Book Info
During hectic years as a teacher and translator, the writing of these poems provided a welcome retreat into the imagination for William Radice; hence the book’s title, which is also the title of its central section. The word also has poignant personal associations for the poet, ‘The Retreat' being the name of the Cambridge house of his friend Juan Mascara, the brilliant translator of the Penguin classics editions of the Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads and Dhammapada. Radice has edited mascara; 's aphorisms and uses one of them as the epigraph to this collection. Readers of Radice’s earlier books – his collections of verse as well as his translations from Bengali – will welcome this substantial addition to this oeuvre. Written in the form of a verse diary the short, forthright, neatly-crafted pieces in this collection mark an interesting new development in the poet’s career.
William Radice
William Radice has pursued a double career as a poet and as a scholar and translator of Bengali. He studied English at Oxford, where he won the Newdigte Prize for poetry in 1971 and wrote his first book, Eight Sections (Secker & Warburg, 1974). He went on to do a Diploma in Bengali at the School of Orient & African Studies (SOAS), London. After five years working as a psychiatric nurse and a schoolmaster, he returned to Oxford to write a D.Phil. thesis on Michael Madhusudun Datta. In 1990 he became Lecturer in Bengali at SOAS. His publications include two more books of verse (Strivings, 1980 and Louring Skies, 1985, both published by Anvil Press), Selected Poems, and Selected Short
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