The Australian poet Les Murray makes life hard for those who wish to describe him. It isn’t only his work, which has been put out in some thirty books over a period of fifty years, and which, having won major literary prize after major literary prize, has made its author a perennial candidate for a Nobel. It is the man. In PR terms, Murray seems the antipode of Updikean dapperness, cold Coetzee intensity, Zadie Smith’s glamour. His author photographs, which appear to be snapshots, can best be described as ordinary. The bald man’s hat, the double chin, the plain t-shirt. A recent photograph, accompanying his New Selected Poems, shows him at a kitchen table, grandfatherly in his glasses. The artlessness is that of an autodidact. Murray has always written as his own man. Fashions, schools, even the occasional dictionary definition, he serenely flouts. To read him is to know him.
A high hill of photographed sun-shadow
coming up from reverie, the big head
has its eyes on a mid-line, the mouth
slightly open, to breathe or interrupt.
The face’s gentle skew to the left
is abetted, or caused, beneath the nose
by a Heidelberg scar, got in an accident.
The hair no longer meets across the head
and the back and sides are clipped ancestrally
Puritan-short. The chins are firm and deep
respectively. In point of freckling
and bare and shaven skin is just over
halfway between childhood ginger
and the nutmeg and plastic death-mottle
of great age. The large ears suggest more
of the soul than the other features:
(These lines are from his “Self-Portrait from a Photograph,” in Collected Poems.)
His is a singular way with words; Murray admits to interviewers that he is something of a “word freak.” His linguistic curiosity is immense, obsessive. Gnamma (an Aboriginal word for desert rock-holes wet with rainwater), the Anglo-Hindi kubberdaur (from the Hindi khabardaar meaning “look out!”), toradh (Irish Gaelic for “fruit” or “produce”), neb (Scots for “nose”), sadaka (“alms” in Turkish), the German Leutseligkeit (“affability”), rzeczpospolita (what Poland, in its red-tape documents, calls itself), halevai (a Yiddish exclamation): these are just a few of the many exotic words that Murray, over the years, has lavished on his poetry. “His genius,” reported The Australian, “is an ability to process the 1,025,000 words in his brain and select precisely the right one to follow the one that came before it.” The estimate is the reporter’s—an unfortunate piece of silliness in an otherwise serious article. The estimate—not something to consider, something only to gawp at—comes from old attitudes, still publishable in 2014, toward “freaks” like Murray.
Murray, as the same article notes, lives with high-functioning autism.
I discovered Les Murray in the early 2000s (a short while before my own high-functioning autism diagnosis). It happened in an English bookshop. The bookshop was in Kent, my home at the time. It was a large shop, bright with snazzy book covers, and superintended by a discreet staff. It welcomed browsers. Every now and then I came into the shop and thumbed its wares and pretended to have money. The pretense did me good. It taught me the prospective book buyer’s graces. In the poetry section one day, I was looking at the stock—short books written by long names like Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Wisława Szymborska—when a cover that bore the surprisingly modest name of Les Murray caught my eye. The familiarity of that “Les,” its ungentlemanliness, so seemingly out of place in a poetry section, appealed to me. And the book’s title was as intriguing as the author’s name was likable: Poems the Size of Photographs. I picked it up and read. And read. It was the first time I read a book from cover to cover while standing in the shop. It helped, of course, that the pages, compared to a novel’s or a biography’s, were fairly few, and many of the hundred-odd poems rather short. Short, occasionally, to the point of evoking haiku-like riddles:
This is the big arrival.
The zipper of your luggage
Growls valise round three sides
And you lift out the tin clothes.
Short or long, each of the poems had something to pique my interest. The word pictures were vivid and felt right: magpies wore “tailcoats,” which, at the faintest noise, broke “into wings”; headstones complete with crosses were the “marble chess of the dead”; in a house, “air [had] sides.” And Murray’s patent delight in language, his fascination with it, matched mine. He wrote like a man for whom language was something strange, and strangely beautiful. “Globe globe globe globe” is Murray mimicking a jellyfish. A soda bottle a little girl taps against her head, Murray informs the reader with onomatopoeic precision, sounded “boinc.” “Bocc” was the bottle’s response when it struck the side of a station wagon. A woman could simultaneously describe a cheese in Australian English and, with copious gesturing, in “body Italian.” And in the modern landscape of ever-present signs—airport signs, road signs, door signs, computer signs—the poet saw a “World language” of pictographs, a language that could be “written and read, even painted but not spoken.” He imagined its vocabulary:
Good is thumbs up, thumb and finger zipping lips
is confidential. Evil is three-cornered snake eyes.
…
Two animals in a book read Nature, two books.
Inside an animal, instinct. Rice in bowl with chopsticks denotes food. Figure 1 lying prone equals other.
Every pictograph would be findable, definable, in a “square-equals-diamond book,” a dictionary.
I wanted very much to buy Murray’s book. But I had no money. I had to wait. At my next birthday I came into a small sum, my age in pounds sterling, and spent it on the poems.
Without Murray’s poems, I might never have become a writer. At the time, so early in my adulthood, their oddness reassured. I could see myself in them. In London, my English had never been the English of my parents, siblings, or schoolmates; my sentences—oblique, wordy, allusive—had led to mockery, and the mockery had caused my voice to shrink. But Murray’s was sprawling; it held a hard-won ease with how its words behaved. If I had known then what I finally confirmed years later, that this poet’s voice, so beautiful and so skillful, was autistic, and that Murray was an autistic savant, I might have seen myself differently. I might have written my essays and my first novel and my own poetry years before they finally made their way into print. But nobody told me; and what was only a hunch, after being diagnosed myself, that Murray too had autism, remained only that. Happily, this hunch was enough to restore confidence in my own voice, to nourish it back up to size. My voice eventually grew as big as a book: a memoir of my autistic childhood.
Only while writing my second book—a survey of scientific ideas about the brain—did I learn why no doctor or researcher would have told me that this famous poet (and more than a poet, one of the English language’s great men of letters) was autistic. It wasn’t due to lack of candor or self-awareness on the poet’s part. As early as the 1970s Murray wrote, in a poem entitled “Portrait of the Autist as a New World Driver,” of belonging to the “loners, chart-freaks, bush encyclopaedists… we meet gravely as stiff princes, and swap fact” (a pity it was only collected thirty years later, and brought to my attention quite recently); in several more recent newspaper profiles, he described himself as a “high-performing Asperger” (a pity, too, I didn’t see these at the time). The reason, I discovered, was that most scientists thought autism inhospitable to creativity, especially the literary kind. Their attitudes were colored by having studied a very particular type of savant: those with a low or lowish IQ, nonverbal or mumbling. I pressed the scientists I met or wrote to. Had they really never heard of any autistic person with a gift for words? They had, I was told, and his name was Christopher. Christopher, in the photographs I saw, was coy and pasty, mustached and middle-aged, a Briton with brain damage, who spent his days turning the pages of his impressive collection of Teach Yourself books. Reading nearly around the clock he had taught himself, to varying extents, some twenty languages. And yet Christopher couldn’t write.
In the end, it was Murray’s following release, The Biplane Houses, that turned my hunch to certainty. By that time I had left Kent and its bookshop and was living in the south of France. I ordered my copy in a click of Internet: it arrived in a many-stamped airmail envelope—a small, slender, red and white book looking none the worse for the cross-channel journey. As I flipped through the poems, I read, in the form of a sonnet, not a declaration of love, but the author’s contemplation of his mind:
Asperges me hyssopo
the snatch of plainsong went,
Thou sprinklest me with hyssop
was the clerical intent,
not Asparagus with hiccups
and never autistic savant.
Asperger, mais. Asperg is me.
The coin took years to drop:
Lectures instead of chat. The want
of people skills. The need for Rules.
Never towing a line from the Ship of Fools.
The avoided eyes. Great memory.
Horror not seeming to perturb—
Hyssop can be a bitter herb.
I had read in who knows how many scientific papers that people with autism took up language—even twenty varieties—merely to release it as echoes. So I was thrilled to see Murray’s lines, full of wit and feeling and prowess, prove their theories wrong. They made me want to learn all about the man behind the pen. I went to my computer; I punched in the poet’s name and autism; the resulting webpages were many, well stocked, enlightening. The information had been there all along. But the reporters had pushed it to the margins. Each had written about Murray’s autism only briefly, sketchily, as something that didn’t fit. They had not thought to look any further, to look at the poet’s oeuvre or his life in another light. To learn this side of Murray’s story I had to piece it together by myself, click by click and link by link, following up every byte of every source that I could verify. Slowly, scattered facts took on the vivid colors of anecdote; interview digressions lost their blur. The developed picture of the poet’s early life—the many years his mind took to adjust to language—was as revealing as it was compelling.
Leslie Allan Murray was born in 1938 in Nabiac, a small bush town and inland port in dairy farming country, 175 miles northeast of Sydney. His ancestors, agricultural laborers, had sailed from the Southern Uplands of Scotland in the mid-nineteenth century, bringing with them their Presbyterian faith and Scots dialect: fraid for a “ghost,” elder for “udder.”
Les was an only child. From his first shriek, the baby’s senses overworked: his indigent parents’ weatherboard house frequently trembled with tantrums. Nothing but a warm bath in water heated on the boxwood-burning stove and then poured, crackling, into a galvanized washtub could soothe him.
The house was poky. There wasn’t room for homebodies. Life was in the main outdoors—on the outskirts of the house, the white of sheep, the black of hens, the green of paddocks. The little boy imitated the calls of willie wagtails and played with cows and crows. He rambled by himself the hilly hectares around the settlement, returning at dusk soaked as if in a cloudburst of perspiration.
Very early, he learned the alphabet from canned-food labels. He took at once to reading the few books around the home: the Aberdeen-Angus studbook, the Yates Seed Catalogue, the Alfa Laval cream separator manual, and all eight volumes of the 1924 edition of Cassell’s Book of Knowledge. The books and he became the best of friends. He slept with them every night out on the veranda.
There were no educational establishments for miles, so when Les was seven, school started going to him. The postman was the intermediary. The lessons by correspondence—in handwriting, grammar, and arithmetic—came every week, postmarked from Sydney, and the boy delighted in tracing pothooks, building phrases, and solving sums at a kitchen table surrounded by buckets and chips of wood.
Two years later, and three and a half miles away, a fifteen-pupil school opened. Les decided he could not go there empty-handed; he asked his mother for several sheaths of white kraft paper, and with a regularly resharpened pencil wrote a long essay about the Vikings (the information courtesy of volume eight of his encyclopedia). The helmeted berserkers, the swishing axes, the longboats: no historical detail was too small. He lost himself in the writing. After trekking off at dawn and arriving hours later, he read his work aloud to the class: both short- and long-winded. Les was lucky in his teacher. Just out of graduate school, the teacher hadn’t had enough experience to classify the boy as odd. Les’s essay was patiently listened to; its precocious author thanked. Then Les and the fourteen other pupils were told to open their textbooks to page one.
He was more or less left to his own devices and soon drifted away from class and sequestered himself in the school’s bookroom. With the exception of a few cousins, amiable and of similar age, he much preferred the company of books to other children. But even with the cousins Les wasn’t much of a talker. If he wasn’t talked to, he wouldn’t start. When the boys induced him to play with them, it was only by going along with his obsessions. His greatest was the war: he had been a child of the war, and though incomprehensible, war, he knew, meant something excitingly big and far away, a silencer of grown-ups, about which the wireless had gone on and on in quick, breathy voices. So the cousins agreed to play Germans. Along the rabbit-ridden creek they raced and leapt and hid. Les spoke to them in orders. He tried sounding German; it made sense to him that he should try. Compared to the other boys, he had always felt and seemed somewhat foreign.
His mother died when he was twelve. Her widower’s sobbing was incessant. It could be heard by the son, lying beneath several bedcovers, in the veranda. Les hadn’t known his father could make such sounds. He interrupted his learning to attempt to grieve too. But what came so naturally to his father mystified him: crying was something he couldn’t get the hang of. He grieved with his feet instead of his eyes, tramping them red, crisscrossing the valley until every fencepost hole, every patch of gravel, every spot, to a blade of grass, was part of him. So that whenever distress tightened his stomach and threatened tears, he closed his eyes and called up the texture of a pebble here, the color of the earth there, and journeyed mile after mile in his head until composure settled on him.
A year taller, he returned to school. It was a bigger school, farther away (he rode the town’s milk truck to its gates) with a bigger bookroom. The books soothed. And it helped that the room was not frequented by many children. His desire to keep to himself was as strong as at primary school. When the bookroom closed for lunch, he waited out the break, impatiently. With his back to a playground wall, shyness and anxiety pinning him there, he surveilled the kicking, skipping shadows as they passed.
Taree High, where Les boarded during the week, was rougher. Tall and large for sixteen, he was an easy target of mockery. To every fashion, every norm of appearance, the country boy was oblivious: he stood out from the students’ well-laundered clothes and up-to-the-minute hairdos as a bumpkin. Class toughs and teases regularly turned on him, harassed him, pelted him with taunts. He could hardly open his mouth without being laughed at; he spoke like a walking encyclopedia, pedantic. He used—sometimes, misused—long, obscure words: once threatening to “transubstantiate” a taunter through a wall.
Most of the teachers didn’t turn a hair to help. But they were dazzled by the sweep and precision of Les’s knowledge, by the nonchalance with which a mention of, say, the pre-Columbians in an art lesson might cause him to hold forth on the Aztecs, Zapotecs, Toltecs, and Totonacs. And Mr. McLaughlin, the English teacher, a mild school counselor of limitless patience, was understanding. To teach Les was to be assured of an eager hearing. He was a quick learner. It was Mr. McLaughlin who introduced Les to poetry. Eliot. Hopkins. Les was entranced by Gerard Manley Hopkins’s words, tried them out on his tongue. For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow. He read on. Repeated. With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim. He knew this and, before long, each of his teacher’s other set poems by heart. Praise Him. He dreamed of one day composing his own verse.
Les spent the rest of the 1950s in an undergraduate’s navy-blue bell bottoms, not the green Dacron overalls he had half-hoped to climb aboard and pilot planes in (the Air Force medical officer failed him on sight). His initial disappointment faded quickly, however, because at Sydney University he discovered a remarkable library—a Gothic, gargoyled sandstone building that seated close to a million books. A million! So he wouldn’t feel out of place at the university after all. And then he thought, where will I find the time? He was being serious. Every free hour he had, and quite a few taken ones, went into his reading. He skipped classes and dodged lecturers to skim, scan, browse, peruse. Encyclopedias, poems, novels (baiting boredom—he couldn’t enter the domestic scenes or believe the plots), short stories, hymnals, plays. He returned again and again to the Encyclopaedia Britannica; he pored over Cicero, Kenneth Slessor, the King James Bible. And then, one day, running the length of a bookcase shelf, a yellow row of Teach Yourself language primers attracted his attention. The exotic letters, words, and sentences enticed. Danish by Hans Anton Koefoed. Russian by Maximilian Fourman. Norwegian by Alf Sommerfelt and Ingvald Marm. French by John Adams. Italian by Kathleen Speight. One after another, in quick succession, Les read them all from end to end. He found them easy. He had the knack of recalling the words, the phrases. And of playing with them, locating rhymes and other patterns, inventing new sentences, freer and more imaginative, out of the authors’ dry, stiff examples. To round out his enjoyment, he enrolled for courses in German and preliminary Chinese. In next to no time, a couple of semesters, the languages in which Les could read and write numbered over ten.
Les the reader and linguist flourished; but Les the student floundered. The astringency of the curriculum—read this, not that; write your thesis in this manner, not that—demoralized him. He dropped out, age twenty-one, to see the country; he hitched long rides in trucks. He overnighted on building sites, in patches of long grass, wherever he could find a dry spot. It was during these vagabond months, in beige, hole-punched notepads, that he wrote his first significant poetry.
He hitchhiked back to Sydney, returned to studentship unsuccessfully, dropping out a second time (he would earn his missing credits only a decade later in 1969), but not before he had met—backstage at a play put on by the German department—his future wife and the future mother of their five children. Usually, with strangers, he couldn’t do small talk; conversation would fail him. But with Valerie, to his surprise, he had no such trouble. Valerie, who was born in Budapest and came to Australia after World War II by way of Switzerland, spoke English with a slight Mitteleuropean accent. She was a young woman of Hungarian, Swiss-German, and English words. Murray instantly felt at ease with her, and the attraction was mutual. (In 2012 they celebrated their golden wedding anniversary.)
Les’s great luck continued. He got a job as a translator for the Australian National University in Canberra. He worked for several departments, rewriting in English one day an Italian paper on “nodular cutaneous diseases in Po Valley hares,” the next a Dutch study of the trading history of Makassar. “Languages,” in the words of a 1964 newspaper article about the young translator, had become his “bread and butter.” For four years he and his growing family lived on Italian and Dutch, German and Afrikaans, French and Spanish and Portuguese. But it was in English that Murray’s poems began to circulate in magazines. They were collected, in 1965, in The Ilex Tree. His first literary prize followed. His reputation and his confidence quickly soared. On the strength of the book and prize, he was invited to give readings as far away as Europe. Soon he lost his taste for translating; he left what he would later call his “respectable cover” occupation to write full-time. It was the beginning of one of poetry’s most extraordinary careers.
Words have been knots of beauty and mystery as long as I can remember. But Murray’s oeuvre was the leaven for my own literary beginnings. So when my debut collection of essays was published several years ago, I dedicated a copy to the poet as a token of gratitude and admiration. But I hesitated before posting it to the bush of New South Wales. What if the book never reached him, or arrived but didn’t please him? For a while I couldn’t make up my mind. Finally, though, I let my timidity pass. I wrote to the address I had found for Murray in a literary journal, and several weeks later—restless weeks, since each seemed to me to last a month—I had a letter from him.
Time and care had been expended on the letter. Murray’s penmanship was firm and fluent (I especially liked his a’s, neat little pigtails); the letter was quite long. Far more than a simple thanks then, or even some compliments: the tone throughout was expansive, even confiding. I was touched. What touched me most was Murray’s request that I write again to keep him abreast of my news and my work. An invitation to correspond.
I took him at his word. I wrote. He wrote back. And so it was that letters later, in the course of our now regular correspondence, I proposed to translate a selection of his poems into my second language, French.
I had seen a gap in the international literary market: Murray’s poetry, in translation, was already on sale in Berlin bookshops, Moscow libraries, Delhi bazaars. But not, for some strange reason, in the city, a cultural capital, that I had begun to call my home: Paris.
The poet’s agent agreed; my editor in Paris agreed. And Murray, in his expansive Australian way, gave me a free hand, carte blanche. I reread the poems, collection after collection after collection; for days, weeks, I immersed myself in them; I ended up selecting forty of my favorites to translate.
Julian Barnes, another Francophile Englishman, has written well of the challenge of translating a literary text. There are, Barnes sighs, as many ways to translate one sentence of a classic as there are translators. In “Translating Madame Bovary” he offers, by way of illustration, a straightforward enough line from Flaubert: “aussi poussa-t-il comme un chêne. Il acquit de fortes mains, de belles couleurs,” followed by a half-dozen attempts over the years to render the words in convincing English:
“Meanwhile he grew like an oak; he was strong of hand, fresh of color.”
“And so he grew like an oak-tree, and acquired a strong pair of hands and a fresh color.”
“He grew like a young oak-tree. He acquired strong hands and a good color.”
“He throve like an oak. His hands grew strong and his complexion ruddy.”
“And so he grew up like an oak. He had strong hands, a good color.”
“And so he grew like an oak. He acquired strong hands, good color.”
And Flaubert, for all his similes, remains prose, albeit prose of the very highest order. Poetry, by virtue of its nature, is widely thought to be more or less untranslatable (consider Robert Frost’s aphorism “poetry is what gets lost in translation”).
So translating Murray, I knew, wasn’t something to be taken lightly. But I didn’t share Frost’s limited conception of translation (or of poetry). I could never have rejoiced in Szymborska’s ode to the number pi, nor gasped at Mayakovsky’s “An Extraordinary Adventure which Befell Vladimir Mayakovsky in a Summer Cottage,” had it not been for the ingenuity of their respective translators. All those Polish accents would have scratched my eyes; the black iron gates of Cyrillic would have barred my way. Without translation, some of my favorite works, Basho¯’s haikus, the Bible’s Song of Songs, would have remained beyond reach of my comprehension, forever the preserve of Japanese’s and Hebrew’s right-to-left readers.
Murray’s English is vivid, inventive, jaunty. He is fond of the striking word choice. In recent years the poet has done double duty as an occasional contributor to Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary. Pobblebonk (an informal name for a kind of Australian frog), doctoring (the regular seeking of medical assistance), and Archie (a World War I anti-aircraft gun) are just a few of his recent submissions. If you read “The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever,” Murray’s paean to pants that reach to or almost to the knees, you encounter several amusing stanzas on legwear history and culture, and then these lines:
To moderate grim vigour
With the knobble of bare knees
Knobble! I love this poem; it was one of the forty I chose to put into French. I did everything translatorly possible to stay faithful to the text. “Knobble” is Murray’s reference to the British (but otherwise little-known) expression “knobbly knees,” and I had a hard time coming up with a French equivalent. Knobble. Knobble. I scratched my head. Bosse? Bump? Nœud? Knot? Neither of these would do. Too abstract. Too neutral. Knobbly knees are funny-looking knees; knobble is a funny word. After a lot more head-scratching, I finally hit upon an idea. In place of bump or knot or whatnot could go tronche. To French eyes and ears, tronche looks and sounds just as comic as knobble does to English ones. Tronche can mean face (as in “to make a funny face”), expression, the (dodgy, weird, or amusing) look or demeanor of an object or person. “La tronche!” is a typical French exclamation, meaning roughly “look at the state of him!” or “get a load of her!” It was as close a parallel as you could get in French. Readers of my translation imagined the stern shirt and tie softened, par la (by the) tronche (funny face) des genoux nus (of bare knees).
Then there is assonance and alliteration, poetry’s nuts and bolts. Murray is a master of verse mechanics. “The Trainee, 1914,” which was another of my selections, tells of an Australian lured from his hovel to fight in a foreigners’ war:
Till the bump of your drum, the fit of your turned-up hat
Drew me to eat your stew, salute your flag
Bump, drum; drew, stew; and the end rhyme: hat, flag. The poem runs on assonance (there is also similarity of sounds between fit and hat). All the poetry of the lines resides in these patterns, so in my translation I worked to retain them. I made adjustments. Bump became tempo (alliterating with tambour, the French for “drum”); fit turned to chic (alliterating with chapeau, hat). Stew was trickier. What suitable French verbs rhyme with ragout? So I had the poem’s character eat not stew but soupe; and, for the sake of rhyme, tweaked the tense:
Jusqu’à ce que le tempo de votre tambour, le chic de votre chapeau
Me poussent à manger votre soupe, à saluer votre drapeau
The hardest thing, of course, was to keep the translations Murray in structure while French in language. Perhaps the most ambitious of my selections, “The Warm Rain” is pure Murray—controlled lines, graphic words, surprising rhymes. Consider the beginning:
Against the darker trees or an open car shed
is where we first see rain, on a cumulous day,
a subtle slant locating the light in air
in front of a Forties still of tubs and bike-frames.
Next sign, the dust that was white pepper bared
starts pitting and re-knotting into peppercorns.
It stops being a raceway of rocket smoke behind cars
By themselves, these seven lines abound in complexity. If the first two slip fairly smoothly into French,
Sur un fond d’arbres sombres ou un carport ouvert
La pluie nous apparaît, un jour nuageux
The others resist. It is necessary to visualize the succession of word pictures as a film. In the third line, the play of raindrops in the air; in the fourth, the shed’s exposed interior (“tubs and bike-frames”), by dint of the rainfall, look like something in a grainy “Forties still.”
Des fils subtils [subtle threads] qui rayent et floutent [which scratch and blur] l’air
Comme un retour [like a flashback] sur les années quarante [to the Forties] en images.
The beginning of the second stanza, too, shifting focus, poses difficulties. The imagery is fast-moving, complex. Dust particles, “white pepper bared,” become engorged with rain and turn to “peppercorns.” Ordinarily thrown up by passing drivers, the puffs of dust “behind cars” no longer resemble smoke. The translator’s task of preserving the alliterations, consonance, and assonance from line to line—“pepper bared,” “peppercorns,” “behind cars”—is formidable. Something, in order for my translation to be viable, had to give. It was the white pepper. I used sel, salt, instead.
Puis la terre jusqu’alors fine comme le sel fin
Se mouille et ses particules grossissent en fleur de sel.
Les voitures qui passent n’engendrent plus leur fumée de fusil
[Then the earth until then fine-grained as table salt
Grows moist and its particles fatten to fleur de sel.
The cars that pass no longer produce their rifle smoke]
Translation takes away, but it also gives. Gone, in French, are the car shed’s tubs and bike frames; gone, also, is the rocket’s smoke (replaced by a rifle’s, to reproduce the pattern of repeating sounds: “sel fin,” “fleur de sel,” “leur fumée de fusil”). Two gones, modest losses, but there is a counterbalancing gain: the French has fleur de sel; it more than compensates with the startling image of a rain that causes the salty earth to flower.
My translation, C’est une chose sérieuse que d’être parmi les hommes (It Is Serious to Be with Humans), was published in the fall of 2014. On October twelfth, radios tuned in to France Culture spoke for thirty minutes in my voice. They told listeners of Murray, his life and work, the repayment of a young writer’s debt to his mentor. The broadcast went around the French-speaking world.
Some months later, Murray wrote with pride of a Polynesian neighbor, a native French speaker, who admired the translation and was using it in her French classes. And though his own French was rusty, he said, he could nevertheless understand and enjoy quite a lot. In other letters and postcards—their news ten days older for being sent by snail mail (Murray dislikes computers)—he affectionately recounted long-past trips to Britain, Italy, Germany, and France. But there was nothing in these messages suggesting he might one day return; he hadn’t been back in years. He was well into his seventies; his health was unreliable; his farm in Bunyah was over ten thousand miles away.
So the news that he would be in Paris in September 2015 came out of the blue. He had accepted a festival’s invitation to speak at la Maison de la Poésie. I was thrilled. Honored, too, when the organizer asked me to share the stage with the poet. Copies of the translation would be on sale after the talk.
Murray, in a multicolored woolly pullover—a dependable “soup-catcher”—braved the twenty-plus hours in an airplane and met me in a bistro. To be able to put a voice, so rich and twangy, to the poems after all this time! At la Maison, the following evening, our conversation had an audience and spotlights and was interspersed with readings in both languages.
After the event, a book signing. The queue was gratifyingly long. I was backstage when someone from the festival came to fetch me; Murray wanted me to sign the book with him.
Murray said, “It’s only fair. We’re co-authors.”