RB  The Manager started ‘happening’ around 1978. The Athenian poet Nasos Vayenas was living in Cambridge, doing research on George Seferis for his PhD at King’s. Nasos is a wonderful poet, a precious intellect, a far-sighted critic. He’s now Professor of Comparative Literature at Athens. They even set up anew Chair for him. Anyway, in 1978, he’d written a poem in nineteen short sections, entitled Biography, which had just been published in Greece. He and I decided to translate it together. So I had the benefit of his insights and explanations during the whole process of translation. That was a fine and fascinating experience.

Whenever I’m involved in translating a text that really excites me, I find I get into the spirit of the thing pretty deeply. And it goes on working inside me long after the technical business of choosing this or that word or phrase or expression as the best ‘fit’ is over and done with. Well, this is just what happened with Nasos’s Biography. Late one night, I’d just finished typing out the whole English version, and suddenly found myself doodling in my notebook and writing (not translating) what seemed like more ‘parts’ of Biography, or at least spin-offs from Biography. And several of these bits and pieces came out at great speed and completely effortlessly. So then, maybe as a kind of jeu d’ésprit, I had the idea of presenting Nasos with some ‘new’ sections of his own Biography – but ones he hadn’t written himself. I knew this would be completely in tune with his own Borgesian sense of humour. Then suddenly, I looked again at my doodles, and saw them in a new light. I realised with a kind of shock that they didn’t belong to Biography at all, that they were the first beginnings of something new. Something of my own.

These were the first inklings or self-announcements of The Manager. Without Nasos Vayenas, the poem would never have even got started. His influence was direct and total, and more important than anyone else’s has been at any time before or since . . . I can’t remember when the title came, incidentally, whether then or later. But when it did come, it announced itself cleanly, completely and unquestionably, and I never questioned it or wanted to question it . . . And of course Nasos and I both shared a love of Eliot and Seferis.

Nasos’s Biography also gave me my immediate model for what I've called the ‘verse-paragraph’, or the verset. In The Manager I do think I’ve extended its range and flexibility. But this is where I first got it from, and there was a time when I even thought that Nasos Vayenas had invented it. He told me he’d adapted it out of Seferis and the fifteen syllable line of Greek oral poetry. But he’s a very modest man.

At any rate, the verse-paragraph was a real discovery for me. I only consciously realised its full potential as I gradually worked at it, and traced its many precedents, partly through further discussions with Nasos, partly through thinking back to my own earlier readings – the fourteeners of early Elizabethan verse, Blake, Whitman, Ginsberg, Saint-John Perse, Seferis. Ever since I was a student, I’d been interested in trying to develop a longer ‘line’ for English, I mean one that could be adaptable and flexible enough to bear the currents and stresses of contemporary speech-rhythms. Not just a vers libre line, but something more shaped, less loose, less flabby. In a sequence of mine entitled Black Light, which celebrated Greece and was dedicated to the memory of Seferis, I’d consciously imitated Seferis’s long lines. And once, when I asked Nasos where he thought Seferis had got his long line from, he answered unhesitatingly and simply: 'The Byzantine Bible.' Then I suddenly realised what should have been obvious all along: that Blake and Whitman had both derived their own long lines from the King James Authorised Version, and Ginsberg from the Hebrew or Yiddish Bible, and so on. So, curiously, it turned out that the Bible, in various languages, was the key to my own long line too.