Edwin Muir

• 1. Introduction

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  Edwin Muir was born on the 15th of May 1887 at the farm of Folly in Deerness, a parish in Orkney, and in his own words he arrived in Glasgow in 1901 feeling as though a hundred and fifty years had been burned away in a two-day journey. That image, from his diary of 1937-39, captures something essential: a man who felt he had been wrenched out of one century and dropped into another, and who spent the rest of his life trying to close the gap. He called himself an Orkneyman and a good Scandinavian, and never quite stopped being one even after decades on the mainland. The questions worth asking about Muir are not simply biographical. How did a child raised on a remote northern farm become one of the key translators of Franz Kafka into English? How did the same man who suffered in bone-charcoal factories end up as Norton Professor at Harvard University? And what was it about the tension between Orkney and Glasgow, between Eden and what he called Hell, that generated so much poetry and so much controversy?

• 2. From Eden to Glasgow

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  Muir's family moved twice before they lost everything. After Deerness they went to the island of Wyre, then back to the Mainland of Orkney, and in 1901, when Muir was fourteen, his father lost the farm and the family relocated to Glasgow. His parents and two brothers died within a few years of that move. The collision with industrial Glasgow left marks that never fully healed. He worked in unpleasant jobs in factories and offices; one of those jobs involved working in a factory that turned bones into charcoal, a detail that carries its own grim weight. One account of this period notes that he suffered psychologically in a most destructive way, though that same account allows that the poet of later years may have benefitted from those experiences as much as from his Orkney Eden. Muir came to understand the move from Orkney to Glasgow as a movement from Eden to Hell, not merely as metaphor but as a felt reality. His psychological distress eventually led him to undergo Jungian analysis in London. During that analysis he had a vision in which he witnessed the creation, and that vision deepened what he called the Edenic myth, persuading him to see his entire life and career as the working-out of an archetypal fable. He wrote in his Autobiography that the life of every man is an endlessly repeated performance of the life of man, and he also described human deeds on Earth as a myth which we act almost without knowing it.

• 3. Willa and the Kafka Project

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  In 1919, Muir married Willa Anderson, and he recorded his feeling about that event with unusual plainness: "My marriage was the most fortunate event in my life." The couple moved to London, then between 1921 and 1923 lived in Prague, Dresden, Italy, Salzburg, and Vienna before returning to the UK in 1924. During this period they began the translation work that would define their international reputation. Edwin and Willa issued their translations under their joint names, and the most celebrated of those were the translations of Franz Kafka. They had translated The Castle within six years of Kafka's death. Willa described their method in her memoir Belonging: they divided the book in two, with each translator handling half, then went over each other's work with what she called a fine-tooth comb. Willa was frank about the division of labour. She recorded in her journal that "It was ME" and that Edwin "only helped." She was the more able linguist and the major contributor. Between 1924 and the start of the Second World War, these translations financed their life together. Their English versions of Kafka, Lion Feuchtwanger, Gerhart Hauptmann, Sholem Asch, Heinrich Mann, and Hermann Broch were widely praised. In 1958, Edwin and Willa were granted the first Johann-Heinrich-Voss Translation Award, and many of their translations of German novels remain in print.

• 4. The Question of Scotland

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  Muir came to St Andrews in 1935, and the following year he published Scott and Scotland, a book that generated real controversy. Its central argument was that Scotland can only create a national literature by writing in English, a position that put him in direct opposition to the Lallans movement, and particularly to Hugh MacDiarmid. Muir had little sympathy for Scottish nationalism. The dispute was not merely a literary argument; it touched questions of cultural identity that Muir had been navigating personally since childhood. His sense of being Orcadian rather than generically Scottish, combined with his experience of living in central Europe, had given him a particular angle on what it meant to write in or out of a national tradition. In 1939, also in St Andrews, he had a religious experience and from that point regarded himself as Christian, seeing Christianity as being as revolutionary as socialism. That same year he published The Present Age from 1914, a work of literary criticism. His poetry, published across seven volumes between 1925 and 1956, was collected after his death and issued in 1991 as The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir.

• 5. Teaching, Warding, and Harvard

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  From 1946 to 1949, Muir served as Director of the British Council in Prague and then Rome. In 1950 he was appointed Warden of Newbattle Abbey College in Midlothian, a college specifically for working-class men, and it was there that he met a fellow Orcadian poet, George Mackay Brown. He was awarded a CBE in the 1953 Coronation Honours. In 1955 he was made Norton Professor of English at Harvard University, a position that took him to Cambridge, Massachusetts. He returned to Britain in 1956. In 1965, six years after his death, T. S. Eliot edited and introduced a volume of his selected poetry. That Eliot undertook the task speaks to the esteem in which Muir was held among his contemporaries, even if he never sought the public visibility that some of them cultivated.

• 6. The Permanence Question

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  Muir died on the 3rd of January 1959 in Cambridge and was buried in Swaffham Prior, Cambridgeshire. In 1961, the critic Kathleen Raine wrote in Texas Quarterly that time does not fade Muir's poems, and that while the new movements of various decades lose their significance when the scene changes and retain only a historical interest, Muir, as a poet who never followed fashion, gave more permanent expression to his world than poets who deliberately set out to be the mouthpieces of their generation. Joseph H. Summers, writing in the Massachusetts Review, argued that Muir's achievement in poetry and prose was larger than the merely literary. Summers described Muir's triumph as less in the technological realm of communication than in the vastly more difficult realm of sensitivity, perception, and wisdom, a triumph made possible only, in his phrase, by humility. A memorial bench was erected in 1962 in Swanston, Edinburgh, where Muir had spent time during the 1950s. Willa wrote her memoir of their life together, Belonging, in 1967, and lived for another eleven years before dying on the Isle of Bute. The Muirs' translation of Kafka's Metamorphosis and Other Stories appeared in a Penguin edition in 1961, extending their collaborative work into the decade after Edwin's death.