Edwin Muir

Edwin Muir
Born (1887-05-15)15 May 1887
Deerness, Orkney Islands
Died 3 January 1959(1959-01-03) (aged 71)
Swaffham Prior
Occupation Poet, novelist, translator

Edwin Muir (15 May 1887 – 3 January 1959) was an Orcadian[1][2] poet, novelist and translator, born on a farm in Deerness. He is remembered for his deeply felt and vivid poetry in plain language with few stylistic preoccupations, and for his extensive translations of Franz Kafka's works with his wife Willa Muir.

Biography

Muir was born at the farm of Folly in Deerness, the same parish in which his mother was born. The family then moved to the island of Wyre, followed by the mainland of Orkney. In 1901, when he was 14, his father lost his farm, and the family moved to Glasgow. In quick succession his father, two brothers, and his mother died within the space of a few years. His life as a young man was a depressing experience, and involved a raft of unpleasant jobs in factories and offices, including working in a factory that turned bones into charcoal.[3] "He suffered psychologically in a most destructive way, although perhaps the poet of later years benefitted from these experiences as much as from his Orkney 'Eden'."[4] In 1919, Muir married Willa Anderson,[5] and the two moved to London. About this, Muir wrote simply 'My marriage was the most fortunate event in my life'.[6] They would later collaborate on highly acclaimed English translations of such writers as Franz Kafka, Gerhart Hauptmann, Sholem Asch, Heinrich Mann, and Hermann Broch.

Between 1921 and 1923, Muir lived in Prague, Dresden, Italy, Salzburg and Vienna; he returned to the UK in 1924. Between 1925 and 1956, Muir published seven volumes of poetry which were collected after his death and published in 1991 as The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir. From 1927 to 1932 he published three novels, and in 1935 he came to St Andrews, where he produced his controversial Scott and Scotland (1936). From 1946 to 1949 he was Director of the British Council in Prague and Rome. 1950 saw his appointment as Warden of Newbattle Abbey College (a college for working-class men) in Midlothian, where he met fellow Orcadian poet, George Mackay Brown. In 1955 he was made Norton Professor of English at Harvard University. He returned to Britain in 1956 but died in 1959 at Swaffham Prior, Cambridge, and was buried there.

A memorial bench was erected in 1962 to Muir in the idyllic village of Swanston, Edinburgh, where he spent time during the 1950s.

Work

His childhood in remote and unspoiled Orkney represented an idyllic Eden to Muir, while his family's move to the city corresponded in his mind to a deeply disturbing encounter with the "fallen" world. The emotional tensions of that dichotomy shaped much of his work and deeply influenced his life. His psychological distress led him to undergo Jungian analysis in London. A vision in which he witnessed the creation strengthened the Edenic myth in his mind, leading him to see his life and career as the working-out of an archetypal fable. In his Autobiography he wrote, "the life of every man is an endlessly repeated performance of the life of man...". He also expressed his feeling that our deeds on Earth constitute "a myth which we act almost without knowing it." Alienation, paradox, the existential dyads of good and evil, life and death, love and hate, and images of journeys and labyrinths are key elements in his work.

His Scott and Scotland advanced the claim that Scotland can create a national literature only by writing in English, an opinion that placed him in direct opposition to the Lallans movement of Hugh MacDiarmid. He had little sympathy for Scottish nationalism.

In 1965 a volume of his selected poetry was edited and introduced by T. S. Eliot. Many of Edwin and Willa Muir's translations of German novels are still in print.

The following quotation expresses the basic existential dilemma of Edwin Muir's life:

"I was born before the Industrial Revolution, and am now about two hundred years old. But I have skipped a hundred and fifty of them. I was really born in 1737, and till I was fourteen no time-accidents happened to me. Then in 1751 I set out from Orkney for Glasgow. When I arrived I found that it was not 1751, but 1901, and that a hundred and fifty years had been burned up in my two-days' journey. But I myself was still in 1751, and remained there for a long time. All my life since I have been trying to overhaul that invisible leeway. No wonder I am obsessed with Time." (Extract from Diary 1937–39.)

Muir came to regard his family's movement from Orkney to Glasgow as a movement from Eden to Hell.

In 1958, Edwin and Willa Muir were granted the Johann-Heinrich-Voss Translation Award.

Works

Translations by Willa and Edwin Muir

Notes

  1. Edwin Muir, an Autobiography, Canongate Press, Edinburgh 1993, ISBN 0-86241-423-7)
  2. Paul Henderson Scott, Towards Independence, "Edwin Muir was an Orkney man who never quite felt that he was Scottish"
  3. The Story and The Fable (1940), p.132.
  4. The Poetry of the Scots, Duncan Glen, page 92
  5. BBC Scotland article on Willa Muir and her writings.
  6. Quoted in Professor the Lord Harries, 'Light from the Orkneys: Edwin Muir and George Mackay Brown'

References

External links

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