Seminario de poesía y traducción.

Este semestre me he metido una clase sobre traducción de poesía, sin estar conciente de que lo era, sólo me inscribí porque el horario me era propicio. Ahora tengo que hacer la labor de traducción de un poema a lo largo del semestre y el martes tengo que exponer la primera versión. Espero que se me pueda hacer algo decente con este poema.

Whacked - C. K. Williams

Every morning of my life I sit at my desk getting whacked by some great poet or other. Some Yeats, some Auden, some Herbert or Larkin, and lately a whole tribe of others—oy!—younger than me.Whack! Wiped out, every day … I mean since becoming a poet.

I mean wanting to—one never is, really, a poet.Or I’m not. Not when I’m trying to
write, though then comes a line, maybe another, but still pops up againYeats, say, and again whacked.

…Wait …Old brain in my head I’d forgotten that “whacked” in crime movies means murdered,
rubbed out, by the mob—little the mob-guys would think that poets could do it, and who’d believe

that instead of running away you’d find yourself fleeing towards them, some sweetseeming Bishop
who’s saying SO-SO-SO, but whack! you’re stampeding again through her poems like a
mustang,

whacked so hard that you bash the already broken crown of your head on the roof of your stall.

…What a relief to read for awhile some bad poems. Still, I try not to—bad, whackless poems can hurt you, can say you’re all right when you’re not, can condone your poet-coward

who compulsively asks if you’re all right—Am I all right?—not wasting your time—
Am I wasting time?—though you know you are, wasting time, if you’re not being
whacked.

Bad poems let you off that: the confessional mode now: I’ve read reams, I’ve written as many.

Meanwhile, this morning, this very moment, I’m thinking of George Herbert composing;

I see him, by himself, in some candlelit chamber unbearably lonely to us but glorious to him,

and he’s hunched over, scribbling, scribbling, and the room’s filling with poems
whacking at me,
and Herbert’s not even paying attention as the huge tide of them rises and engulfs me

in warm tangles of musical down as from the breasts of the choiring dawn-tangling larks.

“Lovely enchanting language, sugar-cane …” Whack! “The sweet strains, the lullings …”

Oh whack! Lowell or Keats, Rilke orWordsworth orWyatt: whack—fifty years of it,
old race-horse, plug hauling its junk—isn’t it time to be put out to pasture? But ah, I’d still if I could lie down like a mare giving birth, arm in my own uterine channel to tug out another,

one more, only one more, poor damp little poem, then I’ll be happy—I promise, I
swear.