Roy Campbell (poet) - Post-war Life and Works

Post-war Life and Works

For many years, Campbell worked at the BBC and remained a fixture. During a poetry recitation by the outspoken Stalinist Stephen Spender, Campbell stormed the stage and punched him. However, Spender refused to press charges, saying, "He is a great poet… We must try to understand." Spender later broke with the Communist Party of Great Britain and presented Campbell with the 1952 Foyle Prize for his verse translations of St. John of the Cross.

In 1952, the Campbells moved to Portugal. Although Estado Novo was not Fascist, emigrating to it after the War further contributed to Campbell's bad reputation among the British intelligentsia. Ironically, the regime of António de Oliveira Salazar was by then far more to Campbell's tastes than Franco's Spain, which was compromised in his mind by an intimate collaboration with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. In Portugal, he wrote a new version of his autobiography, Light on a Dark Horse. In 1953 he embarked on a lecture tour of Canada and the United States. Organized by the Canadian poet and editor John Sutherland, the tour was largely a success, though not without attacks on Campbell's "Fascistic opinions." During the 1950s, Campbell was also a contributor to The European, a magazine published in France and edited by Diana Mosley. The European could also boast contributions from Ezra Pound and Henry Williamson.

Campbell's conversion to Catholicism inspired him to write what some consider to be the finest spiritual verse of his generation. Campbell's translations of the Catholic mystical poetry by St. John of the Cross were lavishly praised by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who considered them, in some ways, superior to the original Spanish. Campbell also wrote travel guides and children's literature. He began translating poetry from languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, and French. Among the poets he translated were Francisco de Quevedo, Fernando Pessoa, Manuel Bandeira and Ruben Dario. Some of Campbell's translations of the symbolist verse of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud have appeared in modern anthologies.

Intriguingly, Campbell also produced sensitive translations into English of Federico García Lorca, an acclaimed poet who was murdered at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War by anti-communist death squads. In verse commemorating Lorca's death, Campbell wrote,

Not only did he lose his life

By shots assassinated:

But with a hammer and a knife

Was after that -- translated.

Roy Campbell died in a car accident near Setúbal, Portugal, on Easter Monday, 1957 when a car driven by his wife hit a tree. At the time of his death, he was working upon translations of 16th and 17th century Spanish plays. Although only the rough drafts were completed, Campbell's work was posthumously edited for publication by Eric Bentley: see Bentley's edition of Life Is a Dream and Other Spanish Classics (1959).