Реферат: An Online Interview With W S Merwin

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