{"id":293836,"date":"2013-04-17T19:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-04-17T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2013\/04\/17\/selected-translations-by-w-s-merwin\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T15:56:40","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T15:56:40","slug":"selected-translations-by-w-s-merwin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2013\/04\/17\/selected-translations-by-w-s-merwin\/","title":{"rendered":"Selected Translations by W. S. Merwin"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

“South”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

To have watched from one of your patios
\nthe ancient stars
\nfrom the bank of shadow to have watched
\nthe scattered lights
\nmy ignorance has learned no names for
\nnor their places in constellations
\nto have heard the ring of water in the secret pool
\nknown the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle
\nthe silence of the sleeping bird
\nthe arch of the entrance the damp
\n—these very things may be the poem.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

-Jorge Luis Borges, Spanish, 1899-1986<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

To enter Merwin\u2019s larger poetic project, whether in his translations or his own poems, the reader weighs life\u2019s experiences captured in language so that \u201cthese very things may be the poem.\u201d This collection gathers poems spanning 2,500 years, from thirty-eight languages, seventy-eight different poets whose names are known, and twenty-six anonymous poets, the latter including songs from communal oral traditions. Two previously gathered selected translations (1948-1968 and 1968-1978), join those Merwin has selected from 1978 to 2011. Each of the three sections is preceded by Merwin\u2019s explanation of his evolving project of translation.<\/p>\n

\u201cSince the eighteenth century, and especially since the beginning of modernism, more and more translations have been undertaken with the clear purpose of introducing readers (most of them, of course, unknown to the translators) to works they could not read in the original, by authors they might very well never have heard of, from cultures, traditions and forms with which they had no acquaintance . . . . (by) poet-translators who do not, themselves, know the languages from which they are making their versions, but must rely, for their grasp of the originals, on the knowledge and work of others.\u201d (from \u201cForward, 1968-1978\u201d)<\/p>\n

Merwin honors his fellow poets who have helped him in his project of translations from not only languages more familiar to Western ears, and the haikus of classic Asian writers of the form, but also ancient Egyptian, Quechua, Kabylia, Dahomey, Caxinua, Vietnamese, Tartar, Urdu, and so forth. Beyond French and Spanish, Merwin explains that he is dependent on dictionaries and other translations; he might not work from the original but from, say, a French translation of the original.<\/p>\n

\n

“Yscolan”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Your horse is black your cloak is black
\nyour face is black you are black
\nyou are all black\u2014is it you Yscolan?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

I am Yscolan the seer
\nmy thoughts fly they are covered with clouds.
\nIs there no reparation then for offending the Master?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

I burned a church I killed the cows that belonged to a school
\nI threw the Book into the waves
\nmy penance is heavy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

Creator of living things you
\ngreatest of all my protectors forgive me.
\nHe that betrayed you deceived me.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

I was fastened for a whole year
\nat Bangor under the piles of the dam.
\nTry to think what I suffered from the sea worms.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

If I had known then what I know now
\nthe liberty of the wind in the moving treetops
\nthe crime could not be laid to me.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

-Myrddyn, Welch, ca 6th century<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Merwin at age 19 visited Ezra Pound when Pound was incarcerated in St. Elizabeth\u2019s Hospital; Pound told Merwin that the best apprenticeship is to translate the masters, to draw from the well from which poetry arose. In following this advice, Merwin grounded himself in ancient poets and even more so in medieval poetry from Romance languages. The medieval poetry shares with Merwin\u2019s larger poetic project the crystallizing use of images; these images carry deeper into the psyche than mere words on the surface might discursively capture. One doesn\u2019t need to know the legend story cycle from which \u201cYscolan\u201d is taken to hear the experience suffered from sea worms while being imprisoned under a dam, and then contrasted to the freedom of winds in a tree.<\/p>\n

Merwin does this in good company, during an important moment in time of world letters for English speakers. In the late 1960s into the 1980s, one larger poetic project\/school was referred to as \u201cdeep imagists.\u201d Along with Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell, Mark Strand, Charles Wright, and Robert Hass (among others), Merwin shared a use of seeming surrealist images which bypassed rational thought to reach emotional\/spiritual reality. These writers also translated poems of varying eras and geographies in what seems in retrospect to be a new blossoming of translations into English.<\/p>\n

In the first \u201cForward,\u201d Merwin points to this impulse for both deep image and translation: \u201cTranslation may be no more dangerous than any other to a growing recognition of the true original that, in del Vasto\u2019s words, \u2018tastes of the source.\u2019 It is love, I imagine, more than learning, that may eventually make it possible to be aware of the living resonance before it has words . . .\u201d The Borges poem cited previously evokes this \u2018source\u2019 with ancient stars and the silence of a sleeping bird; the poet does not know the names of stars and constellations imposed by people, but does enjoy direct apprehension of them, and the smell of jasmine, the sound of the \u201cring of water in the secret pool.\u201d Poetry bypasses intervening mythological\/scientific constructs to grasp reality itself.<\/p>\n

\n

from \u201cLooking Across the Field\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

A peony appears
\nin my mind
\nafter the petals have fallen<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

The evening I cut
\na peony stem
\nand felt my spirit whither<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

The summer night is short
\ndew gathers
\non the hairy caterpillars<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

-Yosa Buson, Japanese, 1716-1783<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Merwin\u2019s own poetry continued to grow and change in subject matter. He has deep ecological concerns, so nature figures significantly in both his own poems and those he translates. Love and its challenges figure importantly. Liminal moments\u2014twilight, an approaching horizon, seasons as they are changing (especially into fall and winter), and most recurrent\u2014the inevitable reality of death\u2014thread through Merwin\u2019s larger poetic project. The Buson poem Merwin chose presents all this by content and form: the natural world suffuses the images\u2014a peony both mentally conjured and in a garden and a summer night\u2019s dew fall\u2014lovely, yes?\u2014but the third line of each stanza, not only finishing the brief thought\/image each in lines longer than the two preceding, but also turns the building image into something troubling\u2014all the petals fallen, a spirit withered and, most graphic, a wet hairy caterpillar.<\/p>\n

Formally, Merwin\u2019s own poetry omits punctuation (since his first four books); he explains that punctuation seems to nail down the words and poem to a page in a limiting manner. Perhaps this is one of many reasons why Merwin is drawn to the Asian haiku-like verse of Asian poets such as Buson in addition to more recent, European authors:<\/p>\n

\n

“Words”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

They were talking about
\npretend love
\nat the old table
\nriddled with worms
\nthe fire warmed up the stove
\nthe lentil darkened as it cooked
\nand in the open doorway
\nfacing human words
\ncomposed in well-tried syntax
\nthe beauty of the bitter foliage
\nand birds with red breasts
\nwere shining.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

-Jean Follain, French, 1903-1971<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This photographic tableau captures conversation around this decaying table in a kitchen\/dining room that is not comfy, but in a place of falseness and paucity. Over against the interior space is the exterior, which has beauty\u2014albeit somewhat bitter\u2014and is alive with the shining red quickness of the birds.<\/p>\n

This former Poet Laureate of the US, Pulitzer Prize winner, author\/translator of over 50 volumes of poetry and prose, is now in his mid-80s. Of interest is how the poet returns to the same sources of ancient languages and medieval poets in the third, most recent period of translating; this after a middle period more characterized by modern poets. His forward to this last section is also ruminative, recalling his life as a poet through personal detail; he is no longer as caught up in the issues of translation.<\/p>\n

Next month his Collected Poems<\/em> will come out from the Library of America to make him the second only living poet to be so honored (John Ashbery is the other). Other poets may join him in importance for American poetry of the 20th\/21st centuries. None surpass him. This Selected Translations<\/em> is amazing in scope, mastery, themes, artistry, imagination: a testimony to a life time of consequential work. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“South” To have watched from one of your patios the ancient stars from the bank of shadow to have watched the scattered lights my ignorance has learned no names for nor their places in constellations to have heard the ring of water in the secret pool known the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle the silence […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[51146,27746,51136,10576,6696,51116,51126],"class_list":["post-293836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-copper-canyon-press","tag-grant-barber","tag-merwin","tag-poetry","tag-poetry-in-translation","tag-selected-translations","tag-w-s-merwin"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293836"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":339826,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293836\/revisions\/339826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}