indian poems that they must be considered unoriginal work and so qualify for inclusion. An important school of thought (Nabokov and Ted Hughes for example) has always insisted on literal translation. Hughes wrote (Modern Poetry in Translation No.1, 1965): ‘As soon as devices extraneous to the original are employed for the purpose of recreating its “spirit”, the value of the whole enterprise is called in question.’ Better, he says, ‘the very oddity and struggling dumbness of a word for word version.’ My own versions, looking to recreate the spirit and employing some extraneous devices, belong in another category, that of poems adapted from their originals, relying for instance on the scholarly work of A. C. Graham for the T’ang poems, and that of Lucy Rosenstein for the Indian ones, to make something not only respectable but also readable, and perhaps re-readable, in a different language. — Author's Note, Raw Material
Mahon is an outstanding analyst of the linguistic — Aingel Clare, The Guardian
A translation by Mahon is an exciting event . . . Mahon’s love of the French 19th century is well established, but there are numerous welcome surprises in the poets assembled here, including a section from the Chinese, some Pushkin, Ibsen and Quevedo, and a scattering of Congolese poets. . . Mahon revisits and renews the concerns of a lifetime, . . . ‘Antarctica’ gives its name to a much-anthologised Mahon villanelle, and the translation here of a Neruda poem on the icy continent is one of the highlights of Raw Material. (His) last collection of his own work was title An Autumn Wind, but even with this Antarctic chill the temperature of Raw Material is closer to an Indian summer.
— Aingeal Clare, The Guardian
Year Published: 2011
Details: 80pp
ISBN PBK: 978 1 85235 523 4
ISBN HBK: 978 1 85235 524 1
Derek Mahon’s previous translation work includes plays by Sophocles, Euripides, Racine and Rostand; Words in the Air (Gallery Books, 1998), a selection of poems by Philippe Jaccottet; Birds (Gallery, 2002), a version of Oiseaux by Saint-John Perse, and Adaptations (Gallery, 2006), comprising a wide range of European poets ancient and modern.
These new adaptations include work based on Propertius, the principal T’ang poets, Rimbaud, Jorge Guillén and the fictitious ‘Gopal Singh’. Also represented here, in a striking new departure, are the Haitian poet Jean-F. Brière, and an African group translated from French. Some of these versions are quite literal; others try only to ‘recreate the spirit’ of their originals.