Реферат: An Online Interview With W S Merwin

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.