Thank you very much, [? Ms. Fuller. ?] My Thanks
to all of you for coming and for all of the hospitality I felt
in Arizona since I came.
I'm grateful for all kinds of things.
And perhaps specifically for one little linguistic acquisition,
which I've made here.
I've been assembling over the years remarks
that I somehow stumble into, which
I mean as complements in which turn out
to be just the opposite.
And I heard a rather good one, I think, here,
which I pass on not just so I can
start the evening with the jokes that those unaccustomed
to are supposed to.
But because it is of some interest,
I think, to people who care about language.
I think I stumbled into the first of these.
There's a great name for this-- noema, I think--
when the opposite of the intention intended as conveyed.
I think the first one happened to me at the Bread Loaf
Writers' Conference when as we were walking across the street
to our dinner, a lady said, may I take your hand in case
I break my leg.
And I said, I wish you would.
That's one.
Or another was also at Bread Loaf on a last morning there.
And that means after all of the farewell parties
the night before.
And that means people were not quite as perceptive as they
had been other mornings.
And it means people were more confused.
And there was more chaos around than usual.
And everybody was dashing around at breakfast saying,
goodbye, see you next year, goodbye, goodbye.
It was rather worrisome.
And I turned to the lady next to me and said--
meaning well, and said, I don't want to say goodbye to anyone
except you.
The third example happened the other night right here.
This is the Arizona contribution when someone in town
asked me in for a drink before dinner.
And the lady had been away for a couple of weeks.
And the provisions were all in a kind of garage, I guess it was.
And she said, would you help me bring in this stuff.
And so we went out there.
And here was this large case.
And I said, do you want me to bring the whole case in.
And she said, yes, since you're here.
What all this meant was, of course, it's heavy.
And I wish you'd help me with it while someone is here.
But that's the third noema, if that's indeed the word for it.
People who write poetry are interested in ambiguities.
And this is a kind of ambiguity.
A kind of double meaning.
Not exactly in the classic sense.
And I don't know whether poets can
aim at this figure of speech or not, maybe.
I thought I'd start though after that gracious introduction
and after all of this hospitality
by biting the hand that feeds me.
By saying what I can against poetry readings.
I really don't like poetry readings at all.
At least other people's poetry readings.
And I think if you haven't heard the case against them,
maybe you ought to.
There's a good deal to be said against poetry readings
besides the fact that they're intrinsically boring
for everybody except the reader.
Unless one's name is Dylan Thomas maybe.
And that is that they misrepresent--
well, first of all, it's impossible to get a new poem
on hearing it.
As Jorge Guillen, the Spanish poet, said,
a poem is not read until it's reread.
Or you could say until it's reread and reread and reread.
And good poems don't communicate on the fly.
If one is reading poems you already know,
perhaps it's all right to listen to the reading of the poems.
It can't hurt, I suppose.
But it doesn't help much to hear a new poem read.
And a second caution about poetry readings
is that the poem after all, is what gets embodied in words.
This is all that matters.
It has nothing to do with the personality of the writer.
And if one perceives the poem through the personality
of the writer, he confuses the two.
I've seen some classic examples of this kind of thing.
Again, in Bread Loaf one summer there was a very
handsome waiter, I guess.
He was a tall, bronze boy with a beautiful voice
and he read his poems.
And girls swoon, sort of.
Well, the poems weren't any good.
But how did they know?
They weren't just listening.
They were looking at this gorgeous figure
and listening to this marvelous voice.
And they didn't realize that what was coming out
of this very masculine throat was
a series of puny little poems that wouldn't have
looked any good on the page.
They weren't any good.
And they were confusing the poems
with the personality of the poet.
Or the reverse can happen.
They tell me that a few years ago, a very good English poet
read at Harvard.
And he was a very unimpressive man.
A meek little Caspar Milquetoast sort of man.
He read his poems very timidly.
They weren't well received because nobody heard the poems
as the poems were extremely strong
and vibrant and masculine.
And they're with us as long as there's an English language.
But people at the reading didn't know that.
And he was followed by a second reader
who had dramatic training or something of that sort.
And was dressed for the part.
And was again, tall and bronze.
And the poems weren't any good.
But he got a tremendous hand.
It's very, very difficult, I think,
to discriminate between the person reading
and the poems read.
And this is why I warn you against poetry readings.
And I do what I can to undermine their popularity.
I give them now and then.
And that I think should do it.
But I really wish--
There was a review recently in The London Times
literary supplement of a new book
by Philip Larkin, who's a very good English poet, I think.
And it said, Mr. Larkin has refused almost all invitations
to judge, recite, review, lecture, pontificate,
be interviewed.
And has continued to produce his rare and fine poems.
This is really what we should do.
And what one wants to say to a number of young poets
who are interested in lecture tours, beware of the poets
who read a lot, I can tell you that.
But what one wants to say to the young people interested in this
is, go home and shut up.
Go home and get to work.
Be like Frost.
Work for 20 years without paying any attention to publication
and making this or that magazine or getting on this
or that lecture schedule.
This is the admirable thing to do.
And when one has enough character,
this is what he does.
He stays home.
But I like Tucson and people in Tucson.
I wish though I could say with Alexander Pope.
"I ne'er with wits or witlings pass'd
my days to spread about the itch of verse and praise.
Nor like a puppy daggled through the town
to fetch and carry sing-song up and down,"
which is what the readers do.
Well, I guess I'm going to fetch and carry a little sing-song.
I hope because I rather felt this is one poetry
reading I shouldn't miss.
So here it is.
My favorite remark about a poetry reading, I think,
is what a listener is supposed to have said to one poet
after his reading.
A young man came up and said, sir, that last poem,
was that a real poem or did you make that up?
And I thought I might start with a few real poems
that I didn't make up.
A couple of translations that is, truthfully
from Saint John of the Cross.
And I don't suppose I have to say again
since I've been saying often lately
that poetry is untranslatable.
And that as Robert Frost said, poetry
is what is lost in translation.
Poetry is what is lost in translation because poetry
is poetry because of a particularly
intimate connection between what is said and the way it said.
And what is said is not poetry.
And many translators just give us what is said,
which is not the poem at all, of course.
And is a little bit like--
as I said, I guess this morning, a little bit like judging
a beauty contest by X-rays.
Well, what do you do when you're translating a poem?
One thing you can do is what [? Vaali ?] called something
like the technique of equivalent effect.
That is don't try to give the thought of the poem.
Try to recreate something which in your language
has what you take to be the effect the original had
in its language.
In that way, the readers know what kind of poet the poet is.
If they heard the thought, they have no idea what kind of poet
he is.
And this is what I tried to do with the poems of St
John of the Cross.
I can't say I did it.
I can't say tonight that my reading of any
of the poems I read constitutes any particular approval
of these poems.
Just the only ones I have to read.
But this is what I was trying to do in this translation.
And when you do this, what you do
is take the thought of the original poem.
You try to find out what kind of diction it was.
And you can only do this by having
spoken the language since you were
a child, the other language.
Or else having that most useful of scholarly tools
and translation, a friendly native.
And you talk to this person and say,
not what does this word mean.
That doesn't matter so much in the poetry.
But when would you use it.
What has been its history in your language.
Is it a formal word or an informal word.
Would a child use it?
You have to get the tone of the word.
And no dictionary will give you that.
If you don't do this in translating,
you make all kinds of boners Recent translation of Octavio
Paz, they tell me has hundreds of plane boners
in it because the translator looking
at the Spanish word "hombro," which means shoulder,
thinks she's looking at "hombre," which means man.
That's a boner.
It's not taking a liberty.
It's a plain boner.
And ignorance is always ugliness, it seems to me.
And a great many translators are ignorant.
I don't think anybody who doesn't
know a language very well or know this friendly native ought
to translate it.
And young poets are translating all over the place as you know.
One is translating from the Scandinavian
because he lived a year in Sweden or somewhere.
A man in Swedish at Harvard tells me
the book has hundreds of simple mistakes
that anybody should know.
Clearly this translator was arrogant.
It never occurred to him to check up on little things.
This I think is pretty bad.
There are some famous boners in the history of translation.
One of my favorites is the story of the Spaniard
who was translating Emily Dickinson
and came across the line, I never saw moor.
Well, I don't have to even finish this story.
The Spaniard knew very well what a war was.
He'd read Spanish history.
But he had all kinds of trouble with the rest of the poem,
trying to make it make sense.
Or another good example is the Italian translation
I saw of a poem by Kenneth Patchen, which has the line
and a girl says, why don't you come up and see me tonight,
I've got nothing on.
The Italian didn't know that idiom.
That was a real boner.
And history of translations, I suppose,
are full of remarks of--
I don't say there aren't any boners here.
I do say there are lots of liberties
that what this translator tried to do
is take the thought, the diction.
And it was this matter of diction
that has distracted me for a while.
The diction, the rhythm.
You'll find lots of poets who will tell you
the rhythm is more important than the thought.
As far as a poem goes, that is.
If it doesn't have a rhythm, it's just not a poem.
Whereas if it doesn't have a thought, maybe it is.
Anyway, maybe it is.
The rhythm, the stanza form.
I think what you do is take all of these things
and then try to write a new poem incorporating as many
as you can.
And knowing perfectly well you're
not going to get all of them.
You know you're not.
Translation is a kind of lost cause in a way.
But here is a translation of one of St John's poems.
The poem about the dark night.
I think it's mimeographed.
I don't know what page though.
Six.
I was surprised to find out that St John of the Cross
is one of the greatest poets in Spanish.
I thought that he was a famous mystic referred to
by TS Eliot and a few others.
But no, Spaniards know him as a very great poet.
One of the greatest in their language.
Many critics would say the greatest for a few poems.
One critic has said that the highest points in St John
are the highest points reached by poetry in any of the romance
languages.
But this is only for a few poems.
Why is he good?
Well, this is a religious poem.
Religious poems are terribly hard to write
as TS Eliot says because few people are really religious,
passionately religious.
And of those who are passionately religious,
few are also good poets.
Most people, he says, in religious poems
don't say how they feel but how they think they ought to feel.
What is proper to feel.
Well St John was passionate and a great poet too.
And these are perhaps as great as any religious poems are.
And they're great for one thing because they don't insist
on being religious at all.
In fact, Spanish girls have told me that when they were young
they read these poems and thought
they were human love poems.
And I'd like to say that this is what they would have
to sound like if they're good poems because what can one
say in terms of the senses.
And I think one point that one has to insist on about poetry
is that it's a very sensuous kind of thing.
Really very primitive.
And that people who write intellectual poetry aren't
writing poetry at all because poetry
is a kind of expression of the whole man.
It's physiologic.
A really sort of a vulgar thing, poetry.
Instead of a highbrow thing.
Which is why Garcia Lorca said the poet is
a professor of the five senses.
If he isn't that he isn't a poet.
This is his field, the five senses.
And if one is going to write poems about God,
one has to write them in terms of the senses in some way.
And St John of the Cross looked for the best image
we have for divine love and found it in human love
as the Song of Songs did.
Human love, he felt, is the best and most exciting thing we know
and the kind of experiences we have.
And so he writes this whole poem as
if it were a human love poem.
And there's no place in the poem, I think,
where you can say it isn't a human love poem.
And if there were any place like this,
it would be a poorer poem, I think.
It's meaningful on the two levels.