A Selection of Letters

American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 2005 by Blunk, Jonathan

JAMES WRIGHT

A Special APr Supplement

An Introduction to Twelve Letters by James Wright

by Jonathan Blunk

JAMES WRIGHT'S LETTERS CHRONICLE MANY of the major innovations in American poetry in the middle of the twentieth century. They also provide a compelling personal narrative of his life. The following selection is taken from the forthcoming volume entitled A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright, published by Farrar Straus & Giroux. Nearly every one of Wright's letters exhibits his dedication to craft and passion for literature, and while each can be appreciated on its own, the first of the dozen letters below merits a brief comment.

In 1958, Pablo Neruda published the poem "Fábula de la sirena y los borrachos" in his book Extravagario. At the time, Wright did not translate the poem, but he never forgot it. Seventeen years later, when M. L. Rosenthal's translation appeared in these pages, Wright was moved to respond. In a letter sent in care of the editors at APR, Wright expressed his personal admiration to Rosenthal and his gratitude for the translation. This "Fable," it seems, had come to haunt Wright, and was bound up in his memories of Neruda.

Neruda's work became a touchstone for Wright, an ideal and an extreme. In a number of Wright's letters from the late fifties and early sixties, he places Neruda and Whitman at one pole and Edwin Arlington Robinson at the other, describing the pendulum of his own poetic allegiances. He was enthralled by the magnitude of Neruda's poems, and his memory of this one in particular suggests the tenacity of Wright's imagination.

The impulse to praise the work of others is a quality of his character, part of what prompted Wright's own translations and a proof of his devotion to poetry. His spontaneous letter of gratitude to M. L. Rosenthal has many parallels in Wright's biography. In July of 1958, Wright initiated a lifelong friendship and correspondence with the poet and translator Robert Bly when he wrote to thank him for a gift copy of The Fifties, Ely's new magazine. Almost immediately, the two began collaborating on translations from the German of Georg Trakl. Wright also began an intensive study of Spanish, to read and translate for himself the work of Neruda, César Vallejo and Juan Ramón Jiménez. Wright's own poetry was never the same.

In April of 1972, Wright met Neruda and took part in a reading with him at the 92nd St. Y in New York City. Wright considered this event one of the greatest honors of his life. Eighteen months later, Wright was in Venice and witnessed daily protests against the United States as word spread of the overthrow of Allende's government in Chile. On September 23, 1973, he learned of Neruda's death. Wright and his second wife, Anne, visited the Adriatic fishing town of Grado the following week, where he wrote his "imitation" of Neruda, "A Visit to the Earth." Wright's elegy to him also dates from that time. Both poems appear in the Appendix to A Wild Perfection, which gathers thirty previously uncollected poems, drafts and translations of Wright's that he refers to in his correspondence.

The following letters span the last twenty-two years of James Wright's life. The earliest ones, from 1958, include a detailed account of a manuscript for his second book, Saint Judas, as well as the first two letters of Wright's intense and fascinating exchange with the poet, critic and novelist James Dickey. These are followed by a poignant autobiographical letter written to his high school Latin teacher in 1972. From the summer of 1976 are letters to Robert Bly, Galway Kinnell and Donald Hall, as Wright was working on the last book he would see into print, To a Blossoming Pear Tree. The selection concludes with Wright's final letter, written to Galway Kinnell on December 31, 1979.

To M. L. Rosenthal

New York City

September 20, 1975

Dear Mr. Rosenthal:

I hope you won't mind a note from a personal stranger.

A few years ago I read Neruda's "Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks" in Spanish, and it haunted me. You of all people know how you might discover a certain poem and you don't simply "memorize it"; it actually seems to become part of your personality, your very life. I never tried to translate _ the poem.

Then, about a year and a half ago, my wife and I were staying in the small Italian fishing village of Grado, on the Adriatic. A few foreigners visit the village in summer to swim; but mostly it is a laboring place; fishing is the main work; the men go out to sea long before daybreak and come back at twilight; there are people all over the place, wives and husbands and children sitting on their front steps after supper, mending nets. I remember being struck by the special strangeness of fishing as a way of making a living: how real fishermen are plain people, almost always poor, married to stocky and pleasant middle-aged wives, surrounded by many children whose games often get intermingled with the work shared, one way or another, by the whole family, in a way of life that, on shore, is just commonplace; and yet how the men go far out to sea in the darkness and let down lines or nets, wondering surely just what weird creature they might draw into their boats along with all the shrimp and piccolini and sardines and the rest of the usual haul. I vividly remembered Neruda's poem. I didn't have the text with me, and I didn't have the poem literally by heart. And so, just for the fun of it, I wrote a poem on my own. It isn't a translation. It's just an attempt to write about an incident similar to the one in Neruda's poem. You could call it an imitation, maybe; or a poem based on something in Neruda. Well, it doesn't matter what you call it. It gave me pleasure to write it. When I read your translation in the most recent American Poetry Review, I was again struck by Neruda's ability to write a poem of such truly enormous richness and depth, and yet do so in a comparatively few lines. My own poem is a little more than twice as long as Neruda's, and of course it doesn't contain anything even distantly approaching Neruda's great mastery.