Don Paterson in Oxford

Yesterday evening I went to the first of four talks Don Paterson is giving at St Anne's in the next couple of weeks as Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature. The talk was very fast and also very funny - he was discussing 'how do you get a poem from one head into another' and quoted Antonio Porchia, as translated by W.S. Merwin:

Que te he dado, lo se. Que has recibado, no lo se

which Merwin translates as 'I know what I have given you; I do not know what you have received.' He contrasted this with a more 'precise' translation and pointed out how Merwin's version is better, as it pays more attention to the natural rise and fall of words and emphasises their meaning in a way the more faithful translation doesn't - faithful, therefore, in a different way.

'Codal incompetance...is a hallmark of bad translation.'

'In poetry we are not trying to communicate accurate information.'

'We are used to meeting poems halfway...poetry is as much read in by the reader as written by the poet.'

He talked of how one could read too much into poems - 'the doors of perception are very easy to fling open and very difficult to shut again' - and of 'cryptosemia - to read signs not apparent to others'. It can be easy to develop the idea that ' meaning is something which poets deliberately and sadistically withold' and 'if you reads poetry slowly and carefully enough you will find many things that aren't there.'

'Poems of course don't really mean anything other than what we make of them.'

He talked about poems by Prynne - 'I used to call this stuff difficult. It's not, it's just bracing.'

He talked for some time about the music of poetry, the rise and fall, and how important it is for conveying meaning - 'daleks have trouble conveying irony'. 

Three more to go! There's no charge but you may have to book.