464
PARTISAN REVIEW
author, but the editors themselves announce at the start of their preface,
"Like most American readers of Dante, we first came to the poet
through Ezra Pound and
T.
S. Eliot." Yet in W. S. Merwin's essay
"Poetry Rising from the Dead" (a version of which also serves as the
introduction to his rendering of the
Purgatorio),
the only mention made
of Pound is that the elder poet once recommended Laurence Binyon's
Dante translation to him.
Merwin, of course, has conceded elsewhere that Pound played a pri–
mary role in his career as poet and translator. "I started translating partly
as a discipline," he says, "hoping that the process might help me learn to
write. Pound was one of the first to recommend the practice to me."
Pound told his young visitor to St. Elizabeth's to "start by getting just as
close to the form of the original as possible." And he urged "the greatest
possible fidelity to the original, including its sounds." And though Mer–
win did attempt to follow Pound's instructions, he "came to the conclu–
sion that it was not the way to go for me, probably not for anybody."
"When I did come, gradually, to abandon more and more often the
verse forms of the poems that I was translating," Merwin explained,
I did not try
to
formulate a precise principle for doing so....
I
think
I began
to
consider the subject more systematically when I was try–
ing to decide on the best form for a translation of the
Chanson de
Roland.
I had before me versions in blank verse both regular and
more or less free, and one that contrived to keep not only the met–
rical structure of the Old French but the rhyme scheme: verse para–
graphs known as
laisses,
sometimes many lines in length, each line
ending with the same assonance. The result, in English, struck me
as nothing more than an intellectual curiosity; unreadable.
Merwin's version of
The Song of Roland
has just been republished (it
first appeared in 1963). "There have been translations of
La Chanson
de Roland
which have aimed at producing assonance patterns like those
in the original, but the results have been gnarled, impacted and stunted,
as the original certainly is not... ," says Merwin in his introduction,
"[and] the associations of the ten-syllable line in English are not at all
what they are in French." Yet in his translation Merwin does not merely
abandon the original's verse forms; he abandons verse entirely. Prose is
Merwin's self-described attempt
to
"get in the way of the originals as lit–
tle as possible," to capture from the original, "a certain limpidity not
only in the language and the story but in the imagination behind them,
