Villon’s Le Testament and Other Translations is a collection of poems by the late W.J. Tait. The manuscript, which has lain in Shetland Archives since Billy’s death, has been prepared for publication by John Cumming and Mark Ryan Smith and includes forewords by both Smith and Derrick McClure of Aberdeen University.
Reviews
“What one might call Villon’s full-frontal confrontation with sex, life, death and the universe obliges the Shetland dialect to boldly go where it had not gone before.”
‘Villon: Le Testament and other translations by W J Tait’, James Robertson, The New Shetlander, Yule Issue 2011, No 258, 1st of December 2011
“To translate from French into Shetlandic is one thing. To inhabit the medieval rhythms of Villon, an almost mythic figure, who packed sex, priest – murder, chapel – robbery, banishment, reprieve, a threat of hanging, another reprieve, more banishment – into a brief 32 years in the 14 hundreds – is another thing again”
‘Villon: Le Testament and other translations by W J Tait’, Morag MacInnes, The Orcadian, 6th of October 2011