Реферат: Online Interviews With Robert Pinsky Essay Research

think people still tell and hear stories, as much as ever. What may be unusual about my

childhood and youth is that my town was a close-knit microcosm. Maybe that kind of

experience is increasingly rare. It was the New Jersey Shore as a small Southern town, in

a way.

FEED: Why are you working to keep poetry

active in American life?

PINSKY: In an age of dazzling, gorgeous,

mass media, highly duplicable and inherently on a mass scale, there is profound value in

an art whose medium is one individual’s voice — and the audience’s voice, not necessarily

the artist’s! Because poetry is inherently, and by its nature, on an individual, intimate

scale, we value it.

FEED: By that, do you mean that the voice

of any given poem is the voice of the reader more than it is the voice of the writer?

PINSKY: Not "more than,"

necessarily. A poem is a reality. That reality inheres not on a page or in an expert

performance but in the sounds of the words of the poem, realized in a voice, actual or

imagined. That reality is not bound to the poet’s voice, or to an actor’s.

FEED: Is storytelling, or the idea of

poetry sharing, necessary to sustain poetry as a viable, cultural force?

PINSKY: Sharing goods is more or less a

definition of culture, I think. It is "natural," in the way that culture is

natural. Such sharing may have more to do with the health and survival of an art than the

official world of grants, prizes, curricula, and so on.

FEED: A friend told me about an exhibition

that she saw at one of the Harvard libraries a few years ago in which your notes for your

translation of Dante’s Inferno were shown. They were covered with comments from

poet-friends of yours like Tom Sleigh and Seamus Heaney. Do you think collaboration is

important to the translating process? What are the similarities between the translation

process and the act of writing original verse?