I don't think that someone who does not speak the original language can ever expect to produce a real translation. Christian Wiman More Quotes by Christian Wiman More Quotes From Christian Wiman At some point you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them. You have to believe that poetry has some reach into reality itself, or you have to go silent. Christian Wiman use believe reality I can see now how deeply God's absence affected my unconscious life, how under me always there was this long fall that pride and fear and self-love at once protected me from and subjected me to.... For if grace woke me to God's presence in the world and in my heart, it also woke me to his absence. I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe. Christian Wiman pain believe fall I find myself continually falling back into wounds, wishes, terrors I thought I had risen beyond. Christian Wiman terror wish fall The horrors have made the legend of Mandelstam and are inevitably the lens through which we read his work and life. But if there had been no Stalin and no purge, Mandelstam still would have been a poet of severe emotional and existential extremity. Christian Wiman work-and-life lenses emotional I think of translations as passing some scholarly smell test: you can read the words of the translation and be reasonably sure of what the words are in the original. Christian Wiman smell tests thinking Mandelstam's style is not singular. He could be stately and traditional, ribald and funny, hectic, elegiac. He could handle abstractions and ideas as well as Pope or Browning but then be so musical that other poems approach pure sound. Christian Wiman style musical ideas I can't think offhand of any American poets who have Mandelstam's urgency, but it's a different country and a different time, and I don't think it would make much sense to say that this is something that's "missing" from contemporary American poetry. Christian Wiman missing country thinking Mandelstam - his gift and the untamable nature of it - was like a thorn in Stalin's brain. Christian Wiman brain Mandelstam is the sort of poet who comes along very, very rarely. Even the two Russian poets whose work is often linked with his - Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva - though their work is more "urgent" than most American poetry, seem to me to operate at a lesser charge than Mandelstam. Christian Wiman anna poet two Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless. Christian Wiman pain spiritual loss I suppose I do believe that the greatest art consoles a wound that it creates, that art can give you the capacity to endure and respond to the pain it forces you to feel. Psychological pain, I mean. Christian Wiman pain believe art One of the ways in which I feel close to God is writing poetry. Christian Wiman writing feels way Wonder is the precondition for all wisdom. Christian Wiman wonder God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering. Christian Wiman god-is-with-us suffering
