Реферат: Online Interviews With Robert Pinsky Essay Research

of T.S. Eliot and people influenced by Eliot, I think those people as a matter of course

wrote in many different forms, were interested in translation, and it’s never occurred to

me to be any other way.

How would you remedy what seems to be a growing distance between the writer — as

artist — and the critic?

William Butler Yeats says, "Nor is there singing school but studying / monuments of

its own magnificence" [in "Sailing to Byzantium"]. That is, there’s no way

to learn to be better or to learn to do an art other than to study monumental examples of

the art. Ezra Pound says, "The highest form of criticism is actual composition."

That is, the poet must choose — the word "critic" is based on

"krinos," which means "to choose" — and critics today get away

with not choosing or not selecting but a poet every moment must choose: whether to use a

long word or a short one, this adjective or that one or none. This constant process of

criticism is part of the work of composition.

Is it a spider’s web in that way?

Everything breaks off from the matrix; the decisions may not be conscious ones, but one is

choosing at all times. With each step tens of thousands of new possibilites appear.

Which has implications especially in translation, because it’s not only your own

intentions you’re trying to forward but also someone else’s.

Yes, it’s interesting.

Especially because you, in your introduction to Dante’s Inferno, and John Ciardi

[in the introduction to his 1954 translation] say almost identical things about the

limitations of rhyme in English but come to the opposite conclusion. Where he says that to

attempt translating Dante into terza rima would be "a disaster," you obviously

didn’t think so.

No, obviously not, and I suppose I should say it was daunting, but in fact it was a

tremendous pleasure. That’s what made me do it, how much fun I had solving the difficulty

of creating a plausible terza rima in a readable English.

You employ a lot of unusual word combinations, similar to Old English kennings. For