Monday 16 August 2010

poems about translation 7: Les Murray on being a translator at the Institute

It's been a while since we've had a poem about translation. Inexplicably remiss of me. It must be the heat (cue hollow laughter). Anyway, what should I find as I surf idly this evening but the Collected Poems of the fantastic Les Murray:



And the reason for my excitement is a wonderful poem called 'Employment for the Castes in Abeyance' which I politely insist you go and read now on page 134. And then why not listen to Murray reading it here. Or indeed vice versa. If you want your own fair copy of Murray's poems to annotate and spill tea on you can find a copy of the even shinier New Collected Poems here. Murray has a really good website also featuring some translations of his poems in German and Italian.

I'm going to leave you with one more Murray poem, in honour of my holiday in Italy which starts tomorrow. If the link works you should find yourself on page 233 reading a poem called 'The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever':



See you in a couple of weeks.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Enjoy!