In an event such as The Mysteries where the very oldness of the piece is brought, so to speak, into the present and onto the stage, not as obsolescence but as a ‘metre’, a lexicon, a performance that still kicks, translation is intimately and fiercely involved in remembrance. Then again, concerns over and processes of remembrance comprehend all of Harrison's written work. So, what might be his latest major lyric, ‘The Mother of the Muses’ (1990), frames its meditation on memory with a staging of the poet's own efforts at recall – a passage of Aeschylus, of the details of a visit to the memory-impaired inhabitants of a Canadian old people's home, of the war-time bombing of Dresden, and of the signs (mere signs) that testify to what traces remain to us of ‘ life’ and love. In this poem the poet's testament of remembrance works something like the salt-grit sprayer that thaws a passageway, a means of travelling, through a landscape of frozen memory whose inhabitants – though they may have been the subjects of history (histories in particular of the dislocating travel that was migration) – are iced in now, isolated, with no further journeys to make than the journey towards death:

However, the poet's act of testimony, his unfreezing of the dead, is not unproblematic. For a start he never proves able to recall, unaided, the passage of Aeschylus's Greek. The poem concludes with his witnessing, in the snow outside, a bird's tracks, ‘ like words’, ‘like blurred Greek’, that return to him (and thereby to the reader) the desire for testimony rather than the testimony itself. It is not even the case that memory is returned as through a veil. The bird's tracks are not Greek, they are only like Cretan Greek to the eye wishing to make the connection, to the intelligence willing to employ the convolutions of simile and metaphor so as to bear witness to the act of remembrance, its loving desire.