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Towards the end of his life the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) wrote nearly four hundred poems in French – notably the two collections published as Les Fenêtres (The Windows) and Les Roses. The emergence of a French Rilke provides the starting point rather than the terminus for Jo Shapcott’s new collection, Tender Taxes, which re-imagines Rilke’s brief and fugitive lyrics as English poems. The occasion is Rilke, but these are more than versions: Shapcott’s poems address this, arguing with the originals, crossing and re-crossing the frontier between translation and origination. Rilke and Shapcott are brought together in the shared incognito of a foreign language, ‘speaking English through a French mouth’.
Jo Shapcott was born in London. Poems from her three award-winning collections, Electroplating the Baby (1988), Phrase Book (1992) and My Life Asleep (1998) are gathered in a selected poems, Her Book (2000). She has won a number of literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Collection, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the National Poetry…
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