of T.S. Eliot and people influenced by Eliot, I think those people as a matter of course
wrote in many different forms, were interested in translation, and it’s never occurred to
me to be any other way.
How would you remedy what seems to be a growing distance between the writer — as
artist — and the critic?
William Butler Yeats says, "Nor is there singing school but studying / monuments of
its own magnificence" [in "Sailing to Byzantium"]. That is, there’s no way
to learn to be better or to learn to do an art other than to study monumental examples of
the art. Ezra Pound says, "The highest form of criticism is actual composition."
That is, the poet must choose — the word "critic" is based on
"krinos," which means "to choose" — and critics today get away
with not choosing or not selecting but a poet every moment must choose: whether to use a
long word or a short one, this adjective or that one or none. This constant process of
criticism is part of the work of composition.
Is it a spider’s web in that way?
Everything breaks off from the matrix; the decisions may not be conscious ones, but one is
choosing at all times. With each step tens of thousands of new possibilites appear.
Which has implications especially in translation, because it’s not only your own
intentions you’re trying to forward but also someone else’s.
Yes, it’s interesting.
Especially because you, in your introduction to Dante’s Inferno, and John Ciardi
[in the introduction to his 1954 translation] say almost identical things about the
limitations of rhyme in English but come to the opposite conclusion. Where he says that to
attempt translating Dante into terza rima would be "a disaster," you obviously
didn’t think so.
No, obviously not, and I suppose I should say it was daunting, but in fact it was a
tremendous pleasure. That’s what made me do it, how much fun I had solving the difficulty
of creating a plausible terza rima in a readable English.
You employ a lot of unusual word combinations, similar to Old English kennings. For
example, from the beginning of Canto XIII: "The leaves not green, earth-hued; / The
boughs not smooth, knotted and crooked-forked."
Yes, it’s so much fun to use all those Germanic roots, particularly when you’re
translating from a Romance language. Walter Benjamin says a wonderful thing about
translation, that a restrung translation "records the change in the new
language," brought about by the work that’s being brought into it. I’m partly trying
to record the impact upon English of The Inferno.
And it must not only have an impact upon English, but also upon your poetry.
Well, translating is a wonderful form of reading; it may be the most intense form of
reading, and whenever you read a great work, it’s going to affect your own work. I think
working on this translation brought me a new intimacy with and appreciation of the
physicality of poetry. Dante is so tactile, so sensuous a writer, and trying to get some
of those effects in a parallel way or a simulacrum or an equivalent way in English gave me
a heightened sense of the importance of physical sounds, like going to all those Germanic
roots or the Old English roots in the passage you mentioned.
And I’ve noticed some of those appearing in the new poems in The Figured Wheel…
Yes, I think so, and…wait, excuse me a minute. [A brief pause] Excuse me, I had some
photographers here.
It’s all right; I’m sure your schedule must be constrained at all times.
Well, I do find that everything has to be written down, so it doesn’t get completely
crazy. Some guys were here taking my picture; I thought they were going to be gone when
you called. They were finished, but they were still packing up.
You must have far more requests than you can handle. How do you make those decisions?
It’s a great question. There are some things that just seem, to use my booking agent’s
expression — he will say, "This is just a good Poet Laureate thing to do."
There will be some things that just seem as though this is what the post was created for,
something that involves encouraging somebody who’s doing a very good job, bringing poetry
into schools or something where you what to enourage and support something that’s very
worthy. And sometimes it’s a personal connection. Or if it’s something that seems to
involve some national thing, like I was invited to go to the birthday party of Old
Ironsides, the U.S.S. Constitution here in Boston, which happens to be a ship that was
saved by a poem. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that poem [after a newspaper article in 1830
proposed dismantling the ship], and it seemed like that was something one ought to do.
A few years ago, Rita Dove did a lot to help redefine what a Laureate "ought to
do." How do you think the role of the Laureate has changed?
I think it has changed in response to the change in the times. I think that there’s been a
notable upsurge of interest in poetry and the practice of poetry, and in response to that
change in the culture the office of Laureate in a typically American way has sort of
improvised itself into something somewhat different.
So what are you hoping will be your trademark or your legacy?
I have a project that I hope to complete, which is to create an audio and video archive of
many, many Americans saying aloud a poem that person loves. I hope to have a very wide
range of regional accents, a range of ages, professions, kinds of education, and it will
not concentrate on poets or critics or experts. The idea will be to establish a record at
the millenium of the life of poetry in the United States, outside of any professional
microcosm of poetry. This project will be sponsored by the Library of Congress, as part of
their bicentennial celebration, and I hope it will also be part of the country’s millenial
celebration.
from Meridian (Spring 1998). Online Source