When I translate one of your poems and I come across words I do not understand, I
always guess at their meanings. I am inevitably right. A really perfect poem (no one yet
has written one) could be perfectly translated by a person who did not know one word
of the language it was written in. A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.
It is very difficult. We want to transfer the immediate object, the immediate emotion to the poem - and yet the immediate always has hundreds of its own words clinging to it, short-lived and tenacious as barnacles. And it is wrong to scrape them off and substitute others.
(...)
It is very difficult. We want to transfer the immediate object, the immediate emotion to the poem - and yet the immediate always has hundreds of its own words clinging to it, short-lived and tenacious as barnacles. And it is wrong to scrape them off and substitute others.
(...)
Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into
the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in
themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to.
I repeat - the perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.
(extract from Jack Spicer's correspondence with Garcia Lorca in After Lorca, 1957)
(extract from Jack Spicer's correspondence with Garcia Lorca in After Lorca, 1957)
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário