Реферат: Online Interviews With Robert Pinsky Essay Research

boughs not smooth, knotted and crooked-forked."

Yes, it’s so much fun to use all those Germanic roots, particularly when you’re

translating from a Romance language. Walter Benjamin says a wonderful thing about

translation, that a restrung translation "records the change in the new

language," brought about by the work that’s being brought into it. I’m partly trying

to record the impact upon English of The Inferno.

And it must not only have an impact upon English, but also upon your poetry.

Well, translating is a wonderful form of reading; it may be the most intense form of

reading, and whenever you read a great work, it’s going to affect your own work. I think

working on this translation brought me a new intimacy with and appreciation of the

physicality of poetry. Dante is so tactile, so sensuous a writer, and trying to get some

of those effects in a parallel way or a simulacrum or an equivalent way in English gave me

a heightened sense of the importance of physical sounds, like going to all those Germanic

roots or the Old English roots in the passage you mentioned.

And I’ve noticed some of those appearing in the new poems in The Figured Wheel…

Yes, I think so, and…wait, excuse me a minute. [A brief pause] Excuse me, I had some

photographers here.

It’s all right; I’m sure your schedule must be constrained at all times.

Well, I do find that everything has to be written down, so it doesn’t get completely

crazy. Some guys were here taking my picture; I thought they were going to be gone when

you called. They were finished, but they were still packing up.

You must have far more requests than you can handle. How do you make those decisions?

It’s a great question. There are some things that just seem, to use my booking agent’s

expression — he will say, "This is just a good Poet Laureate thing to do."

There will be some things that just seem as though this is what the post was created for,

something that involves encouraging somebody who’s doing a very good job, bringing poetry

into schools or something where you what to enourage and support something that’s very

worthy. And sometimes it’s a personal connection. Or if it’s something that seems to

involve some national thing, like I was invited to go to the birthday party of Old