Guest blog post by Dr James Rann, Lecturer in Russian, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Glasgow
It was the war that had sent me back to the archive and it was the war I found there. In early June of last year, I was on the twelfth floor of the University of Glasgow library, examining Edwin Morgan’s neatly handwritten manuscripts and admiring the views across the west of Scotland. Meanwhile, in eastern Ukraine, the Russian army was continuing its bloody grind through the city of Sievierodonetsk. I was looking for the Glaswegian poet’s translations from Ukrainian. He only ever produced four, all in 1955, and although two were published in the local press they were never anthologized. I had first noticed them a year earlier, in passing, when investigating Morgan’s translations of Russian poetry into Scots; I little imagined then how much Ukraine would come to dominate my thoughts and the world’s collective attention.
The hushed and lofty Archives and Special Collections room can feel a long way from anywhere, let alone the battle-scarred towns of Luhansk Region, Ukraine, but once I had found the sheets of unlined A4 bearing Morgan’s meticulous fair copies, that gap seemed to close in an instant. “Baptise freedom with the hated / Blood from hostile veins…,” Morgan wrote, translating ‘Testament’ (1845) by Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s most revered poet.
Once the Ukrainian river has carried
Our enemies’ blood to the sea,
To the blue blue sea… ah, then only
Will these fields be left by me.
Morgan’s version of Lesya Ukrainka’s ‘Contra spem spero’ (‘I hope against hope’, 1893) was less violent, but still resonated with the present:
O but my tears shall be lost in laughter –
Dear is my hope though despair is its father –
Misery shall move me to sing my song –
Life shall be mine though the darkness is strong!
It seemed not just uncanny but moving that Morgan’s brief dalliance with Ukrainian culture had managed to anticipate this tragic and crucial moment in that nation’s history – the combination of public valour and private resilience that have distinguished Ukraine’s response to Russia’s renewed invasion.
Poetry is known, of course, for this ability to transcend history, to slip out of one context and into another, and Morgan’s translations made this process easy. While maybe lacking the zip of his best work, they are faithful but fresh, not bogged down in a fixation with preserving rhythm and rhyme that can trap translations in a clunky Victorianism. My own relative ignorance probably helped too. Shevchenko and Ukrainka are famous poets and these are famous poems, but in that moment, beyond a vague understanding of their significance, I had little historical context to obstruct the sensations of timelessness and timeliness. And I had a phone in my pocket, too, always dragging me back into the unpoetic present of breaking news and speculative Twitter threads about troop movements.
Still more important for fostering a sense of overcoming time and space, however, was the materiality of the archival documents in front of me. On the one hand, there were the rituals of the archive itself – the long journey in the lift, the locked door, the washing of hands, the sharpening of pencils. All these estrange the reading process, giving space for unexpected linkages. On the other, there is the physical continuity and somatic affinity afforded by holding someone’s possessions in your hands and peering at their handwriting. Morgan’s translations from Ukrainian were made in response to a six-week tour of the USSR he undertook in 1955 with the Scotland-USSR Friendship Society, visiting St Petersburg, Moscow, Kyiv, Odesa and points in between. His scrapbooks preserve a number of physical mementos of this experience, including a cutting from Kyiv’s Ukrainophone evening paper picturing the Scottish delegation and a postcard from Professor Andrii Bilets’kyi (GB 247 MS Morgan C/13 p2621. The polyglot linguist had made a recording of Morgan while in Kyiv and the two subsequently corresponded; Morgan sent books on Scots and Gaelic and requested information about the languages of the Caucasus (GB 247 MS Morgan T/1, letter dated 13 September 1955).
The real intimacy came, however, from the small notebook in which Morgan kept his notes from the trip (GB 247 MS Morgan H/1). It is fascinating not just as a snapshot of, at once, a particular moment in Morgan’s life and a particular moment in Soviet history, but also as a showcase of the complex temporality of such documents. The notebook records Morgan’s immediate reaction to the USSR in 1955 – Kyiv, for instance, is ‘a v. simpatico city’ about the size of Glasgow – but also features clippings glued in later, no earlier than 1956, that discuss the ongoing process of destalinization in the Soviet Union. (Similar articles also appear in the scrapbook around this time.) We see here physical evidence of the impact of Nikita Khrushchev’s famous ‘Secret Speech’ of February 1956 on someone sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Once the violent excesses of Stalinism were publicly admitted, Morgan literally revisited his earlier impressions, adding context. Like me, he felt compelled by the spectre of state violence to re-open the archive and bring it into conversation with the present.
This sense of identification between the archival researcher and their subject is compounded by the fact that Morgan was, somewhat unusually, an active user of the library collection in which he now features. To better understand the context of Morgan’s translations of Shevchenko and Ukrainka, I descended six flights of stairs to consult the library’s small Ukrainian section. I pulled a heavy brown volume of Shevchenko’s Kobzar (first published 1840) from the shelf. My Ukrainian leaves a lot to be desired, so I was relieved to see next to it a Russian translation of Shevchenko’s collected works. I started with the Ukrainian but did not get far before the front matter revealed the familiar name Bilets’kyi – the editor happened to be Oleksandr Ivanovych Bilets’kyi, father of Morgan’s correspondent Andrii Oleksandrovych. Above that, though, was a still more familiar name, penned with a flourish in blue ink: Edwin Morgan. I was not, therefore, surprised to see the same in the Russian-language edition too, and, pasted in both, a label marking Morgan’s gift of the book to the library. In all likelihood, Morgan acquired these books in Kyiv and used them to produce his translation. When I told him of the coincidence, Jim McGonigal, Morgan’s friend and biographer explained it succinctly: “I think that Eddie now has a direct link to the library angel, and the most surprising finds can emerge.”
It was partly thanks to these angelic interventions that I was able to explore, in this article, the wider political parallels between past and present that are revealed by these translations and the Soviet sojourn that inspired them, as well as some of the complex interactions between Scotland, England, Russia and Ukraine that they suggest. But, in furnishing moments of connection, Eddie and the library angel gave me something else too, something more personal. I am no Edwin Morgan, but I am a University of Glasgow lecturer in my thirties with a passionate enthusiasm for Russian poetry and the cultural achievements of the early Soviet Union, who has found himself confronted by the grim consequences of the Kremlin’s power. I am still struggling to comprehend the new cruelties perpetrated by Russia in Ukraine, news of which is relayed instantly and incessantly to my phone, and what those horrors mean for me and my professional and personal entanglements with Russian culture. But at least when I hold in my carefully washed hands those loose sheets, that notebook and those old Soviet editions with their cheap glue and rough paper, it does not feel like I am doing it alone.
For further information on the Papers of Edwin Morgan (MS Morgan) please see here
You can view the full online catalogue for MS Morgan here
Please note that an appointment is required to access MS Morgan, please contact Archives & Special Collections in advance regarding access by emailing library-asc@glasgow.ac.uk
Categories: Archives and Special Collections, Library, Reflections
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