An Online Interview With W. S. Merwin Essay, Research Paper
from Artful Dodge
Daniel Bourne: Your poem on Berryman last night was interesting. It seemed
rather un-Merwinlike, a very traditional focus, little elliptical movement. Is this a kind
of departure, something new, or a return to the roots of an earlier literature, with that
kind of poem?
W.S. Merwin: I have no idea. I don’t have any ideological sense of what is
Merwinlike or un-Merwinlike. I’m always happy to find I’m writing a poem which is
different from anything I’ve written before, but I don’t think you can really write out a
paradigm. To be surprised is to find new directions and new regions you haven’t been into
yet, to be surprised by your own writing,that’s what I would always be hoping for.
DB: Does that poem surprise you more than any other poem you’ve written
recently?
Merwin: No. I don’t feel that very much about my own writing. I very much don’t
want to repeat myself or imitate myself or find myself doing something I’ve already done
before. If anything feels as if that’s what’s happening, then I try to move away from it.
DB: Do you see yourself coming from any springboard as a poet or translator? Did
you start with any firs principles or how long was it until they developed?
Merwin: Probably very few first principles. I started out realizing I didn’t
know very much and still don’t know very much. At some distance, translation obviously has
always been of great importance to writing to me. I went to see Ezra Pound when I was
nineteen or so. He told me something that I think I really already knew. He said that it
was important to regard writing as not a chance or romantic or inspired, (in the
occasional sense) thing, but rather a kind of spontaneity which arises out of discipline
and continual devotion to something; and translation is a way of keeping one close to what
one is doing, to the possibilities of one’s own language. I don’t translate very much
anymore but for years I tried to translate all the time, a certain amount, and just how
that’s affected my writing, I don’t know. I didn’t try to imitate while I was translating
or anything like that. The familiarity with one’s medium, a familiarity with language and
with the practical details of dealing with tension and language which come out of
translating- I think are of great importance to me in writing. What I’ve chosen to
translate is as much a matter of affinity that I recognize as I went along as it is an
influence on what I actually wrote. I’m sure it’s worked both ways, but I haven’t tried to
follow it. Just as I don’t really theorize much about my own writing, I don’t even pay too
much analytical attention to it. What I’m really interested in is not what I’ve written
but what I haven’t written, the next poem, if there is one. I don’t know if there is a
next one. It’s the part that doesn’t know that I believe it comes from, if it comes at
all. I don’t do it by forming an idea of what the next poem is supposed to be or what kind
of poem it’s supposed to be or where it’s supposed to go, or anything of the kind.
DB: Are you afraid that there won’t be another poem?
Merwin: I feel that it’s quite possible there won’t be another one. I hope there
will be. But I don’t understand people who can program themselves to the point where they
can predict another one. Of course, you can sit down after years of discipline and years
of writing and you can write a poem. What kind of poem is it going to be if it is as
deliberate as that? I don’t want to sound spooky or romantic about it either. I think that
the sitting down and trying to write is terribly important, the regularity with which one
works. If you do try to write regularly, you will notice that the results are irregular.
There are times when you just can’t stop writing. Everything contributes to it. I suspect
that everything is contributing to it all the time but there are long periods when it
seems very hard to put words together that are at all satisfactory, that are doing what
you want them to do. These things come in waves or cycles.
DB: You said that translation seems to be able to serve as that disciplinary
force.
Merwin: An example, I guess, of what I’m saying is that in the late fifties,
after The Drunk in the Furnace, there was a period when I knew perfectly well I
wasn’t going to write for awhile. There wasn’t anything I could write that didn’t seem to
me to be simply a continuation of what I’d been writing before. I didn’t want to do that.
It seems to me that I had to come to the end of a way of doing something. And ten when I
began to write again, I wrote about half of The Moving Target in a few weeks.
DB: You said that you translated those works towards which you felt a strong
affinity. I noticed that your translations of Jean Follain and Antonio Porchia are
definitely not the broad cultural works you translated earlier. (Merwin: Those were
done in the mid-Sixties, too.) Is there some kind of movement from the broader appeal…?
Merwin: No, in most cases they were people whom I found and they weren’t very
well known. Antonio Porchia wasn’t know at all in this country. I found a not very
satisfactory French translation of him by accident. That led me to write off and get the
Spanish original. I took to carrying it around wherever I went. I was fascinated by
Antonio Porchia. Since I couldn’t remember some of the Spanish aphorisms I found myself
making little notes in English in the margins, which I could remember for reference. These
gradually turned into translations and I found I had translated about half the book. That
was how I did the Porchia. Again, there was no schematic or programmed view of what I
should be doing. This is one of the problems with a lot of literary history. Critics tend
to assume that writers work out some sort of program for themselves, that it (writing) is
much more calculated than it is. If it’s any good, talent or the gift of somebody is an
urgency, a moving force, and all one can do is try to direct it, and hope that it stay
there, and keep it fed and alive, and alert, awake… I don’t know much about fiction
writers, of course. My small experience with writing with the theater is rather different.
But with all of them, I think there is a great, I almost said blindness, a movement that
begins out of what you don’t know rather than what you think you should be doing next.
It’s not some kind of intellectually calculated program that you conform to. Faulkner says
in several places that The Sound and the Fury really began with an image in his
mind of that little girl’s wet panties as she was climbing down out of the apple tree. The
whole novel came out of this image. Where did this image come from? Heaven knows…
Faulkner’s own imagination. But the image was first and the whole thing rose out of that.
I think if it is too calculated there’s something fishy about it (writing). Frost says
that about individual poems. If you know too much about a poem to begin with, you’ll
probably write a phony poem. I think there is a danger in writing a lot of so-called
political poetry. I said yesterday I think all poetry is political. But most political
poetry doesn’t turn out to be poetry in the long run because you have double-guessed about
it too much to begin with, you know too much about it. You know what it’s supposed to be
saying, apart from the poem itself, what it’s message is going to be. If it arises out of
a real feeling for rage or oppression or something that’s close to visceral experience,
then it saves itself, it becomes a real poem, a piece of propaganda.
DB: You speak so much about sound. Is that the basic unit you strive to
transpose in translation? Do you think it’s more important than metaphor?
Merwin: I think that’s one place where I do believe in being calculating and
programmed in translation… deciding what aspect it is of translation that one really
wants to make in the new language. I think that it is very seldom sound. I think usually
the sound itself is pretty obvious although it’s missed again and again by both critics
and translators. I think really the sound is part of the original language just I think
the sound plus the form is part of the original language and all the association that go
with it. What one can try to transpose is the role of the sound. What is the
function of the sound? How important is it? What does it do to the effect, the power of
the poem? I see if I can remake that function in the translation.
DB: How close do you think translation of syntax is tied up with translation of
sound?
Merwin: I don’t know that there is an answer to that because it depends wholly
on whom you’re translating. In the original, sound and syntax are inseparable, if you’re
translating a really accomplished and interesting first-degree magnitude poet. But in
translation, they’re bound to be separate because the sound is part of the original
language and the role of the syntax in the original language is not the same as the
language into which you’re translating. But it’s related to the value of translating as an
exercise, I think. The ability to have some kind of flexibility of syntax, to recognize
the enormous importance of the different syntactical ways of trying to say something, each
of which is slightly different, is something that’s being lost sight of, I think, in the
educational system. Students come to the point where they think they want to write and
they have very little syntactical experience, very little dramatic education. They reach a
certain point where they feel there’s only one way of saying anything. The obvious way,
the way one is used to saying it, may not be the right way of saying it. Unless there’s
been a real education in the grammar of your language, translation helps you to finish
your education. Otherwise, the choices that are opened to you are much more limited and
you feel they are the only choices. That’s to bad. It means you can hear only a few
choices, that your ear is closed off to all kinds of possibilities. I don’t know the
answer to this. It’s right there in the educational system and in the fact that English is
taught so badly now. It goes along with the way vocabulary is getting imprecise, not just
in our speech but in our writing. The example I was using is where "convinced"
is used more and more often when the person really means "persuaded." "I
convinced him to take the afternoon plane rather than the other one." What the person
means is, "I persuaded him to take the afternoon plane."
DB: In a way then, the acquisition of good syntax and varied ways of saying
something is almost as important as the image.
Merwin: Well, it’s a tool. It’s like trying to be a fine carpenter when your
only hammer is a six-pound sledge and you have a cold chisel. You’re going to have a hell
of a time, you’re handicapped. I think this is related to the matter of the life of the
language coming our of colloquial speech. In real vernacular, in real colloquial speech,
there’s always the energy of the language and we know of contemporaries, critics, and
writers, who insist that one must have the colloquial and not the formal or that one must
have the control of the form that the colloquial line is put in. I think these are poles
which make the tension in which the language operates and the literature can be written.
You can’t let go of either one without the tension just all disappearing, one must honor
them both, absolute energy of colloquial speech, as long as it has not been totally
debased by debasing uses of it, such as advertising, communal abstractions, committee
English, and things of that kind, and on the other hand, the honoring of the tradition of
the language itself and its formal possibilities. They’re both assumptions of the life of
the language, into the life of what we can write in the language.
DB: When translating Lazarillo de Tormes, were you seeking an idiom, and
what do you think of rendering local color in translations?
Merwin: I wasn’t trying to imitate or invent any particular locality. I think in
some ways it was one of the most difficult translations I ever did. It led me to realize
the importance of translating comedy. Translation of comedy is one of the great
disciplines I know of. Because if you are translating jokes, for example, if you get
anything wrong, nothing works. You have to get it absolutely right. Then you realize that
all translating is really that way. With Lazarillo de Tormes, I was trying to get
that. These are several things happening. This was a very literate man who wrote Lazarillo,
and that’s very evident in the book but also he’s writing in the voice of a fully-formed
and funny character, a kind of much harder, much more difficult Huckleberry Finn. It’s
sort of the original form from which the other picaresque people descended later. I
imagine Huckleberry Finn, is certainly in this tradition, whether Mark Twain was
aware of any of the others or not. I certainly wasn’t trying to make him sound like
Huckleberry Finn but there’s a real closeness between those two characters.
DB: Did that book come before Boccacio’s Decameron ?
Merwin: No, I don’t think so. The Decameron was earlier.
DB: I thought there was a lot of picaresque in that book.
Merwin: But’s there’s no single character. Lazarillo is the original
picaresque because it’s the original role-hero going from episode to episode. The only
continuity is one character who goes from one episode to another. I think it’s one of the
first books in literature which actually does that and has a character who, by the
standards of the society around him is a rogue, in all senses a rogue. He’s an outsider
and an oddball. Lazarillo is also a very winning and touching character, I think, very
funny. The whole book is full of those ironies which Cervantes uses not so very long
afterwards in Don Quixote, which are also virtually intranslatable. The subtlety of
Cervantes’ irony is one of the things that is lost in translation. I wasn’t trying to make
him sound like Huck Finn or something like that. He had to sound like a child, very
intelligent, very straight, a very courageous and funny child.
DB: Do you feel that maybe the key in translating that book was the voice?
Merwin: Absolutely.
DB: You mentioned last night about the heavy impact of reading Czeslaw Milosz’s The
Captive Mind. Why do you think that during a period like the Sixties (which was very
political), the book did not really get any attention?
Merwin: I simply don’t know. I think that the only theory that I have about it
is that Milosz was so critical of the Communist world and there was a great deal of
leftist sympathy in the Sixties. For example, the SDS-oriented people felt that Milosz was
right-wing just as many Marxists felt about Camus and The Rebel. I’ve always felt
that this was wrong, I mean in the sense of being incorrect. There’s a kind of outlawry
that I have been drawn to all my life which is not doctrinaire, which is neither right nor
left. In fact, it’s opposed to them both. Every time I come back toward a political
stance, I never stay in one very long because every time I move toward one I tend to
partake of that anarchy, a suspicion of all their houses. That’s the only explanation I
can think of as to why Milosz was not accepted more widely and was not read more widely in
the Sixties. I don’t remember when The Captive Mind was published, 1958, 1959,
somewhere along in there. I know some of my friends read it and were excited about it at
the time and it just seemed to disappear. I think it went out of print, too. It’s been out
of print for a long time because I’ve tried to get copies of it for my friends and
couldn’t find it.
DB: The Seventies seemed a time of political relaxation, or at least part of it
did. Was it for you? Do you think your poetry seemed to turn away a bit…?
Merwin: It depends on what you mean by politics. If you mean concern with the
manipulation of human beings by other human beings, if you want to define it that way, you
could say that’s true. I was trying to say last night that what’s happening to the world,
what organized human activity is doing to the world, is that same thing it’s doing to
language and culture around us and to other cultures, to other people and species. The
natural world, as a whole, is all the same thing and to me it’s all political. One picks