The Year in Poetry (Vol. 109) | The Year in Poetryby Allen Hoey
The Year in Poetry by Allen Hoey
At the conclusion of "The Poet as Translator," the most intelligent and savvy essay on the topic, Kenneth Rexroth notes one reason why poets try translation:
Translation saves you from your contemporaries. You can never really model yourself on Tu Fu or Leopardi or Paulus the Silentiary, but if you try you can learn a great deal about yourself. It is all too easy to model yourself on T. S. Eliot or William Carlos Williams or W. H. Auden or Allen Ginsberg—fatally easy—thousands do it every day. But you will never learn anything about yourself.
Updating the list of contemporaries (Robert Bly, John Ashbery, and, probably still, Allen Ginsberg), this passage retains its common-sense appeal. Given that, if anything, the demand for "practically unrelieved intensity in poetry" has increased in the 36 years since Rexroth wrote this piece, we have even greater need not only for the forum...
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