Реферат: An Online Interview With W S Merwin

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