The annals of English eccentricity brim not only with outrageous and flamboyant personalities but with many obscure, half-hidden figures whose quirks and foibles vanish with their deaths. For every Orde Wingate, the army officer who liked to comb his pubic hair with a toothbrush (invariably, someone else’s) during staff meetings with his subalterns, there are dozens of village eccentrics whose antics surpass imagination. If I recall one of these in the first week of the New Year, it isn’t only because I am sick of the glitz and the hoopla that accompany this most ghastly of our holidays (I have it on good authority that more people enter mental hospitals or attempt suicide, or both, on New Year’s Eve than any other night of the year). The man I have in mind, a gifted if minor poet and a crossword composer of genius as well as a dazzling shuffler of identities, deserves to be remembered.

You won’t find the name of E. Powys Mathers in the old Dictionary of National Biography. (I haven’t been able to get my hands on the new one to check.) Even so, a strong case could be made that in the early years of the last century, Powys Mathers was as important a force as Arthur Waley or Ezra Pound in bringing the riches of Chinese, and other eastern, poetry into English.

Powys Mathers’s translations span an amazing range of languages and literatures, from Chinese and Japanese to Baluchi, Tibetan, Persian and Pushto, Cambodian, Hindi and, Burmese. How, you wonder, could any one man master so many vernaculars? The answer is simple and disconcerting: He didn’t. Rather, when he was not working from French versions of the originals, he made them up, artfully sprinkling appropriate local color into each. Like many far greater poets – Yeats is the prime example – Powys Mathers was most articulate when most masked.

Anvil Press in London has now republished two of his collections under the title “Black Marigolds and Coloured Stars” (106 pages, $13.95), with an affectionate and discerning introduction by the superb English poet Tony Harrison, a longtime fan. The first collection, “Coloured Stars,” contains dozens of “translations,” but, as Mr. Harrison points out, this was “a smokescreen for his own pseudonymous activities.” Powys Mathers had the perpetual frustration of being an unattractive sensualist. He could express his proclivities only by donning the protective coloration of a nom de plume. As he well knew, this was also a time-honored practice among those very Eastern poets whom he most delighted in mimicking.

Thus, in “Love Song” he would write, “Surely the faces of women are pleasant / but the taste of cheeks that have been newly shaved is better,” and attribute the sentiment to the “Turkish poet” Jenab Shehabuddin, adding coyly in a gloss, “I have been able to find out no more about this very real poet than that he was born in 1870 and studied medicine and wrote much of his verse in Paris.” Jenab is but one of a panoply of bizarre identities Powys Mathers concocted, including one Julius Wing, a Chinese-American valet who wrote verses.

Whoever originally wrote these poems, they read with surprising freshness. In “A Lover’s Jealousy,” for example, he startles with the lines: “Like a black carnation in a desert of snow, / Like a black star in daylight./ I carry the scent of your body about with me.” Again, in “Spring Cold,” the opening lines are stark and powerful:

In the melancholy enclosure

The wind leans, and drags at the threads of fine rain.

It is a good thing the double doors are shut.

The grace of the willows, the frailness of the flowers, these bow down before the capricious weather that rains towards the time of “Cold Feasts.”

But whatever the weather, it is always difficult to find the balanced harmony of verse.

In the meanwhile; this much poetry is finished.

It is, I think, not so much in the occasional brilliant image that Powys Mathers shows his gift as in the musical patterning of his poems. This is shown to best effect in the long sequence “Black Marigolds,” which makes up the rest of the Anvil edition. Purporting to be a translation of the “Chaurapanchasika,” the “50 Stanzas of Chauras,” a “young Brahman poet … at the court of King Sundava in Kanchinpur,” this remarkable poem begins each stanza with the words “even now,” a rendering, the author tells us, of the Sanskrit word adyapi. Well, maybe, and maybe too Powys Mathers “translated” the poem, as he says, “in two or three sessions on a box by the stove in hutments” during the Great War, but I tend to doubt it.

It’s not easy to excerpt this poem without misrepresenting it, mainly because Powys Mathers freely avails himself of certain well-worn “Oriental” motifs, such as “perfumed kisses” and the like. But consider the music of certain stanzas:

Even now
I mind the coming and talking of wise men from towers
Where they had thought away their youth. And I, listening,
Found not the salt of the whispers of my girl,
Murmur of confused colours, as we lay near sleep;
Little wise words and little witty words,
Wanton as water, honied with eagerness.

The Swinburnian languor of the verse is undercut and made convincingly astringent by such lines as “little wise words and little witty words.” There is a playfulness at work that saves the sequence from either lushness or mere preciousness, as though the poet skirted the very brink of affectation in order to see what tiny treasures he might snatch back.

The final stanza of the poem has a valedictory timbre that persists in the memory:

Even now
I know that I have savoured the hot taste of life
Lifting green cups and gold at the great feast.
Just for a small and a forgotten time
I have had full in my eyes from off my girl
The whitest pouring of eternal light.
The heavy knife. As to a gala day.

Alongside his translations – he is perhaps best known for his version of “The Thousand and One Nights,” prepared by J. C. Mardrus – Powys Mathers achieved his greatest notoriety as “Torquemada,” of the London Observer, for his fiendishly difficult cryptic crosswords (some of his puzzles proved to be original poems when solved). How ironic, and drastically eccentric, that this shy and elusive sensualist should now be best remembered under the sobriquet of the Grand Inquisitor!