Mother Courage and her children: Translated by Tom Leonard

'Hawd yer wheesht there stoap yer drum

it's mother courage this way come...'

In this translation by the distinguished Scottish poet Tom Leonard of Brecht's great 1939 anti-war play Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, the Thirty Years War becomes the War on Terror and Mother Courage is a working-class woman from the West of Scotland speaking the racy nonstandard language of Glasgow. The rest of the cast speak varieties of English language subtly shaded for irony, accent and all the social hierarchies carried by diction and regional language in a land where diction is an index of class.

Best known for his early poems in Glasgow dialect such as 'The Six o'clock News', Tom Leonard invests his translation with the arguments about language and politics that have run as a thread through all his work for almost fifty years. It is a play about the language of politics and the politics of language. As Leonard says, 'the hero of this Mother Courage is the language itself, and it is an anti-hero. Only Kattrin is allowed in her final action to be a proper hero - and she is dumb.'

'Leonard's writing has been immensely influential as a harbinger of critical change in how we think about poetry and about how literature is taught and used in schools and universities throughout the country... his work speaks for
human compassion and for the necessity "not to be complicit" in a world that is saturated with sound bites, social inequality and corporate flannel'.

Roderick Watson

Tom Leonard died in 2018. Tom Leonard's many books include a fictional biography of James Thomson, Places of the Mind, and a pioneering anthology of neglected nineteenth century Scottish poetry, Radical Renfrew. His Intimate Voices: Selected Works 1965-83 was banned from Central Region school libraries in the same year that it shared the Scottish Book of the Year Award. In 2010 his Outside the Narrative: Poems 1965-2009 was the Scottish Poetry Book of the Year. A collection of his literary and political criticism was published as Definite Articles: Selected Prose 1973-2012. A posthumous collection, of poetry and prose, passing through, was published by his family in 2021.