Реферат: An Online Interview With W S Merwin

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