Tom Paulin's latest book collects the "Translations, Versions, Imitations" he's made, over nearly 30 years, of poetry from languages other than English. Many have already been published elsewhere, not only in journals but (perhaps more unusually) individual collections.

As its cover acknowledges, the book's clearly an hommage to Robert Lowell's Imitations, a similarly eclectic collection of great poems - primarily from the European lyric tradition - in translations which clearly bear the master's thumbprint. But Lowell's title is a deprecation, too, of the limits of literary translation; an admission that to make a poem "work" is nearly always to stamp it with the translator's own style and culture. Paulin is much more whole-hearted in his appropriations of primary material - whether it be still-life prose-poems from the French of Ponge or Heine's "To a Political Poet" - to his own experience. As the title poem admits, "the things that are lent I take/them over and make them mine" (p. 70); and there's much of Northern Ireland here even though only one short traditional poem, "The Lagan Blackbird", originates there.

On the one hand this suggests a European sensibility, an intellectual curiosity which ranges beyond the local. For example, the book includes three wonderful versions of Akhmatova, every bit as muscular as their originals and with something of the compact yet vivid Russian of the Acmeists. Paulin's classical versions, particularly passages from Prometheus Unbound, are both magisterial and immediate. On the other hand, the poet's subversive technique is to revivify the "fricatives labials and peachy vowels" (p. 81) of poems by as it were bringing them home to Ireland. This must have worked particularly well in free-standing individual versions; when they are brought together like this we begin to see some of the techniques he employs. First among these is the use of "Irish" vocabulary. In Rilke's "The Island in the North Sea", "a sheep scumbles up a dyke a/gross hirpling dopey ominouslooking (sic) sheep" (p.2): the onomatopoeia (those pl's and bl's slurping like mud), in what may be either dialect or neologism, helps us see not only the sheep but its depressively rural human context. But at other times this diction works less to clarify than to obscure. If we don't know what kind of birds the "stints skittering along" Mallarmé's "tideline" are (p. 47), we can't picture the scene or why they're in it.

Paulin also makes his constructions more demotic, less fastidious than those of scholarly translation. Line breaks are often counter-intuitive: "in moonlight in my own so/deepdown sadness driving this borrowed/Toyota" (p. 71) and the accent, rather than sense, of the original is sometimes recorded in non-native-speaker turns of phrase: "your song it travelled out through desert space" says Paulin's Goethe (p. 20), rather as film characters use heavy accents to indicate they're talking a foreign language. The same poem, though, suggests what movement out of the bounds of conventional punctuation might achieve:

Your kind of verse is what I'm after
- repeat that repeat those little rills or runs
that turn into repeat this this before
they pitch and split - […]

Most strikingly, the landscape and politics of Northern Ireland are brought explicitly into many of these poems. Sometimes this can be confusing, as when Montale's Mediterranean Gulf of Poets becomes soggy Irish coastline. In a version of Simon Dach's seventeenth century "The Caravans on Lüneberg Heath" the Holocaust is oddly prefaced by a scene from the Troubles in Newry. At others though, as in the stunning (self-)portrait of "The Road to Inver", after the shape-shifting Portuguese Pessoa, this contextual "translation" brings us face to face with the original poem with all the intimacy of a reading from within its own culture.

Here Paulin shows us the paradox of translation. As his Epilogue says, "You find the poem's title/but not the poem" (p. 101); and to find that poem itself may mean not only to paraphrase the original but to "try write it out in your own form/of this language […] which again isn't /in this one-horse town/quite what you want to say." Passages like this show us the poet at work; they remind us that poetry can be a form of intellectual roman à clef. The Road to Inver is cunningly wrought, full of subtle self-allusions (Chéniér's "From the Death Cell" is followed after a decent interval by Tsvetayava's "André Chénier"): it is indeed a collection in which we can detect the Paulin's mastery of poetry in translation.

The Road to Inver (Faber & Faber) £12.99

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