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s with one of last issue’s interviewees Stella Duffy, I first saw David Constantine read at the Word Factory, a spoken word night held at The Society Club in London. In an interview with host Cathy Galvin, Constantine gave a powerful argument for the importance of translating foreign verse into English. I felt like marching on Whitehall by the time he was done. The fact that we can devote almost the entirety of the following interview to discussions of the art and craft of translating poetry, and then a couple of weeks later learn that Constantine won the 2013 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award for his collection Tea at the Midland and Other Stories, should give you an idea of the sheer quality of this man’s writing. I talked to Constantine at his home in East Oxford. — Euan Monaghan structo: Why is it so important to bring non-native voices into English? constantine: In some ways it’s self-evident. There’s the misapprehension that if you’ve got English that is enough. Britain – and England more than Scotland or Wales – is lamentably bad at learning foreign languages and it’s been on the slide for a long time in the state schools, which is terribly bad, because whenever they decide that it is a bad thing, it’s very difficult to recover. You lose an entire generation of language teachers, and obviously the effect of that is hard to rectify. And I think that it’s because there is a perception that we don’t really need foreign languages, which is, even on the most basic or mercenary level, just not true. If you talk to any business people they know that you are at a disadvantage, in the eu especially, if you’ve only got English. And that’s my least concern. It’s also in complete contradiction to the fact of the United Kingdom, which is multicultural and multilingual. There are three hundred-plus languages spoken at home in London, and the primary school in east Oxford where my granddaughter goes has got forty or fifty languages. Which doesn’t mean the school’s a mess; it’s terribly well run and they teach in English, but the mix of kids, their parents and grandparents and the mix of cultural activity, is completely astonishing. Last night we were at what used to be Oxford School – now Oxford Spires, it’s been forced to become an Academy – at a creative writing event there. Our daughterin-law teaches there. The kids were all reading in English, they’d all written in English, and it was very, very good. Phillip Pullman was there too and he said it was one of the best events he’d ever been to. These are 14 or 15 year-old boys and girls, and their ethnic origins were manifestly various. Not just from the Indian subcontinent or black Africa, but also from Poland and so on. And that’s the fact of the matter. And yet that fact
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