Two years ago I published
an Italian version of RS Thomas collected poems sponsored by the
Arts Council of Wales.
The audience liked his poetry a lot: he was
unpublished in Italian and the book was successful.
After that, Mercator, in the persons of my dearest
Sioned Rowland , The Arts Council Director Dr Tony Bianchi
and the University of Aberystwith organized a conference
on Welsh Poetry and there I met RS Thomas.
He read his poems in the original and three of his translators, a Catalan, a
French and me, the Italian,
read our versions. It was a three days wonderful experience.
Never in my life of a literary translator did I find more fascinating this
task as when
I translated "Death of a peasant."
I have these beautiful photos with RS Thomas surrounded by the three of us
during
last year poetry reading.

I feel very honored to have worked for and with this great poet.

Erminia






----- Original Message -----
From: Alan Halsey <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2000 10:21 PM
Subject: R.S.Thomas


> I'm surprised there hasn't yet been an obit here for R.S.Thomas: nobody
> out there a fan? Not sure I'm exactly in that category but certainly
> admire much in his work - particularly I suppose the way his poetry was
> founded on deeply-experienced contradictions & evolved out of a refusal
> of easy resolutions. To me his most interesting period was in the early
> seventies when the struggle between opposites began to show up in those
> unexpected line-endings, very subtle discontinuities. I'd certainly call
> that 'innovative' & maybe the more interesting in that RST was clearly
> not interested in innovation for its own sake. I'd like to quote a poem
> here but damn it my copies of the books seem to have gone awol.
>
> I saw him give a talk once when he was already quite old & apparently
> not very well: non-stop for about an hour, without notes, utterly
> fluent, a performance & a half. It was about why English people living
> in Wales as I did should be deported at once, so it had a certain edge
> to it from my point of view. I was surprised how unacknowledgedly
> Marxist his argument was - for 'capitalist' read 'English', for
> 'exploited working class' read 'Welsh'. The fact that so many English
> have been exploited in exactly the same way was apparently entirely
> irrelevant as far as he was concerned. The interesting thing, of course,
> is that he never allowed himself to sentimentalise the Welsh people
> themselves - completely the opposite, in fact - which is the first of
> the really hard edges his poetry sprang from.
>
> Today's Guardian pieces stress his sternness etc but I witnessed a quite
> bizarre episode which showed another side of him. He turned up in my
> bookroom in Hay accompanied by a young I think Korean with a camcorder.
> Somehow or other he'd agreed to let this guy film him in this or that
> location - the last thing you'd expect him to do, but he was doing it
> with great good humour & grace. Well well. I wish I'd been sent a still
> of him standing under the faux-primitive necklace which hung from the
> ceiling at that time but I never saw any of the film ... I guess stashed
> in an archive somewhere.
>
> AH
>



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