"Valéry’s ‘L’art personnel’ has been replaced by Mahon’s ‘individual gifts’, and in the dead’s ‘colloquial turns of phrase, / the individual gifts and singular souls’, Valéry’s ‘Où sont des morts les phrases familières, / L’art personnel, les âmes singulières?’ are dust, but resurrected, as another metaphor for translation would have it, in the Irish poet’s colloquialism, giftedness, and singularity." Peter Robinson on Derek Mahon • Poetry London

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