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Interviewer:

Do you see poetic inspiration in the same light as its religious counterpart?

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Wilbur:

Robert Frost once said that “poetry and religion are sisters, but they’re not twin sisters.” Coleridge was careful to say that imagination is a “repetition in the finite mind” of the divine fiat. God creates, while we can at best compare, organize and fuse. But when we are given to write a line that’s new, shapely and vital, we are right to thank God for it. Indeed, such a line is a tribute to Him.

 

Interviewer:

You’ve written a number of ekphrastic poems—“Museum Piece,”  “A  Dutch  Courtyard,”  about  de  Hooch,  whom  I  love,  and  “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra,” to name a few.

 

Wilbur:

My father was a painter, and so from early days I was sensitized  to  visual  art  and  familiar  with art books, studios, museums and galleries. It was inevitable that my poems should be full of seeing and of pictures. Actually, visual imagery is primary in everybody’s poetry—partly because there are so few terms with which to describe “Many  people  nowadays  are  embarrassed by the word ‘inspiration.’.  “When we are given . . . a line that’s new, shapely and vital, we are right to thank God for it.” taste and odors—but some seeings are more vivid and material than others. Yeats, for instance, offers very few concrete perceptions; I am in the other camp with Hopkins and Lawrence. As a painter’s son, I take pleasure in accurate detail such as you’ll find at the end of my poem “March,” where I try to capture the look and behavior of a beech leaf in a gully of sparkling snow. One aspect of the visual is its relative standoffishness  (which  offended  Lawrence  and  pleased  Baudelaire), and I’ve written about that in a poem called “The Eye.”

 

Interviewer:

Ballet is a subject that comes up in your poems often, whether as a focus or just through word  choice: the entrechats of “Mayflies,” for instance, and the leaves “held in ice as dancers in a spell,” from “Year’s End.” Has ballet always been an interest?

 

Wilbur:

I do care for ballet, whether in performance or Degas. But there are things one likes to talk about in poetry because they are ways of expressing aspects of the world, yet that one does not obsessively pursue in reality. A reader of my poems might think me more devoted to fishing than I really am.

 

Interviewer:

You mentioned being “in camp” with Hopkins and Lawrence. Were these two writers early influences on your work? Who else was an influence?

 

Wilbur:

Hopkins was an early admiration of mine, and later I responded to a number of other poets who saw the world with a striking exactness and respect for fact. Lawrence’s poems about birds and beasts were like that, and others who fortified me in that inclination were Marianne Moore, Francis Ponge, Williams. By the time I had written two books, I had pretty well ceased to be “influenced” but continued to read other poets with relish.

 

Interviewer:

You’ve translated a number of French plays and poems from several languages. Do you find yourself, to paraphrase Friedrich Schleiermacher, bringing the writer to the reader or the reader to the writer when you translate?

 

Wilbur:

I would never sacrifice any of the original in hopes of making its English version easier or more appealing for the imagined contemporary reader. The translator who does that sort of thing betrays contempt for the reader and a lack of taste, or such is the usual case. Such a translator is cousin to the theater director who thinks it enlivening to bring a seventeenth-century character onstage pedaling a bicycle. My biggest jobs of translation have been Molière’s comedies, and since Molière’s language is clear and timeless, I have not had to wrestle with any temptation to “update” or vulgarize or explain.

 

Interviewer:

I’m curious how you choose what you translate. Have you ever considered trying your hand at more of Dante, beyond Canto 25 of the Inferno?

 

Wilbur:

I’ve often translated as a kind of tribute to a poem or play that has charmed me and to which I have hoped to give a second life in English. Many other translations, from languages I don’t have, have been suggested to me by editors who felt that with some linguistic aid I might attune myself to the originals and do them justice. People like Olga Carlisle, Max Hayward or Patricia Blake have been very good at matching Russian poems to my abilities and sensibilities. Or vice versa. Others have paired me with poems in Hungarian or Portuguese or Romanian. I much enjoyed doing Canto 25 for an Ecco Press translation of the Inferno by various hands, though since I rendered it faithfully and in purely rhymed terza rima, it was hard and slow work. So slow was it that, starting Dante at my present age of eighty-three, I might find myself in the afterlife (Purgatory, no doubt) before finishing the whole Commedia. I had better stick with Molière.

 

Interviewer:

I wonder if you might comment on the Treasury Department’s recent ban on editing and translating work from Iran and other so-called unfriendly countries.

 

Wilbur:

That ban seems a stupid idea. We did better during the Cold War, when Russian and American writers (I among them) translated each other and visited each other’s countries. Why not develop a little understanding and mutual respect, so as to be ready when political “friendship” resumes?