Edwin Muir: One Foot in Europe

Abstract

A central element of modernism was its cosmopolitanism and this relied on facilitators of cultural interchange and, in the case of literature, translators. Edwin Muir was a significant figure in alerting the Anglophone intellectual world to developments in continental Europe, particularly in literature in German. His own background in remote, rural Scotland was non-academic and his career is fascinating in that he read what he chose or what came his way, not what he was obliged to read to satisfy the demands of an institution. An early engagement with the works of Nietzsche, Hölderlin, Heine prepared him to read contemporary German literature including Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Kafka and Broch. With his wife Willa, Muir translated several works by Kafka and Brock which fed new ideas images and notions of form into the modernist consciousness. Muir's essays and reviews promoted this larger consciousness. Although, in comparison with the wildly modernist work of his compatriot Hugh MacDiannid, Muir's own poetry is only mildly modernist, he contributed in a unique way to making continental writing available to British and American authors and readers.