The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems brings together for the first time a choice of Peter Robinson’s work in this field from the last quarter of a century. As the title underlines, these are not imitations or adaptations, but translations that remain faithful to their originals while, thanks to the poet’s imaginative identifications and technical expertise, becoming English poems in their own right. The main body of the book chronicles a sustained commitment to twentieth-century Italian poetry, but there are also selections from his early involvement with Pierre Reverdy’s work and more recent readings of Noriko Ibaragi and Ingeborg Bachmann. Admirers of Peter Robinson’s own poetry will find his talents fully engaged in paying these tributes to poems by others he loves.
Peter Robinson was born in 1953 in the North of England. Since 1989 he has taught in Japan, at present in Sendai, where he lives with his wife and their two daughters. His five books of poetry are Overdrawn Account (1980), This Other Life (1988), which won the Cheltenham Prize, Entertaining Fates (1992), Lost and Found (1997) and About Time Too (2001). His translations, many in collaboration with Marcus Perryman, include Selected Poems of Vittorio Sereni (1990). A literary manifesto, Poetry, Poets, Readers: Making Things Happen is published by Oxford University Press this year.
“Robinson is the finest poet alive when it comes to the probing of shifts in atmosphere, momentary changes in the weather of the mind, each poem an astonishingly finely tuned gauge for recording the pressures and processes that generate lived occasions.”
Adam Piette, The Reader
“These are versions that possess an uncanny accuracy, true to the fragmented, selfcommuning, smouldering and combustible humanity of Sereni’s work.”
Charles Tomlinson, The Independent
