SOURCE: An interview in Southwest Review, Vol. 68, No. 2, Spring, 1983, pp. 164-80.

[Myers is an American educator, poet, biographer, and critic. Simms is an American educator, poet, and critic. In the following interview, which was conducted in 1982 during Southern Methodist University's eighth annual literature festival, Merwin comments on creative writing programs, his development as a poet, the writing process, and his ideas regarding translation.]

[Simms]: Bill, unlike most contemporary poets, you have not made a career of teaching. Recently, you started teaching for the first time. How do you like it?

[Merwin]: I love it. But I'm very spoiled. I'm teaching at Cooper Union, in New York City, and there's no Humanities major at Cooper Union; it's basically for architects, fine arts students, and civil engineers. They're taking a poetry course because they want to take a poetry course, not because anybody told them to. They want to. So this is a wonderful place to start. They have to tell me why they think it's a good idea; and I have only twenty students, so it's not a hard job at all.

Do you teach workshops?

No, it's not a course in writing books; it's a course in reading books, and that's a much more unwelcome subject.

On the spectrum of, say, Robert Bly to the right of the opinion of academic workshops and someone like Marvin Bell on the left of the spectrum, where do you stand in relation to teaching poetry workshops?

I suppose I'm a little closer to Robert Bly, in that I've obviously always avoided it. But I've always liked visiting workshops. I really quarrel with the word workshop in the first place. I mean, it seems to be terribly earnest. Nobody sits around shaving pieces of wood or anything like that. It also assumes there is some kind of earnest and anonymous activity there which is done like the apprenticeship in an old painter's studio, and I don't think that's what happens very often. I think there are a lot of things to be said for workshops, for writing courses, but they are not courses, and sometimes what happens in them is not writing. And I don't like the word creative, so the vocabulary is pretty limited for me to talk about this. But having writing in an academic setting is obviously a very good thing. I've always discouraged its being done for credit, because the very idea of young writers starting out with the idea of writing for credit is already a little suspect. There is no credit. Who's going to give you credit? What does it mean? And it can create dependencies which I'm very suspicious of.

My own fetish is independence. So I'm very suspicious of that, and I'm very suspicious of several other things. It encourages association between the act or the ambition or the aspiration to write and careerism and competition and status-seeking—all of these things that are only too easy to associate with the act of writing, and with the idea of living. Making that a part of one's life. That's putting the Bly in there. And I've seen a lot of that. The better known the writing program, the worse it seems to be. On the other hand, the chance to associate with other people who really care about writing, and about poetry, and to have time set aside to write and to be associated with somebody who's more experienced, can be very valuable. These things can be sorted out, though never completely; but insofar as they can be sorted out, obviously there are some very good writers coming out of these programs. Usually, they've had a hard time outgrowing the programs afterward, but they have come out of them and the programs have done some good.

There's another thing you could say against them (actually, you could say this about the quality of publications in the United States in general), but there's a whole lot of writing that you can pretty well tell where it comes from. You can look at it and you don't see an individual voice nearly so much as you see the background in which that person spent several years supposedly learning how to write.

You're talking about the "workshop poems"?

Yes. There is no "workshop poem," but there are a lot of different workshop poems. I'd rather put it another way. We were talking earlier about the "poetry of erasure," [the title of a lecture delivered by poet/critic Richard Howard at the M.F.A. Program at Vermont College in August, 1982,] the kind that disappears as fast as you read it. I'm reminded of Czeslaw Milosz, who began with a very conventional, almost medieval, education in literature and language. But there was no presumption that anyone could write, except to the people who were writing. One of the first things of his that I read, The Captive Mind, was a very important book to me, and it's one of the books that's not been reprinted or had much fuss made about it since his Nobel Prize. It's a very disturbing book; it asks some very disturbing questions about the relationship between imagination and authority, and the imagination and institutional and organizational structures of all kinds. Political ones in his book that, as you know from the happy resurgence of feminism in recent years, are built into most human relationships. And, by implication, what he's talking about in eastern Europe applies, one way or another, to all conformist situations. The more conformist the people are, the more they distrust others individually and the more they trust themselves individually. And there's one extraordinary moment in the book when he talks about having grown up essentially in a medieval setting, and about learning Latin and classical literature. His father was a great poet and a great folklorist. He learned a lot of folklore, especially from the Middle Ages, the early strata of the psyche of Europe. And then one day, finding that he was in the town where he'd grown up, where in the winter bears wandered into the edge of town, he was lying on the cobblestone and the machine-gun bullets were sailing past him, and up the block at the corner, friends of his were being herded into a truck at machine-gun point, and he found himself thinking, "What do I want to remember? What could I take with me? I mean, I might get killed or I might have to leave here immediately in the next ten minutes, and what of all that I've read do I want to take with me?" I read this at a point in my own writing when I had really come to the end of a way of writing, and I thought, "That's something never to forget, you know, I don't want to write 'poetry of erasure,' the poetry that gets published in only one of 1,200 magazines. I want to write something that somebody wants to take with them." And that probably means something.

There are a lot of things you can't take for granted. And I think there are many things that a lot of contemporary writers take for granted. They take for granted the greater stability in our society. I mean, if you really are confident enough to write as much as some people write, I guess it assumes that somewhere libraries are going to last forever and that people are going to be willing to carry these things around in a wheelbarrow. Or that everybody's going to have his own computer to read the whole of world literature in his living room. I think these people are more optimistic than I am.

[Myers]: I'm curious about the kind of space you live inside of to write. Do you have some kind of self-imposed discipline, some kind of schedule or habits that you could talk about?

Well, I used to write every day. I like to think that I do; sometimes there are great gaps when I can't, when there are other things going on. But yes, Flaubert, who came after the generation of the Romantics, said that inspiration consisted of sitting in front of the same table for the same two hours every day.

[Simms]: So discipline is very important.

I think it is. I think maybe if you've done it for enough years early on you can do it in your head after that. Mandelstam, a great Russian poet of the twentieth century, died when he was forty-eight in a concentration camp. He wrote only four pieces of prose. He kept everything in his head. He never wrote anything down. He was a very vehement man. And in the fourth piece of prose he said, "I am the only poet in Russia. All the rest of you fools write!"

[Simms]: Do you have any rituals when you write, like some people who have to have an apple on the left side of the desk?

I don't believe in them. I suppose I've got lots of them.

[Myers]: Is there a sensory process you go through?

Well, I shut the door.

[Myers]: I have such a sense of silence and solitude from your work, and space within that, that I feel that when you sit down to write, there must be some kind of almost unconscious process you go through to write.

Well, if it were so, and I could tell you what it was, it wouldn't be your process, so it wouldn't help you very much. This is part of many paradoxes and dichotomies of my life. I think that if you can lead a life, parts of your life at least, where you can have a disciplined way of going about it, you spend a certain amount of time with nothing happening. Unfortunately, everybody always does imagine that the bulk of literature has something happening all the time. But I try to be just intolerable every morning, so that people will leave me alone. If you can do it that way, then you find that writing happens in all sorts of other places too, and under all sorts of other circumstances. I'm just extrapolating from my own experience, but over a period of months, every day, you find that things are happening outside those hours; whereas, if you're counting on a bolt of lightning to strike you before you do anything, it probably won't.

The discipline makes the possibility of things happening outside of it. We all know that if you set yourself the task of writing an extremely boring paper, on the regularity of the spark of a four-cylinder engine or something like that (it might not bore somebody else, but it would bore me to write that), you'd find that you'd be full of ideas for other things. And if somebody said, "Write about something else," you'd go completely blank.

[Myers]: Yes, one is imprisoned by that freedom. I want to talk about your development. In my eyes you are a very developmental poet. Your early works have very formal characteristics, then you went toward a much freer, fused kind of syntax that lends itself to a floating feeling, what someone has called a "Post-apocalyptic voice." And that's an incredible transformation to make. Could you tell us a little bit about that process of change you went through in your writing?

It's probably less deliberate than it sounds, than it's been made into. When someone talks about a thing like that, it always sounds as though the person who has gone through the change sort of sat down and figured out what they're going to do next. What I remember happening in the late fifties was coming to the end, in fact, of The Drunk in the Furnace and thinking that I'd come to the end of something and I didn't know what was going to happen next, but I knew that it wasn't going to be the same thing. Because that seemed to me to be something I knew about, in a way. I think that poetry, and maybe all writing, certainly everything we do to some degree, does not come out of what you know, but out of what you don't know. And one of the great superficialities of positivistic thinking is the assumption that things really evolve out of what you know. Nothing evolves out of what you know. You don't move from what you know to something else you know. And it's the unknown that keeps rendering possibilities.

So I really came to the point where I was dissatisfied with what I knew, and I wanted greater access to what I didn't know. There's no way to get through a time like that except to wait. That's a very good thing. Sometimes that time of dissatisfaction might happen to somebody younger, and that would be a deadly time to be in a writing course, because writing would be the very last thing you could do under those circumstances. I think that far more than calculation, deliberate calculation—and a poet begins to smell the kind of writing that comes out of deliberate calculation—what happens with poetry from one poem to the next, from one line to the next, from one word to the next, and certainly from one phase to the next, is much closer to listening for something. You don't know what it is you're listening for, but you recognize it when you hear it. Discipline has a lot to do with it. And also caring about poetry. There are several ways of listening. You can deafen yourself by reading so much and depending on it too much.

We talked about dependence. You can reach a point where you depend upon what you hear, or someone else's voice. This, of course, is very dangerous. It's a very tricky business, but I think you spend your whole life learning how to listen. And what you're listening for is something nobody else can hear. So nobody else can tell you how to do it. That's what makes it difficult, what makes it exciting, and what makes it never finished. That means you're always beginning the whole thing. One of the most terrible things that any course could do for you would be to make you feel that it was really valuable. You know? It shows you the way. It may teach you how to walk, but finally, you have to walk. If it led you to feel that somebody had to be along holding you by the hand and holding you up all the time, it wouldn't really have taught you how to walk. It wouldn't have taught you that you just put one foot out into empty air, in front of the next one, which is what you keep doing. If it weren't for empty air, you would be stubbing your toe all the time.

[Simms]: You've been talking about the change you went through after your first four books. What about the change your work went through after the sixties, after Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment? It seems to me that the work went through a further change. It turned more toward prose; you more or less abandoned that stark style which was yours in the sixties and was very successful. What made you change it that time?

I don't altogether know the answer to that. I don't know if it changed completely or if it was suddenly a difference in focus, in direction. The Lice, which is the book most people seem to read, is very strange because, when it was published and for some years thereafter, it was spoken of by some people as a book that was so bleak and black and pessimistic that it was practically intolerable. That on the one hand. And on the other, that it was so obscure nobody could understand it. I always wondered how the two criticisms could live in the same room with each other. There was one teacher in a university in those years who said she didn't understand this poem but she was frightened. I said, "Why are you frightened if you don't understand it? I mean, you must understand something to respond to it. Why don't you pay attention to your response?" I don't understand why some of those reactions took place. I can guess that it had something to do with the times and with what people wanted or didn't want to think. I really thought I was trying to write more directly and simply in that book at a time when there was a wind of desperation and a feeling that too much was being written in a society in which writing was of decreasing importance. And that viewed historically, there was very little hope for the world we all live in. We were all bent on destroying it. And I think we are.

I don't feel much more optimistic about our historic circumstance now than I did then. I feel very angry about it. I don't like seeing what we are doing to the world around us and the arrogance that's part of it. I feel implicated in it and angry. I realize that what James Watt is doing is being done in my name. And I feel outraged. It's irreversible even if he tries to stop what he has done. It cannot be undone. I don't know a way, an easy formula, a nice way around it, and I understand the arguments for convenience that are being made, but they are just for our convenience.

But you can't just dwell on nothing but your own helpless anger. Some people do, but I think it's very limiting. If you are just angry, what are you being angry about? If there is nothing you care about, what difference does it make what happens to the world? And the work shifts. The same year that The Lice was written was the year of the Cuban missile crisis. I'd been an activist for several years trying to work against the arms race. Just before the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy authorized another set of atmospheric tests in the Pacific. It was followed almost immediately by the missile crisis, and that was followed by a wave of chauvinism that I felt really nauseated by. I'd walk around New York and go into bars that I was familiar with and hear people saying we should have dropped a bomb on them years ago. I thought, "Most of these are people who don't like their lives. These aren't happy people saying I'm willing to blow up the world to maintain my own happiness: these people are saying I'm willing to blow up the world so that my own particular kind of misery doesn't change." I thought, "I wake up every morning knowing what I hate. If someone asks me how would you live if you could live the way you wanted to, I wouldn't have a very good answer." And I thought, "Well, I better find out. That is just as important as knowing what the dangers are." So I lived differently for a number of years, and I suppose that is part of the answer. You can be angry about what's happening to animals or to the whole of northern Canada or to the Amazon basin, or you can turn it around and think, "Well in the limited time left, why not pay attention to other people and to animals and to what's there?"

There is a marvelous passage in Thoreau's journals where he talks about the enclosure of the conquered common, a subject which he has in common with John Clare, a generation earlier in England, who went crazy with despair over what was happening to the common. Thoreau said that from now on it would be impossible to pick huckleberries on wild land; it would always be on somebody's land. This was a small point, but Thoreau understood how important it was. The next thing he says is, in a way, an answer to your question. He said, "I have not been grateful enough for the years in which I could pick huckleberries."

Being angry about it at that point is partly anger at yourself for what you haven't seen. This is not a place to stay, this circle of the envious in Dante's Purgatorio. One of the great things in that poem is that the punishments aren't punishments; all they are is a dramatization of the error itself. Dante knew that sin, in the Christian sense, means to err. The Greek base is a word from archery meaning "missing the target." The error is acted out in each of these cases. And the envious are sitting against the stone wall up there huddling against each other. And their eyelids are stitched up with wire, and the tears are running out between their eyelids, and the point is that when they could see they didn't look—they didn't see. Now they are dreading the fact that they didn't see, and they are wishing that their eyes would open. So they listen.

[Myers]: That explains the contradiction that one finds in The Lice. The beauty in the book is a positive value that comes out as beauty of the voice in music. But it's a very negative book: there are no people in it, the stones are asleep talking to one another. A kind of scary void exists within it. So it's not really a contradiction; it's fused opposites that make a whole.

If no one recognized that scary void, no one would pay attention.

[Myers]: Now let's talk about how translation has affected your work.

In ways, I'm sure, that I don't know. For at least ten years, I tried to keep translation and my own writing very distinct and not do what, for example, Robert Lowell did [in Imitations]: start with a translation and then gradually turn it into whatever he felt like. I always thought that was a way of misguiding everybody, including myself. Lowell did it with immense talent and his ear was marvelous, so you read the poems. But I don't feel he raised me closer to Baudelaire or Rimbaud. He brings me closer to something of his own.

I started translating when I was eighteen, as part of that discipline we were talking about. I went to see Ezra Pound in a nut house in Washington [St. Elizabeth's]—I just wandered in by myself—and we had a lot to talk about even though there was a great age difference. He said, "If you want to be a poet you should write every day." And he said, "At your age you don't have anything to write about. You may think you have a subject, but you don't know what it is yet." So he said, "What you should do is translate." He also said something that I certainly think is true: that anybody who wants to write should see if he has any linguistic gift. Pound was much more autocratic than I am, saying that everybody should learn a language. Some people can't learn languages—I really believe that—at least after a certain age, but I think they are pretty rare. If you start young enough, everybody can learn languages fairly easily. I would like to have been learning languages all my life. I've gone through periods of giving up and letting it go. I would like to have been a little more studious about that. But learning languages and translating is the way to work every day. Try to translate and try to see how close to the original you can get. Pound did say to start by getting just as close to the form of the original as possible. I tried that and came to the conclusion that it was not the way to go for me, probably not for anybody.

I don't think any particular poet I have translated had an immediate influence on what I was writing. I would have tended to avoid translating if I had found that happening; but I think that reading a lot of Spanish and French and Portuguese poetry inevitably influenced me. Especially since I started writing in the forties and fifties—a particularly starchy time in English, and a good time to be reading Neruda, as I did when I was in college—and realized that although it was hard to imagine doing it in English, it was possible, and sooner or later one would find a way of doing those things. Not just sounding like Neruda or Jiménez or Lorca or any of the people that I first ran into, but realizing that the possibilities were not just what they seemed to be at that time in English. That's one of the dangers of any period's conventions: everybody to some degree thinks those are the only possibilities, and writers of each age feel they have made some tremendous break-through and have found the only way to do it, which just shows they are locked into their own little cultural pattern. Then along comes another generation that says, "It doesn't really matter. We'll do it another way."

[Myers]: So this is the change from translating according to the letter of the original toward translating more in the spirit of the original. So there is more freedom: Pound's idea of adaptation.

I think it's good not to have the right words. I mean nobody ever does, you know. Sure, it's the spirit that makes you want to do it, but it's the letter that makes it possible. If you had just the spirit, you wouldn't have any letter at all. I'm not saying that the form of the original is not important; I think it's obviously essential. It's inseparable from the original poem, but it is also inseparable from the original language. And so you can't really bring it over. What you have to do is sense how the form is working with the original poem and try to make it work that way in the poem that you're trying to make in English. And there is no formula for how that's to be done. If there were, we could have computer translations, and some people tell us we can have.

[Myers]: How do you feel about critics and poets who have said that the translations done in the last twenty years have flattened out American poetry?

[Simms]: Created a "translationese" …

I know that's a common criticism, but I don't know what it's flattened out from.

[Simms]: I think Jack is talking about the fear of losing our native idiom of American speech, the fear that translation may dilute or cause us to lose the flavor of our national character.

I don't know. It's hard to tell who the critics are talking about. And they can give examples, but this is one of the things that is hard to talk about. I mean if you take John Keats's generation and see who was writing…. There were far fewer people then, but all the poets look pretty much alike. I think a lot of them look pretty uninteresting too. But when you look at that period, who do you read? You read: Keats (pretty distinct), Shelley (pretty distinct), Wordsworth, and Byron, and Coleridge, and Clare, and Hood. They're all pretty unmistakable, but if you put them back in the period, it looks as though everybody was writing the same. And to blame it on translation, to blame it on the thing that really broke it out of the sort of belletristic sardine-can verse that a lot of English poets are still writing today because they're still in the fifties, is, I think, rather graceless. I don't think there is a single voice that's been made out of it. Do we really think on the basis of translation that Mandelstam and Neruda and Jean Follain sound the same? I don't think so.

[Myers]: I think the argument goes that the young poets who are influenced by the American or English translations are using these as models for poetry and flattening out what was the beautiful music of one hundred years ago in English verse.

Well, there is an unpopular thing that could be said against writing programs. Most writing programs that I've seen focus heavily on the twentieth century, particularly on the post-World War II period. This is something that's never happened before in literary history. I don't think of myself as being particularly old, but my generation are the oldest poets writing. This has never happened before, and it's been so for almost ten years. We don't have any others. Robert Penn Warren, I suppose, Stanley Kunitz—I mean there's not a generation, only one or two figures are left. And that's true not only of much older people, but of a generation before us. They all disappeared: Lowell, Roethke, Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, you can run down the list, they're all gone. They all died within a few years of each other. It's bootless to ask why. Nobody knows why. So there's a great link with the past that's broken.

Virtually everybody of my generation went through a kind of critical period when they were about thirty, and really examined a way of writing which they had been doing up until then in a relatively unexamining way, and chose to write differently and came out writing differently. This is the thing we started our talk about. But before that time the writing of all of us—and this goes even for Allen Ginsberg—had had a certain amount to do with formal verse, and, in fact, I was one of several people who taught a course with Allen in the history of the English lyric. Allen started it because he found that when he mentioned the "Ode to a Skylark" to a bunch of students nobody knew what he was talking about. When he mentioned Christopher Smart nobody knew who he was talking about. Finally he said, "Who did you people read when you were growing up," and they said, "You," and he said, "That's a big comedown. We are going to start at the beginning."

This is the thing that's flattened out—writers are imitating each other. And they are imitating only their immediate elders. English poetry is a relatively recent growth in the Western world. And certainly the English poetry of the post-World War II period is a tiny fraction of English poetry. I don't see how you can love poetry and limit yourself to two generations, because Shakespeare wrote poetry too; so did Chaucer and Alexander Pope. One of the things that's been interesting about my class at Cooper Union has been to start by exploring this very subject and find that of twenty people in the room not one person ever heard of Alexander Pope. I thought that this was probably the most unfashionable place to start. I believe the reason Pope is so unpopular has to do with the Romantics in England, and an assumption has been made ever since then about metrical and regular verse. But part of the assumption is based on the fact that people for various reasons have stopped being able to hear it; they don't hear it at all. All they hear is a sort of tick tock tick tock … and that's not what Pope was doing. Pope is one of the metrically supplest poets in English. Or he wouldn't have been as admired as he was by some other poets. When students began to hear it, within two sessions they were bringing in passages of Pope because they were laughing at them, or finding them moving, finding that they identified with this eighteenth-century hunchback whose life was totally different from theirs.

[Myers]: Now let's have some questions from the audience.

[Marshall Terry]: I've been reading with real pleasure your new book, Unframed Originals, the memoirs about your family and background. I want to ask you about the impulse at your age now to do that and about the impulse of putting the various kinds of material into different forms: poetry, prose poetry, memoir, or fiction.

Marshall, I don't have a theoretical answer, but I would like to try to answer that very question with examples. I don't know how one comes out finding that certain things really belong in poems and certain things belong, if one's right, in prose. But later on I'd like to read some of that book, and some poems that have to do with the same subject twenty years earlier, and then some others that were written later. The reason for these things I don't know. I don't know why some mornings I have eggs for breakfast and some mornings I don't. I certainly don't have a theoretical answer. Someone asked Schumann, "Why was that passage in A minor?" and he said, "That was the key that belonged there."

[Student]: What would you do to help children to grow up loving poetry?

I have only a fleeting, passing relation with that question. I don't actually teach children; I have many friends who do and we talk about that. And I think it's a matter of enormous importance. I also think it's natural for children to like poetry and it's essential that they do. If they grow up without it, they are deprived of something they need. They're deprived in our world of a lot of things they need; I'm not saying they're never going to live without it, but they need it. And of course the most obvious way of helping them do that is to get them to pay attention to their dreams and to the details of the world around them. I've watched people getting children to strive to write about their dreams and to write about, for example, three things in the house that they really like. You find that they don't make a list, they really start telling about something.

[Student]: You said you're involved in teaching people about reading poetry now. What if someone were to come to you and say that they weren't familiar with contemporary poetry or, more specifically, your poetry, and they wanted your advice on how to approach it. What would you tell them?

Will you be represented in the "someone"?

[Student]: Yes.

What would you be looking for?

[Student]: Well, some poetry you read for sound, other poetry for meaning, and some poetry for the images. Or you read for all three.

I wonder if that's really so. I wonder if you don't always read for all of those things. Does anybody ever read a poem just for the sound? If you did you might as well read it in a language you didn't understand.

[Student]: Sometimes, some things are more important than others.

That's true, there's a difference of emphasis and degree. But I think that if you attach enough importance to the sound itself, that becomes the meaning, the meaning of what you're looking for. I certainly hope that's not true of poems of mine, but it could conceivably be true, and that's why I asked you what you're reading for. But one of the ways I've been working with students at Cooper Union is that I've made up a thematic progression and they've been bringing in poems every week that have to do with part of that thematic progression; one particular theme but coming from different periods, from the contemporary period or the period between Shakespeare and the twentieth century or the period before that. Three poems each week from each person. Take a really simple theme like animals; you're going to bring in three very different poems. And the assumption is that these are poems you like, so you're going to have to explore. Nobody can tell you what you like. You could bring in a lousy poem, but in the course of talking about it with other people you may begin to find why it's a little bit lousy and why it really doesn't work, or it may take you six weeks or six months or six years to find that out. But it's really more important to examine your response. An awful lot of literature is taught at present with very good intentions, purely to feed … knowledge. You know a lot about the poem, but the poem really doesn't mean anything to you. And there's nothing wrong with the knowledge, but if it really doesn't have anything to do with your response, if it really doesn't involve you, you really haven't even read the poem yet. So you're the best answer to the question. You have to find the answer to it yourself. If you really care about reading poetry, you'll find some of the answers yourself just by going on reading it.

[Student]: I have been hypnotized by the voice of your poems for years. When you compose the poems or when you read your poems out loud, do you hear that voice in your head?

Yes, I always hear it, and I can't imagine that poetry ever happens any other way. I really believe it's impossible to have poetry divorced from the sound of the words. I think that one must always hear. Mandelstam didn't write; he composed aloud all the time. And he began to mumble when he was beginning to compose, and it really took him over. There's an incredible book that his wife wrote about their years of exile together in Russia. Very often they only had one very small room, and he had a great phase of writing quite late. They're incredibly powerful poems. This thing took him over for several years, and she said that when he started writing a poem, the only thing she needed to do was roll over in bed and look at the wall for a while, just to try to get out of the way. When he finished, he would tell her the poem, and she would write it down. She wrote most of them down; this was an interior process because she knew that every apartment she lived in would be raided by the police, and all of her friends' apartments would be too. The police would be looking for manuscripts, so the Mandelstams tried to obliterate all evidence completely, and so she memorized everything, including the prose, and kept it in her head for thirty years. She used to work at factories reciting these things to herself. It's a wonderful example of something that I think is always there. It began with him hearing something, and he was working out how he heard it, and then she went on hearing it through the process of memory.

There's a wonderful thing in Eliot's essay on Blake. It wasn't particularly sympathetic with Blake; in fact, I don't like the essay in some ways. But he says some marvelous things about the relation between sound and meaning in some poems. Everybody who reads Blake's poem "The Tyger" recognizes at once that this is a very great poem. I've been reading the poem all of my life, and I'm not sure that I understand it. There are certain things about it that are very clear, but there are certain things about it that are just so mysterious and elusive that I don't know what they're about. But, as with one's dreams, one doesn't doubt that it's absolutely authentic. It goes on and it goes on meaning all the time, not necessarily in a one-to-one intellectual way. It's not an allegory. When we have exhausted all of that, the poem has only begun. Eliot said there are passages in the poem that he'd heard for years before he'd really begun to understand them.

[Student]: Do you find that knowing the poet personally helps you in translating his work?

I think it probably does help. Certainly it helps to stimulate the translation. It's much easier to go and ask questions about it. There are lots of obvious ways in which it helps. It also prejudices you, and you may find you're translating poems you didn't want to translate. But, sure, if you're going to be translating somebody, it would be nice to know him. One of the problems in translating, I guess, is trying to hear what the original is, to try to figure out why you want to translate the poem and then bring your translation as close as possible to answering that question. There are so many translations that I've finished and asked myself, "Well, if the original is really like that, why was it ever translated?" You don't want anybody ever to answer that question. You should think that somewhere in the translation you'll get a clear idea of why the poem was worth translating. But you should never assume that a translation is possible.

[Simms]: It's necessary but impossible.

That's right. When I really began to think about translation after years of doing it without thinking too much about it, a funny thing happened. I was reading at the time some translations of Egyptian hieroglyphs, The Book of the Dead. I noticed a very strange thing. When I read the transliteration of the hieroglyphs, it was very exciting, but when I turned to the back of the book and read it in so called "good English," it was as dull as could be. So the translator made an assumption about what was good English instead of leaving something open to see if something about the language could be captured. There's always something a little bit out of the ordinary about the language of poetry, you know, and if you get it too close to the ordinary, too close to what anybody would have done, then you're obviously getting away from the original even if you seem to be getting closer to it, because the original isn't like that. If it really were that flat, you wouldn't have translated it. So I tried to do some translations which were really getting close to the strangenesses of the word order of the original.

This is a poem of Francisco de Quevedo, who was a great Baroque Spanish poet. This was a sonnet. It's not translated as a sonnet, but it has the kind of units of energy that work the way they do in the sonnet. The attempt was to do something that would have the same kind of impact in English that the sonnet had. If you translate a sonnet as a sonnet, you lose something because the form is part of the original language. A sonnet in Spanish means one thing, and in English it means something else. So you can knock yourself out to reproduce the sonnet, and you've still got something else. So, why have you done that? This is one of the inessential things: that sonnet is part of the Spanish; the original language is what you leave behind. But that kind of poem works. It has a certain impact in Spanish, and I've tried to reproduce the impact in English and at the same time not be stuck in the kind of obvious "good English" word order. So this is the way the sonnet comes out, and even the title is closer to the Spanish word order than to the kind of obvious English translation: "Love Constant beyond Death." The title makes you wonder what part of the sentence it is, or whether it's the whole sentence.

       Last of the shadows may close my eyes
       goodbye then white day
       and with that my soul untie
       its dear wishing
 
       yet will not forsake
       memory of this shore where it burned
       but still burning swim
       that cold water again
       careless of the stern law
 
       soul that kept God in prison
       veins that to love led such fire
       marrow that flamed in glory
 
       not their heeding will leave
       with their body
       but being ash will feel
       dust be dust in love

You wouldn't have written an English sonnet like that. A real translation, even if it's in a way you can't notice, shouldn't just relax in what's already there in English, but should always be making English do something it never quite did before.