TRANSLATION

The ambition to translate arose very early, yet found itself checked less by personal inadequacies in learning a second language as by the struggle to become a second person (or, perhaps, in being a person in the first place). So there have been versions.

The Noise of the Fields (1976) concluded with "Elegies' a shortened version of Joseph Brodsky's "Great Elegy for John Donne', later revised and extended.

Jubilee for Renegades (1982) contains a section of six poems more exactly rendered from a foreign tongue. Reviewing this volume in The Irish Press, Robert Harbinson commented that "his command of his own language, or rather his own style, is so complete that translations "From the German of Johannes Bobrowski" are indistinguishable from Maxton's own inventions.'

At the Protestant Museum (1986) presents nothing quite so obviously routed through translation, though the museum of the title-poem is located in Budapest. The major evidence of this commitment is Between; Selected Poems of Agnes Nemes Nagy (1988). The Engraved Passion (1991) included "After Endre Ady (1877-1919)', and individual poems by other writers (Juhasz, Oravecz, Weőres) appeared in The New Hungarian Quarterly and the bulletin of the Hungarian PEN Club. In the Introduction (2004) to his own translations of Nemes Nagy, George Szirtes has paid tribute to Maxton's earlier versions, "His translations of poems that deal directly with nature . . . are impeccable.' Szirtes' reservations about Maxton's achievement in other areas of Nemes Nagy's oeuvre appear to relate to differences over the religious dimension.

Gubu Roi; Poems & Satires 1991-1999 (2000) took its unhelpful title in part from Alfred
Jarry's play of a century earlier, and in part from the wit and wisdom of Conor Cruise O'Brien. The collection contained nothing immediately recognizable as translation, though "Letter to Felizitas' is largely made up of unacknowledged quotation from the correspondence of Walter Benjamin, in a manner encouraged by Benjamin himself. The same principle had been more thoroughly exploited in Passage (1984) with sources in archaeology, Freud and anti-war protest.