What can forgive us for
the clothes left lying and the rocking journey,
flashing poles and pylons standing into fields of air,
in flooded fields?
Something flew out of our hands,
the cup incomplete,
air of invasions and land of defeat.
There was the tree felled in another valley,
behind the flown carpet
and nothing left to remember, all to forgive.
Nothing to remember but
the windows slammed against the cold,
the helmet crushed down on the eyes.
And who, beside the darkened station lamp,
remembering, started back.
Eithne Wilkins, born on 12 September 1914 in the New Zealand city of Wellington, was a poet and Oxford graduate best remembered today as the co-translator, with her Austrian/Hungarian Jewish husband Ernst Kaiser, of the first English version of Robert Musil's epic fin de siécle novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften [The Man Without Qualities] (1930–1943).
Wilkins met her future husband, who had fled to England following the annexation of Austria by the Nazis on 12 March 1938, in 1946 while working as a publisher's reader and concurrently as a lecturer in German at the University of London. They married three years later and, after returning to Austria, published many co-authored translations of works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Franz Kafka, Lion Feuchtwanger, Ernst Wiechert, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, the artist Oskar Kokoschka and the composers Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg. But it was their tireless work as the translators and champions of Musil –– activities which involved extensive editorial research and saw them become instrumental in having the collection of the writer's private papers relocated to Vienna's National Library from their previous home in Rome –– that established their respective academic reputations both in the UK and internationally. (Kaiser's other career as a novelist was largely unsuccessful, with many of his manuscripts remaining unpublished at his death.)
The couple returned to England in 1968 after Wilkins was offered a new lecturing position at the University of Reading. Kaiser was appointed an Honorary Research Fellow at the same university, where for the next four years they worked side by side supervising and coordinating the activities of the Robert Musil Research Unit. Kaiser died on 1 January 1972 at the age of sixty, with Wilkins following him to the grave on 13 March 1975. While a handful of her poems were published in magazines and anthologies between 1937 and 1949, they were never collected or published in book form.
As of March 2020 Eithne Wilkins does not have a Wikipedia entry of her own. Nor are there any photographs of her available to view online.
Use the link below to read three more poems by New Zealand poet, translator and academic EITHNE WILKINS posted on the consistently interesting 'forgotten literature' website NEGLECTED BOOKS:
http://neglectedbooks.com/?p=4453
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Last updated 27 November 2022
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