UKL: That deeper meaning is where poetry approaches music, because you cannot put that meaning in words in an intellectually comprehensible way. It’s just there and you know it’s there, and it is the rhythm and the beat, the music of the sound that carries it. This is extremely mysterious and rightly so.
DN: Robert Frost talks about it, or compares it to hearing somebody having a conversation on the other side of the wall. You’re able to tell what they’re saying through their intonation and their rhythm, but you don’t actually hear any of the individual words.
UKL: You can tell what they’re feeling, but you may not know really what they’re talking about. You know how they feel about it by the sound—yeah, that’s neat.
DN: When we last spoke, you also mentioned this with regard to Virginia Woolf, who I know didn’t write much poetry. Is that a similar phenomenon, do you think, what you learned when you were young with poetry, around the meaning of the sound, and what you’ve described of the meaningfulness of Woolf’s relation to sound when you write prose?
UKL: When you’re talking about the sound in the rhythm of prose, it is so different from poetry, because it’s in a way much coarser. It’s a very long beat, the rhythms of a prose work. Of course, the sentence has its rhythms too. Woolf was intensely aware of that. She has a paragraph about how rhythm is what gives her the book, but, boy, it’s hard to talk about. It’s one of these experiential things that we don’t really have a vocabulary for. I wonder if there is a vocabulary for it. It’s like talking, again, about music. You can only say so much about music and then you simply have to play it. Some person can hear it and get it or not get it.
DN: Who are some of the poets that you love as an adult? Your cherished poets?
UKL: I have to put Rilke very high. I had MacIntyre’s translation of The Duino Elegies one summer when I needed help. I was in a bad time, and I kind of feel like some of the elegies got me out of it. They carried me through it, anyway. I don’t know German. So, Rilke and Goethe I have to get with facing translations and then just work my way back and forth and back and forth. Usually I end up trying to make my own crummy translation, so I can work my way into the German words with a dictionary. That is a very laborious way of reading poetry, but boy if you do it word by word, if you don’t know the German nouns and have to look up every single one, and the verbs are mysterious and not in the right place [laughs], by the time you’ve done that, you know the poem. You’ve kind of made your own version of it in English, and that’s why I love translating from languages I do know and even from languages I don’t, like with Lao Tzu.
DN: You also wrote the preface to Rilke’s Poems from the Book of Hours when New Directions rereleased it.
UKL: Actually The Book of Hours is not one of my favorites. I like later Rilke. He’s a very strange poet and a lot of what he says doesn’t mean much to me. But when he says things and it’s the music, even I know. My father was a German speaker, and I heard him speak German, so I know what it sounds like even if I don’t know the language. It’s the music that carries it in reality. A strange rhythm he has.
DN: Can you talk about your attraction to translating Gabriela Mistral? You dedicate one of the poems in Late in the Day to her. What was it that you fell in love with?
UKL: It was not exactly love at first sight. I didn’t know very much Spanish when I started reading her. My friend Diana Bellessi in Argentina sent me some selected Mistral and said, “You have to read this,” and so I labored into it with my Spanish dictionary and I just fell in love. I never read anything like Mistral. There isn’t anybody like Mistral, she’s very individual, and it’s an awful shame that Neruda—the other Chilean who got the Nobel—gets all the attention. But you know men tend to get the attention and you sort of struggle to keep the women in the eye of the men. Neruda is a very good poet, but Mistral just has a lot more to say to me than he does.
DN: And what about the endeavor of translating when you come back to your own writing? Do you feel like you can trace influences from the efforts of translation?
UKL: Oh, yeah. I can trace influences from individual poets and think, “Oh, I’m trying to do Rilke here, don’t try that!” [Both laugh.]
DN: I really loved the afterword to Late in the Day entitled “Form, Free Verse, Free Form: Some Thoughts,” where you talk about your long-standing poetry group, and also about the realization you had, from doing the poetry group assignments, that form can give you a poem. By that you don’t mean to say that just by following the rules you’re going to get a poem. You mean something else.
UKL: This is touching back on that same mystery of form, rhythm, and so on. This is something that I think is clear to many poets, but I was very slow to realize it. By committing yourself to a certain form—let’s say a really complicated one, like a villanelle, which seems very artificial, and unbelievably difficult when you first approach it—certain lines are going to have to repeat themselves at certain intervals and you don’t fiddle with that. If you write a villanelle, by golly, you write a villanelle. You don’t write something like it and call it a villanelle. Take the rules seriously and somehow or other, as you follow them, you find that the necessity of having to do something gives you something to do. I don’t know how that works, and it doesn’t always work. The sonnet is probably the form most people think of when you talk about poetic form, and I find them terribly difficult. I write very, very few anymore. Maybe because there are so many very very good sonnets. I don’t know, that doesn’t usually worry me. It’s just not a form that I work with very well. The quatrain, on the other hand, is a straight form in a way—just four lines, that’s it. There’s no other definition, but you can make it just as strict as you please with rhythm and rhyme and so on. I think any artist in any medium will tell you the same thing, that if you’re working toward a certain form, whether you originated it or it’s something you inherited from other artists, you have complete freedom there. In a way, I find metric rhyming verse gives me more freedom than free verse. It’s a different kind of freedom.