The translation is a very good exercise for people who write.
Ezra Pound once said that anyone writing poetry
ought to translate at least 70 lines a day.
That's too much probably, but I think we see what he means.
Ezra Pound, like most great poets,
believed writing poetry is very hard work.
And Pound said once, learning to write
poetry is at least as hard as learning to play the piano.
At least as hard.
Most of the great poets have insisted on this.
One cannot say this too much to the young who yearn to write
poetry, and who decide the third month they're writing,
that they're poets.
And that they're significant poets.
And everything that comes into their head and goes on the page
is great.
It's not how you learn to play the piano, the third or fourth
month.
It's going to take a long time, and a lot
of work before anything very significant works out.
Especially if you think that--
I don't know how many people are in this camp
was writing poetry, 20, 30.
How many colleges are there in America, are there
50,000 young men and women setting out as poets?
No, maybe.
Will 10 make it?
Maybe.
I'm not trying to discourage anyone,
I'm saying work is all it's going to matter.
And if anyone thinks he just arrives automatically,
he's probably wrong about this.
Well, I say this in connection with translation,
which is one thing you can do for work.
You can always translate-- you can't write poetry
all the time.
I don't think-- that's too much poetry.
Sometime count through the collected poems of Yeats,
and see how much he wrote per day over his lifetime.
Not much.
You'll find out, what was he doing at other times?
In part working, thinking about working.
He translated a little, but with help.
This is a thing one can do though.
And also in translating, you're taken away
from the narrow limitations of your own language.
Elliott says somewhere, if you're
going to imitate anybody, and young people do.
If you're going to imitate anybody,
it ought to be someone who writes in another language.
Because the verbal echoes don't give you away.
If you begin to write like E.E. Cummings,
you're instantly sunk.
I mean this is second hand immediately because Cummings
has done it perfectly.
And he did it as nobody else did, he was original.
But there actually are young people
who think they're being original by imitating E.E.
Cummings, or somebody like Hopkins, for example.
You can't do it that way anymore, it's been done.
Whereas if you read say Lorca, Machado, Valery, someone
who writes in another language, and imitate pretty closely,
not so many people are going to know.
And I don't mean--
I don't merely mean that you're getting away with something,
I mean that you are doing more yourself.
Because these writers did not give you the words,
they gave you ideas of technique, and so on.
And the words are your own.
This is one reason to translate.
And then also it takes you out of your own time,
which is quite a dangerous place for a poet to be.
I found a good example of that lately when
I found a book called something like the most
brilliant young American poets.
And I opened it, and there were 30 names
of which I had heard of one.
This was published in 1903.
Well, if you are simply following the net--
the great net, what seemed to be the great names of 64,
you're running the same risk.
In 20 years, who will know who they are?
Probably, maybe if you're lucky you've
picked out a good one to imitate.
But the chances are you haven't because the people who
appear a whole lot and a little and literary magazines
for a few years are generally ephemeral, or generally so.
And they're often the biggest names of their time.
These names from 1903 were great names in 1903.
The people were much imitated.
They were names like Richard Burton,
which is the one for some reason I remember.
Not the other two.
Now neither of the other two Richard Burton's you
know about.
The American poet Richard Burton,
and I'll bet none of you has heard of.
But he gave ratings in 1903 I'll bet.
Big stuff in 1903.
What should writers have been doing?
Not being too devoted to the contemporary.
Because of all the great poetry ever written,
how much belongs to the present?
One 100, not that much I think.
And you can learn far more safe from Sappho and Catullus
than from people writing in a whole lot of little magazines.
If you want to write poems that will last 2000 years,
read Catullus.
And it's quite annoying to me what
I get students in class who sound like a certain poet
I've seen in the magazines.
And they say, oh, yes, I am imitating
Jimmy Anderson of Des Moines.
He's doing some pretty hot stuff these days.
And this happens all the time.
That's the name I made up, but I could
think of some would all know who are
no more important than Jimmy Anderson of Des Moines.
Who is in all the little magazines right now perhaps.
Well, this is another advantage of translation,
it gets you in contact with the really great.
And it introduces you to techniques
you would not think of.
It suggests experiments you would not think of perhaps.
I have an example of that sort.
And I repeat this in case anybody is thinking,
he certainly is arrogant.
Which is what people always think
when one criticizes anybody.
I did have to write lately a review of the collected poems
of T.S. Eliot.
T.S. Eliot seems to me somewhat overrated now.
Though he sure is greater than Jimmy Anderson of Des Moines,
but somewhat overrated.
And I mention this, and I got a couple of mad letters
from people who said, how dare you criticize your betters?
Well, if you can't criticize your betters, who's
worth criticizing really?
Does this mean that you cannot have an opinion about a man who
writes better poetry than you do?
This is surely ridiculous.
It means that-- does it mean that a girl can't criticize
a girl who just because the one is
more beautiful than the other, or even more smart?
Now this doesn't hold for criticism.
One can have a sincere opinion about these matters.
What's this in connection with arrogance?
Arrogance.
I don't mean to sound arrogant when I say,
here is something I learned from translation,
but I do repeat again that I don't read this because I
think it's a good poem.
I don't know whether it is or not actually.