James Michie

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James Michie (born June 24, 1927 in Weybridge , Elmbridge , Surrey , † October 30, 2007 in London ) was a British translator and poet who , in 1995, worked with Collected Poems for his collected poems , which deal with subjects such as love, dreams and death was awarded the Hawthornden Prize .

Life

Professional career and first volume of poetry "Possible Laughter"

The son of a banker was the younger brother of the well-known scientist Donald Michie , who was known as the "father of artificial intelligence in Great Britain" . Michie himself studied after visiting the Marlborough College Literature at Trinity College of the University of Oxford and was there along with Kingsley Amis in 1949 an edition of the Oxford Poetry out. In the first years after the Second World War he financed his studies as a porter at Guy's Hospital and then became involved in the International Voluntary Service for Peace, for which he built houses for refugees in Bavaria and later in Jamaica .

In the mid- 1950s he worked for the Heinemann publishing house and published The Colossus And Other Poems , Sylvia Plath's first collection of poems , in 1960 , and her novel The Bell Jar in 1963 . While there, he also worked with Anthony Burgess , Michael Holroyd and others, and oversaw the publication of the first English editions of Harper Lee's Who Disrupts the Nightingale and JD Salinger's Franny and Zooey . He then moved to The Bodley Head publishing house, where he eventually became director.

Through this activity he managed to increasingly focus on his own writing ambitions, which began in 1950 with the first poems published in Penguin New Writing . Rupert Hart-Davis published his first own volume of poetry Possible Laughter in 1959 and, like subsequent collections, contained poems written with humor and a detached attitude on topics such as love, human weaknesses, dreams and death. These were skilfully written, often entirely in rhyme form, and carried this through the ambiguity of the title. In many cases, his humor suggested more than suggested when reading a poem for the first time. Two of the poems contained in Possible Laughter met with particular admiration: on the one hand, Dooley Is a Traitor , a dramatic dialogue between the accused and his judge, was published by Philip Larkin in his Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973), and on the other, the Park Concert , a memorable evocation of a band and "their kind of dormant charges", selected by WH Auden for the poetry book A Certain World: A Commonplace Book .

Translations by Horace and Jean de La Fontaine

In 1964 Hart-Davis published the Oden des Horace , which Michie had translated . Many of these versions are also completely in rhyme form with very favorable couplets : These, together with the English tendency to lengthen originals, had the effect of smoothing and rounding the odes, which was not possible in the Latin original. Many of the rhymes are ingenious, although the occasional absence of a rhyme form also brought benefits. Thirteen of the odes, eleven of which were in Alkaic strophic form , are written in the original ancient meter .

In the following years he wrote other translations such as the poems of Catullus , the Helena of Euripides , the poems of the Greek anthology , the epigrams of Martial , Ovid's Ars amatoria and the Eclogae of Virgil .

He reached his peak as a translator in 1973 with Selected fables , a selection of the fables by Jean de La Fontaine . The liveliness and sheer joy of the originals mingled wonderfully with Michie's gift, not least his love for rhyming and using different line lengths. The critic Geoffrey Grigson described Michie's version as the best ever published, "earthier and sharper than Marianne Moore's " ('earthier and sharper than Marianne Moore's').

Books of poetry "New & Selected Poems" and "Collected Poems"

His own poems, on the other hand, only appeared at greater intervals: It was not until 24 years after his first volume of poems that New & Selected Poems appeared in 1983 , which he dedicated to the poet PJ Kavanagh . The volume contained 25 of the 32 poems from Possible Laughter , and 25 new poems, most of which described the changing moods of the heart. The pathetic knowledge of self-irony is more pronounced here than in the first collection, although the touch of playfulness and despite everything ( malgré tout ) is maintained as well as the technical skill.

In 1985 he edited the Oxford Book of Short Poems together with PJ Kavanagh , which only contained poems with a length of no more than 13 lines. In 1989 an edition of Aesop's Fables followed , retold in verse and illustrated by John Vernon Lord .

It was not until 1994 that a third volume of poems appeared, Collected Poems , which contained a further 21 poems. Love and death were once again the predominant themes, albeit with the slight touch characteristic of Michie. Even in the somberly titled Moods poem , Dooms , he kept the joke up:

"Love said stay, but pride said go
I stayed and stayed too long.
It both hurts love and pride to know
Pride is right and love was wrong. "
'Love said stay, but pride said go.
I stayed, and stayed too long.
It hurts both love and pride to know
Pride's right and love was wrong. '

It also contained some translations, mostly of the works of the French writer Théophile Gautier , as well as epigrams and curiosities such as a poem that used the 59 possible anagrams of the word "hospital".

In 1995 he was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for this collection of poems.

Writing style and effect

His love for the linguistic game, which goes hand in hand with the inventiveness that is forced from the translator, was not limited to poetry. For around 30 years he was under the pseudonym Jaspistus, which his brother gave him in childhood; He also wrote competitions and quizzes for the magazine The Spectator .

Translator Rex Warner said that WH Auden once told him that he often thought of translating the works of Horace but found that he could not hope to be better than James Michie, recognizing Michie's extraordinary talent.

Civilized discourse, with due attention to craftsmanship, were the basic yardstick for Michie's work, although it also conjured up captivating images, such as the moon, which in a poem "glowered as the color of barley" ('glowered the color of barley '), or by a weir “vitrified by its own speed”.

As a translator he belonged to the upper class and his work remains groundbreaking. His view of the lyric can be illustrated by the last sentence in his introduction to the translation of the Odes of Horace, in which he suggests: “Love and friendship and civilized entertainment are balanced against death and bloodshed and the duties of civilization: the scales trembles, but the poet's hand is stable: it is the exciting balance of mature art ”('love and friendship and civilized enjoyment are balanced against death and bloodshed and the duties that belong to civilization: the scales tremble, but the poet's hand is steady: it is the exciting equilibrium of mature art ').

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Margaret Boden: Donald Michie (1923-2007). Father of artificial intelligence in Britain. In: Nature , Volume 448, 2007, p. 765.
personal data
SURNAME Michie, James
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British poet and translator
DATE OF BIRTH June 24, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Weybridge , Elmbridge , Surrey
DATE OF DEATH October 30, 2007
Place of death London