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PARTISAN REVIEW
contends that one of Rilke's early poems is less "interesting" than
Robert Bly's "vigorous, unrhymed, unmetered translation" of the
same work. But perhaps the reader has no German and can't hear
the difference. Very well, then, Hass will demonstrate on an English
model. He quotes the opening lines of Yeats's "The Lake Isle ofIn–
nisfree":
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
"Imagine if you can a translation of this stanza into twentieth–
century free-verse," Hass writes. Imagine it Hass certainly can:
I'm going to get up now, and go west to Innisfree,
and I'll build a small cabin there out of reeds and clay.
I'll make nine rows of beans and a hive for honeybees
and I'll live by myself in that bee-loud valley.
Why is this version better than the original? Simple, says Hass.
"What goes are the wistfulness and the music. They are replaced by
a sense of active will and specificity, which aren't really in the orignal
poem." The reader will, I submit, be hard put to find a greater
"sense of active will and specificity" in the revised version. But that's
not the point. "The wistfulness and the music" are indeed casualties
of the procedure. "What goes" with them, alas, is the poetry itself.
Imagine if you can the same method applied to
Paradise Lost.
To be fair, not all practitioners of the prosaic principle operate
with so arrogant a notion of the purviews of contemporary parlance .
C. K. Williams, in
Tar,
wisely puts his versified prose at the service
of experiences for which it is a suitable measure. Here's the opening
of "My Mother's Lips":
Until I asked her to please stop doing it and was astonished to
find that she not only could
but from the moment I asked her in fact would stop doing it, my
mother, all through my childhood,
when I was saying something to her, something important, would
move her lips as I was speaking
so that she seemed to be saying under her breath the very words
I was saying as I was saying them.
