Реферат: An Online Interview With W S Merwin

disciplines I know of. Because if you are translating jokes, for example, if you get

anything wrong, nothing works. You have to get it absolutely right. Then you realize that

all translating is really that way. With Lazarillo de Tormes, I was trying to get

that. These are several things happening. This was a very literate man who wrote Lazarillo,

and that’s very evident in the book but also he’s writing in the voice of a fully-formed

and funny character, a kind of much harder, much more difficult Huckleberry Finn. It’s

sort of the original form from which the other picaresque people descended later. I

imagine Huckleberry Finn, is certainly in this tradition, whether Mark Twain was

aware of any of the others or not. I certainly wasn’t trying to make him sound like

Huckleberry Finn but there’s a real closeness between those two characters.

DB: Did that book come before Boccacio’s Decameron ?

Merwin: No, I don’t think so. The Decameron was earlier.

DB: I thought there was a lot of picaresque in that book.

Merwin: But’s there’s no single character. Lazarillo is the original

picaresque because it’s the original role-hero going from episode to episode. The only

continuity is one character who goes from one episode to another. I think it’s one of the

first books in literature which actually does that and has a character who, by the

standards of the society around him is a rogue, in all senses a rogue. He’s an outsider

and an oddball. Lazarillo is also a very winning and touching character, I think, very

funny. The whole book is full of those ironies which Cervantes uses not so very long

afterwards in Don Quixote, which are also virtually intranslatable. The subtlety of

Cervantes’ irony is one of the things that is lost in translation. I wasn’t trying to make

him sound like Huck Finn or something like that. He had to sound like a child, very

intelligent, very straight, a very courageous and funny child.

DB: Do you feel that maybe the key in translating that book was the voice?

Merwin: Absolutely.

DB: You mentioned last night about the heavy impact of reading Czeslaw Milosz’s The

Captive Mind. Why do you think that during a period like the Sixties (which was very

political), the book did not really get any attention?