The Living Resonance

Dear Friends,

A few weeks ago, a friend sent me a compilation of poets’ takes on the poet’s role. The poets on this page, living and no longer, spoke in different keys of their art, work, practice, and “purpose.” Essential, it seemed, was this: by way of attention and empathy, curiosity and imagination, poets sense some pulse of being, then clothe and convey it in the sounds and symbols of language. My friend’s missive was just the thing to moor me; I’ve been reeling as the words of civic discourse reveal themselves to be mere casings of the principles they once purported to embody. The note was, in effect, a call to entrust to poets the safe keeping, the safe passage, of what W.S. Merwin called in his Selected Translations 1948-1968 “the living resonance before it has words.”

Just about the same time, The Library of Congress announced the appointment of a new US poet laureate, a role dedicated to “raising the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry.” The extraordinary poet, editor, translator, and former Merwin Conservancy writer-in-residence Arthur Sze has stepped into this position, bringing a focus on poetry in translation—and an opportunity, as he described it, “to step into someone else’s imaginative worldview.” If a poet stewards some “living resonance” into words, the poet-translator draws it through the filter of one language and into another with fidelity and creativity, and accompanies it, in William’s words, through “the constellation of secondary meanings, the moving rings of associations, the etymological echoes, the sound and its own levels of association,” all the while respecting the vitality of the original. 

This week brought less bolstering news: Arthur’s inaugural reading, scheduled for this Thursday evening, would be postponed due to the government shutdown. And yet, the impasse renders this appointment all the more vital. When eventually we join Arthur to celebrate poetry in translation, we will, as William wrote, “embrace even through wrappings, poetry that was written from perspectives revealingly different from our own.”

With warm regards,

Sonnet