"this fogging up transparency is it"
Pound, Bly, Catullus, Amichai, Valentine, Zagajewski
Ezra Pound, to W.S. Merwin, 1946 (Merwin was 18):
If you’re going to be a poet you have to work at it every day. You should write about seventy-five lines a day. But at your age you don’t have anything to write about. You may think you do, but you don’t. So get to work translating. The Provençal is the real source. The poets are closest to music. They hear it. They write to it. Try to learn the Provençal, at least some of it, if you can.
Robert Bly:
Catullus (trans. from Latin by David Koehn):
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Yehuda Amichai (trans. from Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell):
Jean Valentine:
Adam Zagajewski (trans. from Polish by Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry, and C.K. Williams):
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