Anyway, I want to read you a couple more of these poems.
That one that I read, which is the first one
in the middle book of these three,
that was called "An Apparatus."
And the next one I'm going to read
is called "Excuse for Festivities."
Alcove to alcove, to enjoy a variety of prospects.
A looming stimulus and a visual cliff.
Attack and exploration.
Ill health and fatigue play a part.
Speed irrelevant.
Apocryphal stories cluster.
Modesty above personal enjoyment.
Responses include, on the one hand,
crouching, curling up, taking cover, and on the other,
calling out, escaping.
First there is weariness, then other causes of forgetting.
Then still others, and then there is weariness.
Fur elicits fear, or a pair of staring eyes or something
falling from the sky.
Instant flight or sometimes, catalepsy.
In hot haste, beating the charger with a furled umbrella
picked up by mistake.
A quite unnecessary withdrawal that evening.
I detest drama.
Met by a sudden movement or mysterious sound, few of us
learn.
Down a dark passage, patting a dog, or psychoanalyst,
comfort me with toy, charm, talisman.
Now I remember a party.
Year passed into year, I betook myself
to a belvedere overlooking a garden.
Covering my face with my hands, I can never recall that day.
One clue, universally known, is pain.
Danger has already materialized, experimental,
hard to extinguish.
Safety may lie in one special place or anywhere
in the tops of trees.
The calming effect of contact.
A response learnt as the result of a single violent experience
does not die easily.
Common sense doesn't cover everything in my youth.
I was afraid.
There is no evidence available.
From what I can tell, things are beautiful in the eyes
of those admirers.
The widow of Napoleon plays cards with Wellington,
and the coins they play for are napoleons.
I don't know whether I made it clear that I felt perfectly
free to change anything either when it was written
or after it was written, or any old time.
There was a publisher in Paris, strangely enough, who
wanted to publish a book of mine,
and someone who had translated books
by me and by Rosemary, who was a wonderful translator,
said she would translate this book.
And I said, well all right.
Fine.
Excellent.
So she started translating it, and she wrote me,
at some point, because she had just
realized that the stanzas were alphabetical,
which is not all that obvious because they don't go ABC.
It's a very irregular alphabet.
And she said, well this may be difficult,
but I'll try to make the stanzas alphabetical.
And I immediately wrote her back, by no means do that.
Just translate every stanza individually,
as you would translate that stanza,
and then rewrite rearrange them alphabetically.
[LAUGHTER]
And this terrorized her.
And she just was exasperated by this
until I was passing through Paris and I went to see her,
and made her sit down at the computer,
and showed her how easy this was to do.
And she said, well, but--
I also wanted her to change the order of the poems
by alphabetically-- by the new titles-- the titles in French.
And she said, but what if somebody sees
that it's not like the English?
They'll think I changed it.
I said, don't worry.
It hasn't been published in English.
[LAUGHTER]
Finally, it came out in French years before this,
and I really sort of preferred the French.
It's very strange to me to go from one to the other.
I was wishing I had written the French rather than the English.