I met Auden late in his life and mine—at
an age when the easy, knowledgeable intimacy of friendships formed in
one’s youth can no longer be attained, because not enough life is left,
or expected to be left, to share with another. Thus, we were very good
friends but not intimate friends. Moreover, there was a reserve in him
that discouraged familiarity—not that I tested it, ever. I rather gladly
respected it as the necessary secretiveness of the great poet, one who
must have taught himself early not to talk in prose, loosely and at
random, of things that he knew how to say much more satisfactorily in
the condensed concentration of poetry. Reticence may be the déformation professionnelle of
the poet. In Auden’s case, this seemed all the more likely because much
of his work, in utter simplicity, arose out of the spoken word, out of
idioms of everyday language—like “Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human
on my faithless arm.” This kind of perfection is very rare; we find it
in some of the greatest of Goethe’s poems, and it must exist in most of
Pushkin’s works, because their hallmark is that they are untranslatable.
The moment poems of this kind are wrenched from their original abode,
they disappear in a cloud of banality. Here all depends on the “fluent
gestures” in “elevating facts from the prosaic to the poetic”—a point
that the critic Clive James stressed in his essay on Auden in Commentary in
December 1973. Where such fluency is achieved, we are magically
convinced that everyday speech is latently poetic, and, taught by the
poets, our ears open up to the true mysteries of language. The very
untranslatability of one of Auden’s poems is what, many years ago,
convinced me of his greatness. Three German translators had tried their
luck and killed mercilessly one of my favorite poems, “If I Could Tell
You” (Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957), which arises naturally from two colloquial idioms—“Time will tell” and “I told you so”:
Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.
If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so. . . .
Münchner
Stadtmuseum/bpk/Art Resource; Art © Robert and Gail Rentzer for Estate
of Morris Hirshfield/Licensed by VAGA, New York; Art (Ernst): © 2018
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris - Leonora Carrington with André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst, New York City, 1942; photograph by Hermann Landshoff. At center is Morris Hirshfield’s painting Nude at the Window (1941). ... [mehr] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/03/08/leonora-carrington-cauldron-at-midnight/
/ by Philip Roth. Library of America, 452 pp., $35.00