The Australian Language Forest: Les Murray’s Translations from the Natural World

In his collection, Translations from the Natural World, Les Murray demonstrates that he is, first and foremost, a translator, or poet-as-translator. I do not mean that Murray is busy translating from one language to another, although he worked as a translator and has since translated four German poets into English (a translation of F G Jünger appears in this collection). Rather, I would argue that Murray is a translator in the Benjaminian sense: one who finds himself on the outside of the mountain forest of language, looking in. If Murray is cut off from the centre of language (the place Benjamin reserves for the poet), it is because he undertakes a particular task: to unify two languages (say English and German), their differences and unassimilatable foreignness, so that they might speak as one. A task that is a kind of madness.