Glad you liked that. I smiled at that quote, because my blogger-friend Sherry Chandler, a poet from Kentucky, had it in the masthead of her blog for many months. It’s definitely a challenging perspective on ethical behavior.

I don’t know if I can forgive the comparison. :) Thanks for the comment, though.

I’ve found translation enormously challenging and rewarding, though I don’t think the results have been especially memorable. I should point out that I don’t know any of the languages I’ve attempted to translate from particularly well. Merwin has done some great translations, especially from the French and Spanish.

Here’s more of the footage from the Academy of American Poets video that Moyers excerpted. From the transcript:

I went to see Ezra Pound when I was eighteen, when I was in college. He was in the psycho ward at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, which was the way his defense lawyer had saved him from being shot for treason for the things he’d said during World War II. The plea of insanity: they said that he was crazy, and he probably was a little crazy. I knew nothing about his politics, fortunately, and he, to my amazement now, took me seriously as a poet. He decided, “this is a young man who wants to be a poet,” and he accepted that.

And he said: “If you want to be a poet you have to take it seriously; you have to work on it the way you would work on anything else, and you have to do it every day.” He said: “You should write about seventy-five lines a day”—you know Pound was a great one for the laying down the law about how you did anything—and he said, “and you don’t have anything to write seventy-five lines about a day.” He said: “You don’t really have anything to write about at the age of eighteen. You think you do, but you don’t.” And he said: “The way to do it is to learn a language and translate. That way you can practice, and you can find out what you can do with your language, with your language.” He said: “You can learn a foreign language, but the translation is your way of learning your own language.”

The part about advice, from Pound, no less, was fascinating. The importance of translation took on new meaning. Makes me want to try it, even in middle-age.