'He pauses in an astounding landscape, almost afraid to move. When he moves, he is no longer himself. And that is it' - Edwin Morgan, 'The Translation of Poetry'

- It's unpleasantly like being drunk.
- What's unpleasant about being drunk?
- Ask a glass of water. - Douglas Adams, The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

It is not just the profusion and variety of Edwin Morgan's translation work that surprises: it is the quality, the rarity of some pieces - the improbable Aigi, the trove of Hungarian poetry done into English. I have set as many of the originals as I could locate and understand against the translations, which leaves plenty of opportunity for further study, since Morgan has translated into English and Scots from Italian, Russian, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Anglo-Saxon, ancient Greek, Dutch, Khmer, Armenian and Hungarian - working with cribs on the last three, although he now gets by in Hungarian.
He is not unique in this respect, but the culmination of a movement in modern Scottish poetry. In the 1920s Donald MacAlister, then Principal of Glasgow University, translated from and into many classical and modern languages; he seemed to have a particular weakness for Welsh Romany. MacAlister contributed to the Scottish Chapbook, whose editor, C.M. Grieve, was quite a different kind of translator. Lacking MacAlister's gift for foreign languages, he was far more intimate with his own. MacAlister was followed, more or less, by Douglas Young, MacDiarmid by Goodsir Smith. Many Scottish poets then and since have produced fine versions from foreign originals, although none matches Morgan's range or excels him in quality.
The aim of this essay is to assess his translation technique, consider his theoretical statements on translation, and ask how his translation work relates to his poetry.
Morgan takes poets at their word. When it comes to a choice, as it does at every turn, he tends to let line-break, rhythm or rhyme, image or argument or syntax go rather than lose the simple sense. Consider the first four verses of a dizain by Maurice Scève in Morgan's version:

Comme corps mort vagant en haulte Mer,
esbat des Ventz, & passetemps des Undes,
j'errols gottant parmy ce Gouffre amer,
ou mes soucys endent vagues profondes.

Wanderer: drowned body in the open sea:
shuttlecock, plaything and mock of wave
and wind: bitter the gulf: waverer
buoyed on my own unfathomed misery - (FR, 46-7)

In the first verse every semantic load-bearing word has been translated ('Wanderer' does for 'vagant') but the effect is not the same. It comes as a shock in that book, after reading through poems replete with conceits on evenings and glances, woods and golden locks, to find a corpse floating in the first verse. Morgan does not use a simile to set up the effect, and he breaks it up with a colon. This is almost a caricatural illustration of the points I set out to show: the sense of the verse is kept but line-breaks, rhythm (dodgy first line), image, argument, syntax and rhyme all go by the board as Morgan uses enjambement, punctuation, and expectance of a verb that doesn't show up to make a much more choppy sea than Scève's. It should not be concluded that this is simply a bad translation. Morgan has decided to make the first four verses rough, and that has involved the (regretted) sacrifice of the powerful first line, but the continuation of his version shows he is quite capable of keeping to the shape of the original, and the last line skilfully explains the sense of the French without expanding it: 'tout estourdy point ne me congnoissoys' - 'I am dazzled, struck; I am hidden from my mind'.
These points have to be pursued with a few more examples. In Morgan's translations there are remarkable few unforced errors - by which I mean semantic distortions not made inevitable by rhyme or rhythm. The ones I found were as follows: in 'Goya', by Voznesensky (RP, 18), 'voronka' is 'bomb crater' not 'raven' (vorona), although since both images are suggested elsewhere in this short poem, it might be simply a shift of emphasis; judging by the grammar, Quasimodo's 'morte di pietà,/moerte di pudore' at the end of 'Letter to my Mother' could be either 'compassion is dead, modesty is dead' or 'compassionate death, tactful death' - Morgan's 'Death of compassion,/death of quietness' hardly allows the second alternative; similarly, Montale's description of himself 'uomo che tarda/all'atto, che nessuno, poi,
distrugge' might just be 'a man perplexed, /tardy to act when no act is destroyed' (from 'Mediterranean', RP, 62) or maybe he is saying that when he gets round to doing something, no one undoes it. There are always such nits for the picking, but in the end the only real mistake I found was in both Morgan's versions of 'A se stesso' by Leopardi, where Morgan has him spurn nature at the end, instead of himself.
Morgan's semantic fidelity sometimes results in too much clarification, something he himself warns against: 'the process of trying to understand the foreign poem always tempts us to make the translation a little clearer or simpler than the original, and this may have a weakening effect.' A Frenchman whom I asked to check Morgan's translations of Maurice Scève found himself returning to the translation on difficult points in the French. Scève has a reputation for obscurity earned by lines such as the following:

tout lieu distant, du jour et de la nuict,
tout intervalle, ô qui par trop me nuyt,
seront rempliz de ta doulce rigueur,

Anyone would expect a 'toi' before the 'qui', and without it the expectation generated by this already long sentence is cranked up still further. Morgan's version gives the game away before the end:

regions remote from night or turned from day,
all space, O my too rigourous friend, will be
filled with your sweet but changeless cruelty. (FR, 50-51)

It is difficult to see what else could have been done there, but the explicative instinct that irons out the grammar is the same urge that treats semantic ambiguities, such as those mentioned above, with a little too much decision.
Just as he is faithful to the sense of the original, Morgan is quite determined to add nothing of his own. A search for counter-examples produced the following: in Montale's 'Arsenio', '…oh troppo noto / delirio, Arsenio, d'immobilità' becomes '…oh delirious / memory, Arsenio, of marmoreality' (RP, 65). 'Marmoreality' is a fine, original touch. The penultimate line of Voznesensky's 'Parabolic Ballad', which literally translates as 'he leaves tonight for Siberia' becomes 'Galoshes flounder through a Siberian thaw', so that Voznesensky gains something in translation.
Because he refuses to add to the original, Morgan is at times compelled to pad. 'I've closed my balcony' ('He cerrado mi balcon') in Lorca's 'Casida del lianto' becomes 'My balcony I've drawn, I've shut it' (RP, 120); 'Terribly silent' in Yevtushenko's poem 'Stalin's Heirs' becomes 'voicelessly loud with dread' (RP, 29); similarly, 'O znal by ja, where Pasternak seems to imitate the laconic punch of Raleigh's 'On the Life of Man', with its closure 'Thus march we playing to our latest rest, / Only we dye in earnest, that's no Jest', is neither laconic nor punchy in Morgan's version:

neither patter nor legerdemain
nor read-out speech redeems the player
cued for complete decease unfeigned (RP, 33)

On rare occasions this padding distorts the argument of the poem; here is Morgan's version of Montale's 'Spesso il male' (Ossi di Seppia, 54) with brackets round Morgan's interpolations:

Often I've met the wrong of the world (in my walk:)
(there by) the strangled brook with its guttural song
(there with) the puckerings of the (thirsty tongue
of a) parched leaf, (there by) the horse that fell and shook.

Little I knew but what I saw (in a rune)
a vision of the divine Unconcern:
(there by) the statue in the drowsy sun
at noon, and the cloud, and the heaven-climbing hawk. (RP, 59)

The concision of the first stanza has been sacrificed to make it match the second, with its fine, clinching line. To put Morgan's technique in perspective, though, we should compare it with that of William Soutar, or Robert Lowell. Of Morgan's version of 'Verses on Pushkin: Third Variation' by Pasternak, we might quibble that the ink on the manuscript mentioned is drying, not dry; as for Soutar's version, it is not immediately apparent that it it the same poem. In his imitation of Montale's 'Dora Markus II', Lowell is much more exact than Morgan on the mysterious lines

Ravenna è lontana, distilla
veleno una fede feroce (Le Occasioni, 1976)

Ravenna is far away, A ferocious faith
distils its venom (Imitations, 1962)

far off is Ravenna; beliefs
are fierce and strong with death. (RP, 68)

But Ravenna is very far away from Lowell's American Dora, who saunters in her aura of sugar daddies and harmonicas.
This brings us to the least quantifiable point on Morgan's translation technique - his fidelity to the tone of the orignal. In this field individual examples could hardly convince; we have to try from another angle. It will be admitted that a poem cannot be translated on a word-for-word basis, Something has to inform the whole translation. There are obvious mechanical ways of doing this, but Morgan often neglects them; he is quite capable, in translating a renaissance sonnet, of producing a decasyllable with twelve, thirteen, fourteen or nine syllables (FR, 21, 37, 39), and of more or less neglecting the rhythm of a poem for children such as Brecht's 'The Plum-Tree' ('Der Pflaumenbaum', RP, 141); compare Michael Hamburger's version in Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913-1956 (London: Methuen, 1981, 243). What he never lets go if he can help it is the tone of the original. He even faithfully renders Voznesensky's studies in cool with suitably farout language, of beats and bums, and birds from restaurants, since he would sooner traduce his own voice than that of the original. For the same reason, he avoids hermeneutic translation: he neither naturalises his original (like Lowell's Montale) nor updates it (like Logue's Homer), nor turns it into his own poem (like Goodsir Smith's second version of Sappho). He will, on occasion, 'make it strange', as Shklovsky might have said, but this, I hope to show, is a different matter. Morgan's best translations are from poets whose formal structure can be rendered loosely - Montale, Leopardi, Mayakovsky. The perhaps surprising conclusion is that, as far as translation is concerned, Morgan is not centrally concerned with form, but rather with the sense of the word and the tone of the poem. The rest is instrumental.
Reading Morgan's books of translations after his poems can give the eerie impression of dealing with an identikit poet. He begins conventionally enough with apprenticeship in the sonnet from Petrarch et al., and essays in discursive forms from the Anglo-Saxon onwards. In the 1960s Morgan tries the more eye-catching forms of Gomringer and Braga. But he takes more than forms from other poets: there is something familiar in the arbitrary exotica of the Lorca translations ('Live iguanas arrive to gnaw the insomniacs / and the heartbroken man on the run will meet at streetcorners / the quite incredible crocodile beneath the soft protest of the stars', RP, 118). In fact, Lorca's 'Asesinato' looks like a blueprint for Morgan's 'The Barrow':

Murder
(Two voices at Dawn in Riverside Drive, New York)
- How did it - ?
- Scratch on the cheek,
that's all. claw
pounding on a green
shoot. Pin plunging
to meet the root of the scream,
and the sea stops moving.
- But how - how?
- Like this.
- Get away from me! That way?
- Sure, The heart
went out alone.
- Oh no, oh god - (RP, 118)

. . . The fog was really thick, but then
someone came up out of the fog
and I shouted HELP and rattled the barrow,
and he came up closer and looked at me
and felt the bars, but not a word,
and I couldn't really see his face,
and you know this is when something happened

- He robbed you, I knew it, dirty thief,
it was all a plant, it was a trap to

- No he wasn't after my money.
- He had something in his hand you see

- What do you mean in his hand? his hand?

- He had something in his hand. He killed me. (P, 258)

Mayakovsky's 'A Richt Respeck for Cuddies' (WHV, 30) leads on to a paean for the timber wolf ('The Third Day of the Wolf', P, 132), and in the general progression from the isolated observer of nature to the morally committed, political outsider (Leopardi to Voznesensky via Montale, Pasternak and Mayakovsky), there are facets of Morgan the poet. There is even the unpredictable formal trickster in the person of Sandor Weöres, whom Morgan has translated in abundance. It's like the king's clothes, without the king. All that's missing from the translations is the stark simplicity of some of Morgan's love poems.
On the other hand, it is Morgan who chooses what to translate (and what commissions to accept): Montale not Pasolini, Mayakovsky not Mandelstam, Aigi not Brodsky, Brecht not Rilke. Of course he was not faced with these choices in the form of alternatives, but putting it like this highlights the selections Morgan has made. There is a degree of ventriloquy in verse translation, and at times it is difficult to tell which is the operator and which the dummy. Maybe his own comments on translation policy can help us out.
In an article comparing Gavin Douglas and William Drummond as translators, Morgan says:
Between the times of Douglas and Drummond the Renaissance ideas in Imitation are the great divide. To Douglas, Virgil was Virgil, whether in Latin or in Scots -'Go, wulgar (i.e. vernacular) Virgill . . .' as he says at the end. But Drummond had no hesitation in publishing as his own a large number of poems which ran the gamut from close translation to loose imitation or paraphrase, taken from Italian, French, Spanish, Latin and even English. Some of his best-known poems are in fact direct translations, though the average reader who comes across them in anthologies will be unaware of the fact. A measure of moral blame has attached to Drummond for this, especially as he quite naughtily does label some poems 'translations', but never the best ones. But this is an area we today have to walk in rather warily. A property-conscious, copyright-conscious world is not the best vantage-point for understanding the subtleties of the communion of European writers, a vast web of ideals and traditions shading off in each country into finer and finer distinctions and measures of vernacular or personal variation. Drummond relished these European blueprints not simply because, as Ben jonson claimed, he was conservative or old-fashioned, but also because the doctrine suited the subtle and delicate movement of his own mind: the making of small distinctions, the slight renewal or slewing round of established metaphors or comparisons, the infusion of a personality drop by drop into a tradition - these are what Drummond wanted and got from his habit of translation.
('Gavin Douglas and William Drummond as Translators', 198) Morgan is like Douglas in that he views the original as the touchstone, the essential constant in the practice of translation. He is like Drummond in that he likes to explore the transmutation effected when the foreign poem comes into his own language. Yet he wants neither literary monuments nor cannibalised texts; he has not tackled the translation of a celebrated classic poem, just as he has avoided hermeneutics, where the kind of fusion that can produce brilliant effects always erodes the boundary between original and translation. Stop at this point and think of a famous translation. Or ten famous translations. The King James Bible? Constance Garnett's Dostoevsky? Urquhart? Fitzgerald? Translations tend to be famous either because the original was a famous classic and the translator was there at the right time, or because the translator left a powerful personal stamp on the work. So what's in it for Morgan? He has made a lot of translations, many of them unpublished. My own, limited experience of verse translation tells me that, given thorough knowledge of the work and its cultural and linguistic nexus, and given the luck to hit on a good approach quickly, a good translation of an eight-line poem might be made in a day. My experience of payment for verse translation is even more limited, though 1 am told there is not much money in it. Having considered how and what Morgan translates it is probably worth asking why he translates.
In a review of Robin Fulton's translation of Blok's 'Twelve', Morgan alludes to the totally different approach to the poem taken by Sidney Goodsir Smith in his (Scots) version, and comments that there is more than one valid route up the mountain. I have always found this a very suggestive comment and wish Morgan had developed it. Whoever has tried to translate a lyric will know the feeling of nearly getting there and having to abandon the attempt, because a crucial rhyme is missing, or a notion can't be negotiated with the materials to hand. A famous example is Pushkin's 'ja vas ljubil' - 'I loed ye but. Aiblins intil my briest', in Morgan's version (Voice of Scotland VI: 1, April 1955). The first three words of the Russian have stymied all attempts: 'I loved you', 'you' in the polite form, whereas love lyrics from Petrarch onwards have used the intimate form. In those three words the author acknowledges that the intimacy is gone forever. Douglas Young, too, translated it into Scots, and not satisfied with that tried to put it into German (using 'du" for some reason, instead of 'Sie').
The comparison of poem to mountain and translation to route would also seem to suggest that a translation is radically different from a poem: ephemeral and dependent rather than substantial and rooted. This may be connected with what Waiter Benjamin says in 'The Task of the Translator', which Morgan commends in a paper entitled 'The Third Tiger: The Translator as Creative Communicator' (delivered at Glasgow University on 3 June 1988). It may be connected, but since I do not understand Benjamin 1 turn to Morgan's comments:

'… Is there some interface that makes translation possible?
This is what Walter Benjamin thought, in his essay, 'The Task of the Translator' (1923), and I think most translators would agree with him, although it's an elusive and difficult idea. Benjamin wrote: 'If there is such a thing as a language of truth, the tensionless and even silent depository of the ultimate truth which all thought strives for, then this language . . . is concealed in concentrated fashion in translations . . . It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work' (trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations, 1973), It is as if the translator had to get behind the words of the foreign poem, through his understanding of them, through his analysis of their meaning and their associations, until he is in touch with a deverbalized poem, a brain pattern (possibly) of nervous or electrical energy which he can then reverbalize into his own language. One is reminded of the search of machine translation for an interlingua, a computer language, or even perhaps a spoken language, like the South American Indian language Aymara which has been tried out because it has an extremely regular and complex grammatical structure capable of containing other languages as subsets'. If there is anything in Benjamin's idea, it makes for a different conception of fidelity in translation, a more creative fidelity if that is not a contradiction in terms. If you are in touch with the mysterious hidden 'real' poem underneath the surface foreign words, you will start your translation on a deeper and less conscious level; things, solutions will fly into your head suddenly and seem right without their being plodding word-for-word equivalents.'

Now this is hard to follow, or swallow, accommodating as it does three radically different versions of the 'interface': Benjamin's cabalistic notion of a language of truth in the mind of God, a Chomskian view of 'a deverbalized poem, a brain pattern (possibly) of nervous or electrical energy', and an elusive interlingua, artificial or Amerindian. What this amounts to is that Morgan feels the poems is drawn out of the source language into some other medium, before being reconstructed in the target language. I have heard Morgan say that he doesn't like to delve too much into the sources of his poetry for fear of rationalising it out of existence. I think it's possible to go a little further into his translation technique without doing any harm. The title of his paper is drawn from a poem by Borges, 'El Otro Tigre', 'The Other Tiger' in Thomas di Giovanni's translation, which Morgan reproduces. The third tiger, as Morgan sees it, the one not caught in the words, is 'the sub-verbal tiger of the interface'. It is as though (forgive a technical translator) the Spanish and English texts were two instruction manuals for a piece of (Platonic) earth-moving equipment, the 'real thing' the words only talk about. The other poem Morgan adduces to illustrate his point is an elegy on the poet's mother by Attila Jozsef. Morgan observes, '…the language is simple and direct, with no punctuation, and the verse is free, but the woman in the poem has such reality that you pierce right through the words and seem to see her and her relationship to the speaker before and after death, all in one pattern of perceptions'. Here we might object that mother, and tiger, are archetypes: the non-verbal unity there is not independent of words, but outwith the poem. The notion doesn't work at all for, say, Mayakovsky's 'Fiddle-ma-Fidgin', or Morgan's own Newspoems - most of his work in fact, where the poem, the co-ordinates of the event, are sound, sense, rhythm, rhyme, line, local history etc and most have to be changed to suit the other observer's standpoint; these aren't ghosts waiting to be painted, but pure constructs.
What are we to make of Morgan's 'translation interface'? Is it mystic, physiological, linguistic, Platonic or archetypal? Maybe each of them by turns. For Morgan it works and that's what matters to him. His most entertaining translations make the audience aware of it as well.
La farce de Maître Pierre Pathelin, an anonymous work of the fifteenth century, was translated for the stage by Edwin Morgan, In one scene the draper goes to Pathelin's home to collect the money he is owed. pathelin feigns madness, uttering a tremendous tirade of flapdoodle, to the consternation of the draper and the amusement of his wife, in about seven different languages or dialects: Limousin, Picardy and Norman French, Flemish, French with a Breton accent, Breton with a French accent, Lorrainese and Latin. Five centuries on, this is probably more fun for scholars than for audiences. The edition I consulted has a footnote for every word of nonsense, which helps us compare the first two parts of Pathelin's diatribe (which I have translated from Limousin and Picardy via modern French) with Morgan's version:

PATHELIN: Crowned Mother of God, my faith, I want to go away, I renounce God, overseas. God's belly, I say flute! Don't make a racket, do your sums! Don't let him talk to me about money. Do you understand, dear cousin?

GUILLEMETTE (the wife): He had a Limousin uncle, his great-aunt's brother. I'm sure that's why he's blethering in Limousin.

THE DRAPER: Hell! He's gone off his trolley, with my cloth under his oxter!

PATHELIN: Come in, sweet lady. What do all these toads want? Back off, you heap of shite! Quick! I want to be a priest. Come on! Let the devil take his place in this nest of old priests! And should the priest really be laughing when he ought to be singing his mass?

Morgan's version:
PATHELIN: Och, the howe-dumb-deid's ay brattlin,
The ugsom eeries are sae ferlie,
It's fell the fremd ma tirly-mirly,
And fient a jouk a jaup the toaly.
Wee chookie-burdie's melanchoaly.
Ah cannae smoch the hough an aa.
Forforchen auchter larder waa.
Bawbees for kimmers, nane for you.

GUILLEMETTE: You see he lived once at Tamdhu
With his Scotch uncle, a whisky man
At the distillery, one of the clan,
His aunt's husband. So he speaks Scots.

DRAPER: The Devil cannot change his spots
He's spiriting my cloth to the tomb.

PATHELIN: Wie eine Blume dada zum,
Und Merz und Herz so kunterbunter,
Kuckuckverein einander unter,
Uber alles immer Geld.
O, was fur ein Haifischfeld!
Sind Sie Sie von Sinnen siechen
Rosenkrank und Guldensieben

Are dead und on ze Toten-pole. (MPP, 39)

And so it continues to custard-pie its way through Italian, Russian and Latin. There won't be a footnote for every word of Morgan's version, because he has brought it back to the theatre: one person is talking to two others; one of them is listening earnestly and the other is enjoying the spectacle.
Is the inscrutable interface anything other than the space between two people, one speaking and the other listening? Whatever their respective languages? It is this specific phase in translation, or translation as a verbal enactment of this fraught transition, that is so central to Morgan's work.
The foreign reader sees a poem shorn of the day-to-day, the ephemeral; its outline is clearer, its context and associations less so, its register and accent might not be caught. (Maybe this helps explain why the likes of Poe and Byron could mean more at times to the French and Germans than to native English speakers.) The situation has its advantages and its drawbacks. At times the reader has the impression of going right to the heart of the poem while being unsure of the tense of a verb or the sense of a noun. Who knows? maybe the author would have left blanks at those points if he could decently have done so, but felt obliged to fill them in, thus ruining the thing for native speakers. Here is what Edwin Morgan writes on first encounters with poems to be translated:
But again this early reading ought perhaps to be fairly impressionistic, since it is important to remain faithful to these shocks and splashes of impact, representing as they do one's first sudden glimpses of the foreign poet's world, the poet's foreign world, which one is about to enter. For example, long before one fully understands a difficult poem by Eugenio Montale, his world stirs and reveals itself.. there is a shimmer, a play of light on water and on crumbling buildings, a face glancing in a mirror, an accordion being played in the twilight . . . Absorbing this atmosphere is a step in comprehension, and one grasps at this point not only the tone of the particular poem but the signature of the author's style; one begins to sense his 'hand', his way of putting things. At this stage, too, most poems yield more unmistakable pleasure than they do at any later moment of understanding . . . ('The Translation of Poetry', 2 1)
What Morgan does with his Mayakovsky translations is to convey this 'first sudden glimpse of the foreign poet's world'; he gives us not Mayakovsky as an ideal Russian reader would understand him, but Mayakovsky as Morgan found him - full of strange invention, glinting with unfamiliar words. Morgan is not a native speaker of Scots, nor are most of his readers: he introduces the translations, in print and on stage, in English. Consider 'Ay, but can ye?', the first poem in Wi the haill voice, and one of Mayakovsky's earliest.

Wi a jaup the darg-day map's owre-pentit
I jibbled colour fae a tea-gless;
ashets o jellyteen presentit
to me the great sea's camshach cheek-bleds.
A tin fish, ilka scale a mou -
I've read the cries of a new warld through't.
But you
wi denty thrapple
can ye wheeple
nocturnes fae a rone-pipe flute?

Early Russian audiences, too, must have found these futurist pieces very foreign. 1 have a recording of Mayakovsky reading this poem as late as the mid- 1920s: he declaims it in the heroic mode, as though it were the introduction to 'The Bronze Horseman' rather than a wry
riddle. He made it strange - a practice the Formalists prized - and he kept it strange.
We can see how Morgan works towards this effect from his rough translation into English:

Hoof beats rang
Apology for a song:
Crap
Crop
Crape
Croup

Drunk in the bluster,
With ice for shoe-leather,
The street slipped along,
The horse came a cropper
Down on its crapper,
and presto
The open mouths mooched together,
Gaper behind gaper, all in a cluster…

(Glasgow University Library, MS Morgan 105)

Horse-cluifs clantert
giein their patter:
crippity
crappity
croupity
crunt.

Bleezed in the blafferts,
wi ice-shoggly bauchles,
the street birled and stachert.
The cuddy cam clunk,
cloitit doon doup-scud,
and wheech
but the muckle-mou'd moochers werna lang
in makin theirsels thrang… (WHV, 30)

Pruning articles and prepositions, grafting on a verb or two, fusing alliteration with simple sound effects so the sense has to be sought out, all delivered in street-Scots stiffened with dictionary words, it now works more like the original:

Bili kopyta,
Peli budto:
- Grib.
Grab.
Grob.
Grub. -

Vetrom opita,
l'dom obuta,
ulitsa skol'zila
loshad' na krup
grohnulas',
i srazu
za zevakoi zevaka... (Mayakovsky, II, 10)

In 'The Ballad o the Rid Cadie' (WHV, 29), Morgan matches Mayakovsky in his sound effects, where the sounds of 'Cadet laddie', 'bluid-rid cadie' proliferate through the first half of the poem, till 'Like grumphies in claver lived the haill Cadet caboodle, / the Cadet and his cadaddy and his grampacadoodle' - then they are overtaken by the wind and the wowfs of the 'revo-wheesht though - LUTION', leaving nothing but the moral of the tale. In 'Eupatoria' (WHV, 70), Morgan definitely goes one better, ringing the changes on the title, from sanatorium to Eupatorianity - just as he does in 'Versailles'(WHV, 48), where 'Pompadour' engenders Pompadusas, Pompadoris, and Pompadorchester suite.
At the end of 'Mayakonferensky's Anectidote', immediately after a few verses of bureaucratic English (the backward elements in these translations all speak English - bureaucratic, banal or Mills & Boon) there is a send-off in neologised, legal-Latinate Scots:

I canny sleep for waumlin thochts.
Nicht's haurdly gane.
Day loups. I see't aa plain:
'Oh for
yin mair
sederunt to convene
to congree to conclude
to comblasticastraflocate sans avizandum
ilka sederunt and tap-table-tandem!' (WHV, 44)

The message comes across straight away, but it keeps fizzing and sparking for some time afterwards. We get the delight of engaging with Mayakovsky's work - as when the man himself is praising Brooklyn Bridge:
It's prood I am
o this
wan mile o steel,
my veesions here
tak vive and forcy form-
a fecht
for construction
abune flims o style,
a strang,
trig-riveted grid,
juist whit steel's for!
('Brooklyn Brig', WHV, 61)

In the end, though, English is the chosen language of most Morgan's translation work, and in it he pursues a different strategem, aiming for a transparency of language that distracts as little as possible from the original. It works very well, especially in the versions of Weores and Jozsef, and other Hungarian poets: it also seems to be a good glaze to apply to Pushkin.
At times it may be felt that there is too much self-abnegation on the translator's part: I am sure that the lexis of Edwin Morgan's poems is much larger than that of his translations, and that the direct speech in his poems, which is always, individual, is never so bland as in his translations. His recent work, though, has a still finer finish than, for example, the early Scève dizains. Reading Weöres or Joszef in English I hardly think of the translator at all. And that is as it should be.