The Gordon Brotherston Papers comprise circa 1000 pages of documentary materials. The vast majority of this material is original correspondence (a mixture of typescript and handwritten), which has never been available for research. The Papers represent, therefore, a previously unknown yet highly significant aspect of post-war small press poetry culture—a developing speciality of Sheffield’s Special Collections due to the Small Press Poetry Collection—particularly focused around international connections, Latin America, and translation.

Around half of the papers are made up of correspondence and manuscripts relating to Brotherston’s extensive translation collaborations with the major US poet Edward Dorn across four decades, from their first meeting at the University of Essex in 1965 through to the publication of their collected translations in 1999, the year of Dorn’s death. Several of the letters dating from the 1970s were written during Dorn’s sojourn at Healdsburg, California with the Zephyrus Image crowd. The other half of the papers comprise original correspondence from a wealth of important figures in European, North and Latin American letters, including: Donald Davie; Tom Raworth; José Emilio Pacheco; Anselm Hollo; Gunnar Harding; John Bierhorst; Mario Vargas Llosa; and Pablo Neruda. Due to the variety and significance of the correspondents, as well as the historical and institutional contexts that surround these letters, they constitute a primary resource of great importance for researchers in the fields of post-war literary studies, particularly poetry; translation and comparative literature; and Mesoamerican studies. Many of the international literary and scholarly relationships fostered by this academic environment, particularly between British and Latin American writers and intellectuals, are represented by original material in the Brotherston Papers. In terms of scholarly significance, the Edward Dorn letters and translation materials are a vital counterpart to the extant holdings in the Edward Dorn Papers at the Dodd Center, University of Connecticut. The translation materials cover the full extent of the Dorn-Brotherston collaborations, from guerrilla lyric in the 1960s, via major twentieth-century Latin American poets such as Pacheco, Vallejo and Marco Antonio Montes de Oca, to the project that would become most important to Brotherston’s scholarly work: translations of Mesoamerican poetry, in this case from Nahuatl (Cantares Mexicanos and others) and Yucatec Maya (Chilam Balam books and others).

In addition to the Dorn correspondence, there are hand-written and typescript original letters to Gordon Brotherston from a range of internationally important poets, translators, and scholars. The collection includes letters from British poet Tom Raworth (including enclosed drafts, Christmas cards, postcards, etc.). Aside from Raworth, the most substantial and significant of British correspondents are: British scholar and poet Donald Davie, the first head of the Department of Literature at the University of Essex; poet and editor of Stand Jon Silkin; Hispanist Roy Jones; Hispanist Edward Wilson; J. M Cohen at Penguin Books; poet Tony Lopez; David Tipton, co-editor of the Lima-based 1960s poetry journal Haravec; poet Charles Tomlinson; poet and translator Michael Horowitz; and Polish novelist and translator Jan Józef Szczepański. Gordon Brotherston is one of Britain’s most prominent Latin Americanists, who played a central role in the establishment of the discipline in the UK and worldwide, and his Papers contain highly significant correspondence from Latin American literary figures. The most substantial of these include letters from: Chilean writer and critic Cristián Huneeus; Mexican poet José Emilio Pacheco; Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa; Mexican poet Marco Antonio Montes de Oca; Chilean writer and scholar José Donoso; Chilean novelist and diplomat Jorge Edwards; Mexican novelist and poet Fernando del Paso; and Cuban poet and member of the Unión de Escritores de la Habana, José Rodríguez. There are also single letters from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes. Along with Pacheco and Vargas Llosa, the four represent some of the major figures in twentieth-century Latin American letters.

As well as his sustained friendship and collaboration with Dorn, Brotherston maintained connections with other US scholars, poets and translators. From the USA, the papers include letters from: John Bierhorst, specialist in Latin American folklore and mythology; poet and director of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Paul Engle; writer and editor of North Atlantic Books, Richard Grossinger; poet and translator Nathaniel Tarn; poet and translator Clayton Eshleman; and poet Robert Duncan. Lastly, correspondence from European writers includes letters from: Josie Hollo/Finnish poet and translator Anselm Hollo; Lotte Harding/Swedish poet and translator Gunnar Harding; Spanish writer and critic Ricardo Gullón; and French poet and translator Pierre Joris.