Translations from the Natural World

"No, I actually discovered Les Murray in Japan. I went to Japan in 1995, just after I finished my degree, and Translations from a Natural World was a book on sale, and I bought it and put it in my briefcase. I didn’t really know anything about Les Murray when I read that and I was really amazed by it, and then I bought his selected poems and it began a life-long fascination with his work. Translations from a Natural World is so audacious. There’s a sequence in the middle of the book, the bulk of the book, where the poems are either about or in the voice of a different living organism, from a yard horse to a sunflower, and what I love is the audacity in that project. What he’s attempted to do is actually forge a language appropriate to each organism and I think only Les Murray can really do that. Of all the poets I read today in English, only he has that protean talent with forging language for a new specific poetic purpose. Yes, he is radically original, but it’s just this idea that language can be fashioned and not inherited. That’s really what I love about it. But it’s not easy and there are lots of the poems that I actually don’t understand, but you can get glimpses into the cleverness. He’s obviously sat down and thought about cows – would they have an I voice? They wouldn’t: they would be we. Or pigs? Pigs are us because we is too gentle but it’s still a collective pronoun. The cleverness of all those decisions is just fabulous. Yes. That veneration of the natural world and that whole ecological concern which comes through. And just his use of sound – he’s written a poem about the Australian lyrebird which can imitate all the other bird sounds. He’s got all these sounds, like kettles and chainsaws which these birds can mimic, in the poem and it’s superbly clever. I’ve been reading his work for years but I picked this collection because it’s so distinctive."