The poet and translator Charles Tomlinson owed his reputation to the first time his father took him fishing. He learnt to combine intuition with the discipline and skill required to “strike at the right moment”. Fishing would, for him, become a potent metaphor for the act of writing poetry.
Fluent in German, French, Italian and Spanish, he combined a quintessential, provincial “Englishness” with an outward-looking internationalism. His work thrived on friendships with poets across the globe — from the great American modernist William Carlos Williams to the Mexican Nobel prizewinner Octavio Paz.
His verse — which filled collections such as A Peopled Landscape, The Way of a World and Skywriting and Other Poems — often focused on the natural world. “Place speaks to me more than the dogmas of any religion, and it speaks of very fundamental things: time, death, what we have in common with the animals, what things are like when you stop to look,” he mused philosophically.
Arthur Charles Tomlinson was born in 1927 in Penkhull, Stoke-on-Trent. The son of a clerk, he attended Longton High School, where he was encouraged by a French master to read Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud (“What better beginnings could a youthful poet from a non-literary background have asked for?”). Another schoolteacher introduced him to German composers such as Kurt Weill, which also sparked his cosmopolitan approach to literature.
Aged ten, he suffered from pleurisy and rheumatic fever, and was confined to bed for two years. During this period he wrote his earliest poems after observing squirrels from his window. Despite the doctor asserting that there was no hope of survival, he went on to lead a rich and energetic life.
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He won an exhibition to Queens’ College, Cambridge, where his restless spirit often took him to the cinema and distracted him from his English degree. Deemed a hopeless case by his tutor, he was passed on to another — Donald Davie, himself a poet, who gave his tutee an anthology of works by Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. Tomlinson was captivated.
On graduating in 1948 he married Brenda Raybould, whom he first met as a teenager. She had been head girl at a neighbouring school in Stoke and later studied art history at the Courtauld Institute. The year that they married, he decided to pursue a career as an artist. The idea had come to him one afternoon at the Fitzwilliam Museum when he was galvanised by a certain French painter. “Discovering Cézanne,” he declared, “feels like something between the sudden awareness of a vitamin deficiency in one’s own body and undergoing a conversion”.
He supplemented his income as a graphic artist with teaching in Camden schools. Despite exhibitions in London and Manchester, he turned his attention elsewhere when he heard of a job on the Italian coast at Lerici as a secretary to Percy Lubbock, the critic and friend of Henry James. Tomlinson and his wife created an idyll abroad in which to read, write and paint.
Among Lubbock’s visitors was one EM Forster, who, having been brought over to meet Tomlinson at work, inspected each of his paintings. The dismayed artist was sure he detected boredom on Forster’s face. Equally memorable from his time in Italy were the nights he spent carousing over red wine with his neighbours — though this meant mastering considerable bladder control as their home had no water closet. One of life’s greatest pleasures, he would later insist, was the long-delayed micturition in an olive grove by moonlight.
Returning to England, he took up a research scholarship at Royal Holloway. In 1956 he was offered a post at Bristol University, where he became a professor and remained until retirement in 1992.
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On the success of his second poetry collection, Seeing is Believing, he won an international travelling fellowship and spent six months exploring America by Greyhound bus. During that time he met many of his literary heroes, including Williams at his home in New Jersey. They struck up an instant rapport, with Williams advising his new friend as he turned to leave: “Take care of yourself. Poetry is a tough business.” Tomlinson got on well, too, with Marianne Moore, whom he visited in Brooklyn and who became a great admirer of his work. He later edited anthologies of critical essays on Moore and selected works by Williams, and acknowledged his poetic debt to them in his book Some Americans.
Another trip to the US brought him into contact with the poet Louis Zukofsky; having driven Tomlinson to the bus stop for his return journey they talked animatedly — until realising that a bus had not arrived for half an hour because they were, in fact, beneath a no-parking sign.
In addition to his own verse, Tomlinson was an authoritative translator — particularly of Spanish and Italian poetry — who edited The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation, published in 1980. It was a magisterial volume in which he collated 600 poems and extracts ranging over five centuries and hailing from China to Peru. “This latest Oxford anthology,” The Times literary editor Philip Howard wrote in his review, “uncovers seams of forgotten gold and other shiny metals.”
The undertaking had been inspired by Tomlinson’s collaboration with Octavio Paz on Airborn/Hijos del aire, a bilingual edition of sonnets they composed together. “I simultaneously came to realise,” Tomlinson reflected, “just how many of our poets, going back to Chaucer, had been great translators, all the time extending the possibilities of English by introducing new forms and new ideas for poetry.” His “Clark Lectures”, delivered in Cambridge in 1982, meditated on the nature of translation and were published the following year as Poetry and Metamorphosis.
With Brenda, who survives him, he had two daughters. Both became professional musicians: Juliet is a cellist and Justine is a violinist.
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Tomlinson re-created the charming isolation he experienced in Italy at his home in Gloucestershire, which deliberately had no phone line. Brook Cottage, tucked away on a narrow country lane, was by all accounts a poet’s paradise. He was regularly visited by leading figures in the arts world — including Ted Hughes, George Oppen and John Berger, who were all close friends. His most recent collection of poems, Cracks in the Universe, was published in 2006.
Despite the admiration Tomlinson won in literary circles, he bore no trace of egotism or vanity. His last years were spent in ailing health — two failed cataract operations left him virtually blind — but his family did their utmost to care for him. His poetic voice, resonant in works such as The Mausoleum, will continue to ring out for years to come:
The light withdraws and the shadow
softens
Until it floats unnameably, gathered up
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Into the colourless medium of early
dusk.
Charles Tomlinson, CBE, poet, artist and translator, was born on January 8, 1927. He died after a long illness on August 22, 2015, aged 88