Edwin Morgan: Collected Translations

There is something profligate in the range and quality of Morgan's work as a translator. He does the labour of ten writers, and with blithe sprezzatura, partly at least because his own work nourishes itself from the poetry of other lands and ages. It is part of the necessary mechanism that Morgan, as a Scot, employs to define his place as a European, to escape the tonal and cultural limitations which England can imply.    Collected Translations includes six decades of work. Readers will find here Morgan's celebrated Mayakovsky done into Scots, his Voznesensky,Pasternak and Vinokurov. There are the Italians and the French—Leopardi,Quasimodo, Montale, Guillevic, Provert and Michaux; and there is Heine, andLorca, Cernuda and Brecht and Enzensberger and Braga. And much, much more.