For me, it is that quaint, classical military, now literary word, ‘myriad’, that helps to convince me that what I am reading is a translation. Is it a word only translators would use these days?

In this anthology we are introduced to Ricardo Xavier Bousoño (1953–2011), an Argentinian writer and target of the military death squads of the 1970s, who writes of surveillance cameras ‘with bovine faces’, concluding: ‘Say this only: / what happened elsewhere / speaks now because / there is no elsewhere.’

Bousoño’s later poem on the way each poem travels ahead of its poet, arranging accommodation, and warming a room for his arrival, is a marvellous piece of work, whoever wrote it. Bousoño is, as expected, hyper-alert to the presence of death and the threat of his own grave, a ‘small scooped / hollow of amazement’.

There is much to admire in Bousoño’s poetry, but his is only the first contribution. After him, we have Elena Navronskaya Blanco, the Argentinian novelist adept at bringing elements of nature into her poetry. Then there is the eccentric Mexican, Lazlo Thalassa (1940–?), whose work in Spanish is itself a loose translation of a fifteenth-century poet, a heretic from Urbano. You could spend many hours on Google chasing up the threads of this anthology that might trail into the actual world or have their only connection to it through this book. There is, I guess, no way that Google can tell the difference between an imagined and an actual person, so I have resisted consulting the internet on all the figures in the book, apart from one, mentioned in passing on the final acknowledgments page: the enigmatic scholar Monsieur Chouchani, who appears throughout the book. Lazlo Thalassa’s poetry, in Boyle’s treatment of it, mixes high and low, classical and mass culture in an ironic, playful manner we have come to associate with the post-modern – a rich mix, provocative and testing for readers who think they know the high and the low. At one point, his shopping trolley is filled with wedge-shaped cones that carry the stamp, ‘made in reality’.

There is work from Maria Zafarelli Strega (1961–?), a shadowy Argentinian poet, homeless and of doubtful identity, a woman who fears she may never find a way through the labyrinth of herself. Federico Silva (1901–80) is a French memoirist whose father was a master of aliases. Silva notes, nightmarishly, that the English words ‘now’ and ‘here’ fuse into ‘nowhere’. Antonio Almeida (1899–1981) the late-in-life Spanish poet provides us with a luminous biographical sketch worthy of Borges. There is a series of ‘new essays by Montaigne’, composed by the Montaigne Poet, who might be several poets, or identical twin poets co-writing in two languages. Robert Berechit (1926–47) is the teenage poet in the anthology, and his ‘Love Letters’ written in World War II occupied France do feel like the work of a precocious talent. The Cuban, Antonieta Villanueva (1907–82) shared with Boyle the real-life experience of polio, though a crippling fall from a stage moves her into a strange territory where forces larger than herself seem to move through her. The Puerto Rican, Ernesto Ray (1965–2016), could have been as famous as his inspirations, Dylan and Cohen, but he renounced music to become (like Wittgenstein, and perhaps Monsieur Chouchani) a ‘humble’ teacher.

Peter BoyleHow different, then, are these voices, styles, periods, languages, and cultures from one another? We have no way of knowing how distinctive each author actually is, because all of them are filtered to us through the work of the one ‘translator’; and we know that a translator can put a stamp on a text that identifies it as ‘their’ work. We do hear Peter Boyle throughout the anthology, and we know that at certain times he has ‘selected’ passages of writing that reflect his own values and his own aesthetic commitments (who knows what he left out?). In a footnote to the work of Federico Silva, Boyle quotes from Villanueva’s memoirs some dismissive comments on how dull experimentalism can be, especially when it is focused upon inventing procedures for mass-producing poetry. The only experimentalism that is worthwhile, Villanueva writes, is innovation that seeks ‘a fresh way to channel the stuff that really matters – the horror, the beauty, the delicacy, the silence’. I read this, against the book’s resistant framing, as a statement of intent. Largely, Boyle succeeds. Each poet does channel the stuff that really matters, and the book demonstrates how various and unpredictable the means to that end can be. The scandalous Montaigne Poet later adds to this aesthetic with a Neruda-esque question: ‘Can goodness write a poem and, if not, why then write a poem?’

The Canadian, Gaston Bousquin (1957–2014), rounds out the anthology. He is one with whom Boyle, the translator, formed a strong bond over many years. A belligerent bear of a man, one suspects he was the physical opposite of Boyle, who confesses he had always been afraid of Bousquin, and in his presence felt his own inadequacies. Bousquin’s chaotic life and violent death in Australia seem to touch upon the motivation for putting this anthology together: How is one to make sense of a life? Can we only pay tribute to the creative energy in each person we encounter? How important are destructive impulses to that creativity? Does it matter who wrote these poems, when we live in a so-called real world where ‘There was a yacht owned by the British royal family tied to a tumbledown wharf and, if you walked across the gangplank, you entered another country’ (from Elena Navronskaya Blanco’s ‘Exquisite Calendar for the Duke of Madness’).