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Unknown: Good day, Good day. Good day [Music] Morton Marcus: With that introduction of Raymond Kane we go to Hawaii, which is now the home of the person who we will be talking to tonight, the great American poet, winner of

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innumerable awards, W.S. Merwin who will continue our programming of the Summer Translation Institute at UCSC, W.S. Merwin: The play of Lesage that I want to draw your which was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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attention to is "Turcaret," and the problem with "Turcaret" is something of the problem with "Les Liaisons Dangereuses." If And I'm going to go back in this recording and pick up Merwin you- if you look at "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," even the

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talking about French drama and prose of the 18th century, and movie, you see that it's- it's been a cult piece for so many introduce some of the translations he is making from years partly because there are really no attractive characters

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"Turcaret." He will also talk about "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," which of course has been a popular film this in it. The attractive characters are so minor and so kind of- The past year. And let us go now back to this tape made by Joe

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Stroud, and yours truly in August for the show, especially, women who are seduced and whom you're sorry for, whom you feel the second of four shows in which the great American poet, outraged by, are not interesting. I mean, they're-

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they're not very interesting as people, you're- They'r translator, scholar, what more can I say about him, W.S. interesting because you're sorr for them, because you hate t Merwin, one of the great influences on young poets today

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see anyone treated that way. Bu you don't- you're no particularly involved with the as people. And this is true and yesterday as he speaks to the Summer Translation Institute this is true of "Turcaret" too the- It's heartless in that sam

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at UCSC. We pick up the program going over a little bit of sense, there's a- there's nobod in the play that you reall material which overlaps from last week. like. I find them all likable because- because simply becau

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e it's so awful, but I obvious y can't expect the whole audien e to, and only very gre t performances have made this pl y work. And the central part f "Turcaret" is such a great pa t that I'm amazed that it's n t used more often because it is

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a very great part. You know grea - great repellent parts sometim s can be as wonderful as any f them. Let me- let me find a ew passages fr -from "Turcaret." And I hope that leads you to read the play

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It really hardly matters where you pick it up, because they're some day. all- everybody is cheating everybody else. I mean, Turcaret is a rich, a nouveau riche kind of industrialist in the 18th

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century, who's very vulgar and who's made a lot of money and is very pleased with himself. And everybody's cheating him, and then everybody's cheating the people who are cheating him, and so on, all the way on around and that's what the play is about.

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So everybody's telling lies all the time, and the sort of comedy is in the audience being able to watch the lies being told. This is the Baronne who is, of course she's much- she has a title and he doesn't, so he's courting her and she hasn't got any money,

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she has a title so she's pleasing him and she despises him, and this is, you know perfectly obvious. She comes i with her- with her servant Mari e, and she says, "I'm delighted to see you Mister Turcaret so t at I may compliment you on

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he verses which you sent me," we l, we know what the verses are l ke [cut-of Seriously, Madame, do you find them well-turned? The Baronne: No [unidentified] could have bettered them.

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Mister Turcaret: I may tell you that they are the first verses that I ever wrote in my life. The Baronne: One would never hav said so. I preferred not to enlist the aid of some author as is the

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usual practice. The Baronne: [Unidentified]. No professional author thinks and expresses themselves in that way. No one would ever suspect that one of them had written your verses.

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Mister Turcaret: I was merely curious to see whether I might be capable of such composition, and love awakened my talent. This is the Baronne: You are capable of anything, Monsieur, and nothing is impossible for you.

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Now Marine says: You are to be complimented on your prose as well, Monsieur. It's in quite as much value as your verse, to say the least. Monsieur Turcaret: It's true that my prose has a certain

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worth, it is signed and approved by four of the treasures of the Commune. Marine [unintelligible] give me their approval and the academy say and- Give me their approval and let the academy say what it

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pleases. Baronne: For my part, I cannot approve of your prose, it impels me to quarrel with you. Turcaret: On what grounds?

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Baronne: Have you lost your reason to send me a note of credit? You commit some folly or other of that sort every day. Turcaret: How much is it for that note? Baronne: I was so vexed with you that I did not even notice the

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amount. Good, it's a mere ten thousand crowns. What, ten thousand crowns? Indeed if I had known that I should have sent it back to you at once. But I should return it

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to you. Oh, now that you have received it, you will not send it back. Marine says: Oh, I should think not. But I am more offended by your motive than by the thing itself.

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Oh why, it seems from the way you encumber me daily with presents that I supposed you need that sort of tie to attach me to you. What a motion, no madame, nothing was further from my

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thoughts. But you are mistaken, Monsieur. I do not love you any more dearly because of them. (How candid she is, how sincere about it)

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Nothing but the ardor and devotion of your attentions affect me. (Oh how good of her) And the pleasure of seeing you.

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(I'm charmed by her adieu, charming [unidentified].) What, are you leaving so soon? Yes, my queen, I was merely passing by and stopped in to greet you. I'm going to one of our meetings.

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I find you one more little scene in recent poems. Here you get a little tiny thing which is what Beaumarchais was- then was doing and what you find in, "Figaro." This is Falta(?) alone, and he's been watching this whole thing, and he becomes in a way the kind

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of- he's saying what the audience is thinking. He's the guy who sees through the whole kind of social [inaudible]. As he's watched all of these people [inaudible]. I'm intrigued by the pageant of human existence, we pluck a

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coquette, the coquette devours a man of means, the man of means has others whom he plunders. An the sum of it all is as enter aining and light-footed a progre sion of labors as a man coul I want to find the bit where h [inaudible], Turcaret, that

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wis is. Ah, here we are. Here s Monsieur Turcaret and the Bar nne again a little bit- this is later on in the play, of course. He's been very angry and he's ha a blow-off and now he's f

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Well, I'm halfway to consolation, I've already smashed a large mirror and all the best pieces of China. The Baronne says: By all means break the rest, Monsieur, why do you not continue?

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Monsieur Turcaret: I will continue when I please, Madame, I will teach you to juggle with a man like me. Now then, that note credit which I gave you a little while ago, I'll have it back. Give it to me.

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Thou you'll have it back. And what if I'd given that to the knight as well, or if I thought you had? Thou what a fool you are. I pity you, truly I do. Indeed, indeed, instead of throwing yourself at my feet and begging me for

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mercy. Mercy, she says, it is I who am wronged, she still says, it's I who am wronged. Of course, if I were to tell you the truth, I'd be delighted if

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as a treat to me you would undertake to convince me of that. And so I should if you were in a state to listen to reason, what could you say to make traitors?

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I shall say nothing to you, oh what an uproar. Very well, speak Madame. I'm controlled, I'm calm and listen, all the extravagances that you have just perpetrated stemming from a false report of Marine's.

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This is a very good passage. I don't know that I can find passages that really point it out, you know, it's hard to pick single things out of a play like that. But let me forget the comment. Except one more piece of one bit of prose from-

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because it was the hardest translation I ever did in my life, because it had to look simple. And it's kind of meant to become- this one is the arch-, this one is- was a book that had a great influence on Cervantes. And although I'm sure

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Mark Twain, probably- I'm not sure, but I imagine Mark Twain never read Cervantes. He certainly had an effect on Mark Twain because it had an effect on all of Russian literature. I mean, Gogol was mad about Cervantes, and Gogol of course

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influenced almost everybody who came after him in the twentieth century. This is of course, "Lazarillo de Tormes," a book for which I have great, great fondness. And the difficulty in translating this, it's comedy, the difficulty in translating is

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that it's a little boy talking, but it's not a little boy talking, it's the author talking in the persona of a little boy. And if you ever got- if you made it flat, or if you made it dull, or if you made it not a little boy, if you got too literary,

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you'd be losing the whole thing. And I do criticize some other translations for having done some of those things, or having gone too literary or done things, said things no little boy conceivably would have said. This is like, you could imagine

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what it would be like to translate Huckleberry Finn into another language, you'd have real difficulty. [LAZARO RECOUNTS HIS LIFE AND TELLS OF HIS PARENTS] Well, in the first place, Your Excellency should know that they

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call me Lázaro de Tormes. And I am the son of Tomé Gonzáles and of Antoña Pérez, both of them natives of Tejares, a hamlet in the neighborhood of Salamanca. I was born in the Tormes River, which is why I took the surname I bear. The way of it was this:

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My father, God rest his soul, had the job of tending a grist mill on the bank of that river. He was the miller there for over fifteen years. And one night when my mother was pregnant with me, she was in the mill when the labor pains came on, and she

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gave birth to me right there, so that I can truly claim to have been born in the river. Then, when I was eight years old, some people who had come to have their grain milled discovered a number of ragged

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and bleeding wounds in their sacks, and the cause of these was imputed to my father. As a result, he was arrested, and he confessed and did not deny it, and he suffered persecution for the sake of justice. I hope to God that he is in glory, for the

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scripture says that all those who are there are blessed. At that time an expedition was being got up against the Moors. My father, who was currently away from home as a result of the aforementioned disaster, went along as a gentleman's

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groom, and like a loyal servant, parished at this master's side. My widowed mother, finding herself without husband or protection, decided to cleave unto the good and become one of them, so she came to the city and rented a little house

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instead about cooking for a number of the students. She also did laundry for some of the Knight Commander of Magdalena's stable-boys, and thus it was that she came to frequent to stables.

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She and a dark complexioned groom there got to know each other and sometimes he would come to our house and leave in the morning. Other times he would appear at the door in the daytime pretending that he wanted to buy eggs and get into

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the house that way. When he first started coming in the house, I didn't like him and his ugly face frightened me. But then when I saw that we ate better as a result of his visits, I got to like him very much, because he always brought

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bread with him and pieces of meat and wood in the winter to keep us warm. (Anyways, the stepmother- stepfather gets into some problems. Let me just start to into the thing about the blind

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man. His stepsfather gets arrested for thievery, too.) And they flogged my poor stepfather and flung boiling oil over him. And my mother was sentenced, for the sake of justice, to the hundred lashes which are customary in such

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cases, and she was forbidden besides ever to set foot again in the house of the aforementioned Commander. Rather than throw the liquid- throw the rope after the bucket, the poor woman got a grip on herself and obeyed the sentence.

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And in order to get out of harm's way and escape malicious talk, she said- she went to work as a servant to the people who at that time were living in the Solana inn. There she was subjected to a thousand indignities, but she managed to

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bring up my little brother until he could walk and me until I was big enough to fetch wine for the lodgers, and candles, and anything else they sent me for. At that time, a blind man came to stay at the inn and took a

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notion that I would do as a guide for him. He asked my mother to give me to him, which she did, telling him that I was the son of a good man who had died for the glory of the faith at the Battle of Los Gelves, and that she hoped to God that I

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would not turn out to be any worse than my father. And she begged him to be kind to me and look after me since I was an orphan. He said that he would and that with him I would not be a

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servant but a son. And so I began serving and guiding my new old master. When we had been in Salamanca for several days, my master grew dissatisfied with his takings and decided to go somewhere

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else. When we were ready to leave, I went to see my mother. Both of us cried when she gave me her blessing. "Son" she said, "I know that I will never see you again. Try to be good and may God be your guide. I brought you up and settled you with a

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good master. Look after yourself." Then I went back to my master who was waiting for me. We left Salamanca and got to the bridge. At one end of it, there is a stone animal, which is something like a bull. The blind

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man told me to go over near it and when I was there, he said, "Put your ear down to the bull, Lazaro, and you'll hear a loud noise inside it." I was simple enough to believe him. And when he could feel that

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my head was up close to the stone, he shot up his hand and gave my head such a mighty whack against that infernal bull that I suffered from the goring for three days afterwards, and he said to me, "Stupid! Get it through your head: a blind man's

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boy has to keep one jump ahead of the devil himself." And he had a good laugh at his own joke. Now, it's, it's- He goes from master to master to master. They're all comic portraits of l fe in Spain at the time.

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I think of reading poetry, of course. Because as you- as you know, poetry is the ultimate untranslatable thing. I want to go read a translation to start with. It is one of the first ones that I did.

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And it was a translation of a poem of Baïf, French poet. And the reason that it seems to be a good one to start with, when I can find it, is because of the- Baïf, as you know, was a- was a member of the Pléiade. And in the Renaissance in

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France, the Pléiade were part of the Renaissance rediscovery of the ancient world. So this- this poem was a translation of another poem, which was, which was a translation of a poem of Plato's. Plato began as a poet. And Plato's translation was a

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translation of another poem, which was originally probably simply a small votive poem that was hung up in a shrine. I was fascinated, I've been fascinated since by the idea that a poem could exist in this way and pass through this many forms and

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still remain a recognizable poem because, of course, we don't have- we don't- a lot of the intervening phases we don't have, but we still have the Plato poem, and we know the relation of Baïf to, Baïf probably knew the Plato one too

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as well as, as well as knowing at least one of the others in between. It's a- it's a well known kind of situation, there's- there are poems rather like it in the Greek anthology, too. You think

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you've seen- you've all seen votive offerings in shrines where you know, you have a little leg hung up or a little- little hand, or a little painting, you know, somebody was saved from being run over by a train. This is a

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DEDICATION OF A MIRROR, a woman's. I that for letting a smile's favor loose from my youth in a light hour, would with suitor's press and fervor find my doorway darkened over, now to Venus for her to keep the promised mirror

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tender up, for the shape which of late I wear is such as will not bear review. And the face once this surface knew stirs no such shadows any more. That, as I say, was the very early one.

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I think I was 21 when I did that. Here's another poem from translation from French poetry of the same period, but that I did 20 years later. And this was a poem that I felt much closer to than that I did to the Baïf

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one. I mean, I liked it. I liked that Baïf one, and I was intrigued by it. But this was a poem that I carried around in my head for years and never thought of translating. I should probably say that I- that I, you know, we're talking about the

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difficulties of translation, and the- and the the cliche about the impossibility of translation, the general impossibility of translation. That's- that's abstract and general. I feel that there are things that are actually

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practically impossible to translate. And I think that is part of the tact and sense that one may arrive at in translating to be able to recognize them. Absolutely untranslatable by anybody, and certainly in one's own case, in my case, I

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certainly ought to be able to recognize things that I know that I can't translate. I think because obviously translators do differ, or one- or as ears differ, poets' ears differ. The perfect example to me over the years has been François Villon.

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People say Villon, something- something- I don't know how long, if there is any final consensus on the pronunciation of his name in 1989. The reason for that I think is that in Villon so much is- so much depends on the kind of Mozartean

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brilliance of the lyric side of Villon. The lyric, in my- in my view is ab- almost certainly is part of the original language, the more- the closer the poem is to depending on its lyric nature, on his formal lyric nature - the kind of song that

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Robert Burns was writing, for example - the more difficult is going to be to move into another language. That's something that one- one, I think we almost cannot move into another language. It's compounded in Villon's case by the fact that

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the- the lyric beauty of Villon, the lyric mastery, which is something like a more lyric Chaucer in English, is at odds with his subject. The subject is harsh, deliberately rough, cynical, brutal,painful, tragic, startling, and in every way at

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odds with- with the form that he's using. And it's that confrontation between, it's that sort of like- disharmony between- between the form and the subject, that makes for a great deal of the power of Villon, and unless you can

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convey the- the real beauty, the great beauty and mastery and apparent ease of the form, the- the great deal of the force of the subject in that form is lost. So that I think Villon is one of the untranslatables. You can by extension say those

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things about a great deal of poets. But we do the best we can and this- This poem is [cut off]. Morton Marcus: And we are listening to Leland "Atta" Isaacs known as "Atta," master of the slack-key guitar, off a

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record called "Atta," which is only available from Trade Winds Records only available in Hawaii. And we are playing this because this is where Bill Merwin lives now, and where most of his poetry is issuing from not only insofar as place, but

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insofar as spirit. He is very much concerned with the destruction of South Seas cultures, particularly Hawaiian cultures. And so we are playing some of the slack-key guitar. Let me say that KUSP thanks Nicholas van Angle(?) for

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providing a grant to help make the Poetry Show possible. That is the first half hour of the Poetry Show. Nicholas van Angle is a real estate agent in Carmel. Thank you, Nicholas, we really do appreciate it. And now let's leave this beautiful

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guitar and get back to W.S. Merwin, who is just about to read some of the poetry of the great medieval French poet, the criminal poet, the outlaw poet, if you will. Francoise Villon, at one time called the king of Paris, but that's because he was

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the king of the underworld. A very fascinating person who wrote some of the greatest poetry in the French language. Here again is W.S. Merwin, speaking this past summer, at the Translation Institute, funded by- sponsored by the

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National Endowment for the Humanities. W.S. Merwin: Bellay, who is the rough contemporary of Baïf's. It's one of the poems that he wrote out of homesickness. His greatest poems are poems written in homesickness.

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He was- what as- as an ambassador, in an ambassadorial capacity to Rome and hated Rome and wanted- wanted to be home in France. He wanted to be home in the country, at least he thought he wanted to be home in the country. And this is- this is a

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famous sonnet of his which begins "Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage," one of the most beautiful first lines in French poetry. The- it is not the rhymes of a sonnet, it keeps the- it keeps the

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sonnet form and it suggests the rhymes throughout and suggests the rhyme scheme, but doesn't follow it exactly. Happy the man who like Ulysses has made a good voyage, or like him who sees the fleece and then came back knowing and wise to

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spend among his kin the rest of his days. At last when will I see smoke from the chimneys of my little village, and in what season look on the walled garden of my simple house that is a province and much more to me. I would rather have the roof my

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father's made than the proud fronts of Roman palaces, and thin slate rather than their hard marble. Rather the Gaulish Loire than Latin Tiber, my little hills than the Mount Palatine, the sweetness of Anjou than the wind from the sea.

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Well, there's another poem that I translated at that same time that was- that was done in the end of the Fifties. I also had a poem of Catullus that had been going around in my head for years that I thought was untranslatable. And I

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thought I would do something. I finally- it got so that it was, you know, when you can't get music out of your head, and things like that; it sort of sticks with you. And now I don't remember the Latin anymore, having translated it. You see

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this is a good reason for not translating something. There's some poets that I've always refused to translate, because I didn't want to lose the original. There were these lines in this poem of Catullus that used to keep running through my

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head. And I began- began to find that some of them started turning into English, you know. And obviously, subconsciously, I was fiddling with- with English until English was getting closer to it. And I finally said that I wanted to do, to myself, that I

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wanted to translate this poem, and try to make the English, the sounds of English, obviously Catullus wasn't burdened with what was rhymed. My prejudice against rhyme is obvious.

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But he had a very elaborate sound, it wasn't a sound pattern. But this kind of texture of sound in the in the original was dense and powerful. And I wanted the English to do the same thing, whether I- whether I managed to make it do

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the same thing is another matter. So that was the intent, that's what I was trying to do is to make- make the English- make the sounds in English have the effect of the sounds in Latin. I should say that this is- this is a very, very angry

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poem, and it's very angry poem of a man about a woman. He's very mad. He says awful things about Lesbia. Whether he was justified or not, we don't know whether he was a [inaudible], male

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chauvinist pig, letting him- letting off steam. But that is neither here nor there in the case of the poem. The- it- we know that Catullus is mad at Lesbia; he wrote this poem, The- the- one of the things that I've loved about the poem is the- the

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style, I mean, I don't just mean the style of the language, but the style of the poem itself, because being angry, and intending to say as- as nasty things about her as he can, [inaudible] to. He has six stanzas, he gives himself six

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four lines stanzas in the poem, and then he throws four of them away. He spends four of them just addressing the people who are going to take the message. And then it gives them the message, he puts the whole message in the last eight lines

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of the poem. I think there's a kind of, there's a kind of posture and and arrogance in that; you may not like the character, but but how it works, his style is fantastic. Because it's the

00:29:41.320 - 00:29:59.480

feeling of absolute mastery of what he was- what he was doing, and, you know, it's sort of breathtaking to see someone able to do that. So this is- it's number 11 in the- in the corpus of Catulllus,

00:29:59.480 - 00:30:20.650

if you're interested in it, and there are other translations in English. Quite a few of them. This also keeps the form of the original, which is a Sapphic stanza: Furius and Aurelius, bound to Catullus though he penetrate to

00:30:20.650 - 00:30:36.250

the ends of the Indies, where the eastern ocean crashing in echoes pours up the shore, Or into Hyrcania, soft Arabia, among Tartars or the archers of Parthia, or where the Nile current, seven times the same,

00:30:36.280 - 00:30:50.560

colors the waters, Or through the beetling Alps, by steep passes, should come to look on the monuments of great Caesar, Gaul, the Rhine, and at the world's bitter end, the gruesome Britons.

00:30:51.100 - 00:31:09.360

Friends, both prepared to share with me all these or what else the will of heaven may send, to my mistress take these few sentiments, but none too nicely: Let her spread for her lechers and get her pleasure, lying wide

00:31:09.360 - 00:31:25.600

to three hundred in one heat, loving none truly but leaving them every one wrung out and dro ping. But as for my love, let her not count on it as once she could: by her own fault it died as a flower at the edge of a field

00:31:25.990 - 00:31:57.910

which the plow roots out in passing. At about the same time, I was very interested in a lot. I've always been fascinated by the Middle Ages. And I think probably I owe more to medieval poetry, to medieval European

00:31:57.910 - 00:32:18.100

poetry than to anything else. I discovered a collection of, I discovered two collections at that time of anonymous poetry. One of them Spanish folk songs that were collected in the 19th century, but their roots went back into the Middle Ages. And I

00:32:18.100 - 00:32:36.070

translated quite a few of those and then kept a handful of them. They're all- they're all in the same kind of form. They're little coplas, which are mostly 4 lines. Let me read a handful of them, and we don't know the age of any of them. And you see

00:32:36.070 - 00:32:47.050

I was playing around with different forms, and I wasn't- I wasn't keeping the rhyme. I was- but I was trying to make it clear that they were coplas. Most of them are amatory verses of one kind or another.

00:32:49.160 - 00:33:05.660

Throw a cross to the dog if you come to see me, because my mother sleeps as lightly as a hair. When they broke the news to me that you stopped loving me, even the house cat looked at me and laughed.

00:33:10.550 - 00:33:28.220

You tell them everywhere that I love you. And I loathe even the saint you were named for. I can't go to church, because I'm a cripple. I'm going to the tavern, little by little.

00:33:35.540 - 00:33:50.180

Fancy hairdo full of [unidentified] curls, and not even four chairs in the house. God bless me, Father Adam, how I love that woman. The day I don't see her, I draw her picture on the wall.

00:33:54.170 - 00:34:19.670

Heart, I told you before, and twice and three times. Don't knock at that door. No one will answer. You've been looking at Neruda. And some years after the ones that I've been reading, I did some Neruda.

00:34:21.820 - 00:34:39.340

I love Neruda. And I love particularly certain periods of Neruda. I don't- There are periods that I don't care for so much, but the great poems of the "Residencia en la Tierra," and then the- and then the "Odas Elementales" are - and some of

00:34:39.340 - 00:34:57.100

the late ones - are the ones that I love. I see that you've been- you've been looking at some of the- some of the ones from the "Residencia." I'd like to read a couple of those since- since you've been working with them. See if, see if they make

00:34:57.100 - 00:35:10.360

any sense. I'm not at this point making any argument for any kind of translation, I'm simply pointing out that I was trying out all kinds of things, that I had been all my life, you know. I don't- In a sense, I don't know what I'm doing. But I

00:35:10.360 - 00:35:26.890

suspect that none of us does. You know, we're trying to get a- try to- try to translate, which means from sentence to sentence, we're working in the dark. But this is a poem that for some reason, from that book, people have not paid a great deal of

00:35:26.890 - 00:35:41.440

attention to, and I think it's one of the great poems of "Residencia." It's obviously, a poem about a man who has left a woman, and we know enough about his life to know what some of the- what some- what parts of it may be autobiographical, maybe.

00:35:42.730 - 00:35:56.800

There had been a very stormy relation and it had broken up and obviously, getting broken up is a matter of real relief on his part, and yet he was- he was in anguish about it, too, and he was very sorry that it had happened. One knows about these

00:35:56.800 - 00:36:13.840

mixed feelings. In fact, Auden said, if you remember, poetry was the precise statement of mixed feelings. WIDOWER'S TANGO

00:36:18.580 - 00:36:31.060

Oh Maligna, by now you will have found the letter, by now you will have cried with rage, and you will have insulted the memory of my mother, calling her a rotten bitch and the mother of dogs, by now you will have drunk alone, all by yourself, your

00:36:31.060 - 00:36:46.240

afternoon tea with your eyes on my old shoes which are empty forever, and by now you will not be able to recall my illnesses, my dreams at night, my meals without cursing me out loud as though I was still there complaining of the tropics, of

00:36:46.240 - 00:36:58.280

the "coolies corringhis," of the poisonous fevers which were so hard on me, and of the horrendous English whom I still hate. Maligna, the truth of it, how huge the night is, how lonely

00:36:58.280 - 00:37:14.030

the earth! I have gone back to single bedrooms, to cold lunches in restaurants, and I drop my pants and my shirts on the floor as I used to, there are no hangers in my room, and nobody's pictures are on the walls. How much of the shadow that is in my

00:37:14.030 - 00:37:28.760

soul I would give to have you back; the names of the month sound to me like threats and the word winter is like the sound of a lugubrious drum. Later on, you will find buried near the coconut tree knife which I hid there for fear you would kill

00:37:28.760 - 00:37:43.500

me, and now suddenly I would be glad to smell its kitchen steel used to the weight of your hand and the luster of your foot: Under the dampness of the ground, among the deaf roots, in all the languages of men only the poor will know your name,

00:37:43.920 - 00:38:00.210

and the dense earth does not understand your name made of impenetrable divine substances. Thus it hurts me to think of the clear day of your legs in repose like waters of the sun made to stay in place, and the swallow that lives in your eyes sleeping

00:38:00.210 - 00:38:15.900

and flying, and the mad dog that you harbor in your heart, and thus also I see the dead who are between us and will be from now on, as I breathe ash and utter ruin in the air itself, and the vast solitary space that will be around me forever.

00:38:17.400 - 00:38:32.280

I would give this wind off the giant sea for your hoarse breathing heard in the long nights unmixed with oblivion, becoming part of the atmosphere as the whip becomes part of the horse's skin. And to hear you make water, in the darkness, at

00:38:32.280 - 00:38:47.910

the bottom of the house, as though you were pouring a slow tremulous, silvery, obstinate honey, how many times over what I yield up this choir of shadows which I possess, and the clash of useless swords which is audible in my soul, and the dove

00:38:47.910 - 00:39:03.490

of blood, alone on my forehead, calling to things which have vanished, to beings who have vanished, to substances incomprehensibly inseparable and lost. Wonderful poet he was.

00:39:09.530 - 00:39:21.770

W.S. Merwin: At least at the time that I did it, it seemed to Unknown: [inaudible]. me that "urinate" would bring y u up short and interrupt the fee ing about it. I mean, it had too much of a pro and con associa

00:39:17.910 - 00:39:34.880

Unknown: I just [inaudible]. ion to it. "Make water" is sort f more impersonal and I thought n that circumstances it would be good. You didn't want somethi g that you thought, "Is it ok y to use a four letter word?"

00:39:34.880 - 00:39:45.080

r "Is it okay to use-" You kno , now when one uses words li W.S. Merwin: No, I think there are a lot of circumstances when e that much more easily than I did when I translated that bo k. I think I would still say "m ke water" though because I d

00:39:45.560 - 00:40:04.070

n't want you to stop and be cau ht up by the kind of irrele ant pros and cons. In Spani h, you know, that whole sort o puritanical feeling about nat ral functions is not nearly so trong as it is in English, so th t's not a problem that's ther

00:40:04.070 - 00:40:20.340

in the original. Am I being lear about it? you want to use four letter words, but I don't think that we should be bound to do it any more than we should be bound not to do it.

00:40:21.390 - 00:40:35.980

Unknown: Yeah, I mean [inaudible]. W.S. Merwin: No, no, no, well, maybe it wouldn't be for u,s but it did seem to me when I was translating that that was- that would call too much attention to the word. I mean, "urinar" in-

00:40:36.010 - 00:40:48.490

which is the word in the original, as I remember, is not something that would make you stop and feel odd in Spanish, and it would have made you stop and feel oddd in English, even if only for a second. I didn't want that kind of attention to

00:40:48.000 - 00:41:08.220

A little afterwards, you know, and a few years later, I was the word. translating Nicanor Parra and Parra is, as you know, a sort of younger poet from the same country and the same background

00:41:08.220 - 00:41:24.710

as Neruda [cut-off]. Morton Marcus: We have been listening to a tape of W.S. Merwin speaking at the National Translation Institute this summer at the University of California at Santa Cruz. We

00:41:24.710 - 00:41:38.780

will cut the tape at this point because the poem he is going to read is a long poem by the Nicanor Parra. And since we began late tonight, let us get off on time. Steve Lacey will be your host in just a few moments on that wonderful show, "Out

00:41:38.780 - 00:41:54.530

Front, Outback," so keep tuned for that. But I want to thank Plaza Books, which has provided a grant that helped make the last half hour programming possible. Plaza Books is located on the Pacific Garden Mall in Santa Cruz; we appreciate their

00:41:54.530 - 00:42:12.920

support. Let me remind you of two events that are coming up. First of all this Sunday, Geoffrey Dunn will be signing his new book, "Santa Cruz Is in the Heart," at the Capitola Book Cafe. That is on 41st Avenue and it is between 5:30 and 7:30 that

00:42:12.920 - 00:42:27.710

he will be signing the book. These are a collection of articles and profiles that he has written over the last several years in The Sun, and Good Times and other places, which really get the spirit and the atmosphere of what Santa

00:42:27.710 - 00:42:45.740

Cruz is all about. I would urge you to attend this filmmaker and writer's book signing at the Capitola Book Cafe this Sunday 5:30 to 7:30. And again, the big news, the formation of the Center for the Literary Arts at San Jose State, which will be

00:42:45.740 - 00:43:03.890

presenting five or six major American and European and South American authors. This year, their first reading the 1980 Nobel Prize winner for language, for poetry, Czeslaw Milosz, the great Polish-American poet, essayist, novelist, critic, you

00:43:03.890 - 00:43:22.550

name it, who will be reading at the Engineer Building Auditorium at San Fernando between Seventh and Eighth Streets on the campus of San Jose State University, Thursday, September 14th, that's the Thursday after this coming Thursday, at 8pm and it is all

00:43:22.580 - 00:43:37.520

free of charge. Right after this, as I said, Milosz is going back to Poland for the first time in forty years to deliver a series of readings and lectures, so don't miss this opportunity to hear one of the 20th centuries' great poets, a

00:43:37.520 - 00:43:55.490

wonderful reader, a man of great profundity and wit. Until next week, when Joe will take over and we will hear more W.S. Merwin. This is Mort Marcus, who will go out with some more Leland Atta Isaac's wonderful slack-key guitar as we salute

00:43:55.490 - 00:44:01.760

Hawaii, the new home of W.S. Merwin. Thank you very much for listening, we'll see you next week.