«"Yo siempre te amaré", jura el poeta. Esto me parece fácil jurarlo yo también. "Te amaré a las 4.15 de la tarde del martes próximo" ¿sigue siendo eso igual de fácil?»

II

Of any poem written by someone else, my first demand is that it be good (who wrotte it is of secondary importance); of any poem written by myself, my first demand is that be genuine, recognizable, like my handwriting, as having been written, for better or worse, by me. (When it comes to his own poems, a poet’s preferences and those of his readers often overlap but seldom coincide.)

 

II
Ante cualquier poema escrito por otro, mi primera exigencia es que sea bueno (quien lo escribió tiene una importancia secundaria); ante cualquier poema escrito por mí mismo, mi primera exigencia es que sea auténtico, reconocible, como mi letra, por haber sido escrito, para bien o para mal, por mí. (Cuando se trata de sus propios poemas, las preferencias de un poeta y las de sus lectores a menudo se superponen pero rara vez coinciden).

 

III

But this poem which I should now like to write would not only have to be good and genuine: if it is to satisfy me, it must also be true.

I read a poem by someone else in which he bids a tearful farewell to his beloved: the poem is good (it moves me as other good poems do) and genuine (I recognize the poet’s «handwriting»). Then I learn from a biography that, at the time he wrote it, the poet was sick to death of the girl but pretended to weep in order to avoid hurt feelings and a scene. Does this information affect my appreciation o this poem? Not in the last. I never knew him personally and his private life is no business of mine. Would it affect my appreciation if I had written the poem myself? I hope so.

 

III
Pero este poema que me gustaría escribir ahora no sólo tendría que ser bueno y auténtico: si ha de satisfacerme, también debe ser verdadero. Leo un poema escrito por otro en el que el poeta se despide de su amada lacrimosamente: el poema es bueno (me conmueve como lo hacen otros buenos poemas) y auténtico (reconozco la «letra» del poeta). Entonces me entero, por una biografía, de que en el momento de escribirlo el poeta estaba mortalmente harto de la chica pero fingía llorar a fin de evitar herirla y provocar una escena. ¿Afecta esta información mi valoración del poema? En absoluto: nunca lo conocí personalmente y su vida privada no es asunto mío. ¿Se vería afectada mi valoración si yo mismo lo hubiera escrito? Así lo espero.

 

IV
No bastaría que yo creyera que lo que había escrito fuera verdadero: para satisfacerme, la verdad de este poema debe ser manifiesta. Tendría que estar escrito, por ejemplo, de tal manera que ningún lector pudiera leer Yo Te amo como si fuera «yo te amo».

 

VIII.

As an artistic language, Speech has many advantages –three persons, three tenses (Music and Painting have only the Present Tense), both the active and the passive voice– but it has one serious defect: it lacks the Indicative Mood. All its statements are in the subjunctive and only possibly true until verified (which is not always possible) by non-verbal evidence.

 

XXIII

The anonymous gift is a deed of charity, but we are speaking of eros, not of agape It is as much of the essence of erotic love that it should desire to disclose itself to one other as it is of the essence of charity that it should desire to conceal itself from all. Under certain circumstances, a lover may try to conceal his love (he is a hunchback, the girl his own sister, etc.) but it is not as a lover that he tries to conceal it; and if he were then to send her gifts anonymously, would not this betray a hope, conscious or unconscious, of arousing her curiosity to the point where she would take steps to discover his identity?

 

XLI

Hatred tends to exclude from consciousness every thought except that of the Hated One; but love tends to enlarge consciousness; the thought of the Beloved acts like a magnet, surrounding itself with other thoughts. Is this one reason why a happy love poem is rarely so convincing as an unhappy one: the happy lover seems continually to be forgetting his beloved to think about the universe?

 

XLII

Of the many (far too many) love poems written in the first person which I have read, the most convincing were, either the fa-la-la’s of a good-natured sensuality which made no pretense at serious love, or howls of grief because the beloved had died and was no longer capable of love, or roars of disapproval because she loved another or nobody but herself; the least convincing were those in which the poet claimed to be in earnest, yet had no complaint to make.

 

XLVII

‘The One I worship has more soul than other folks. . . / {Much funnier, I should like to say.) To be accurate, should not the poet have written... ‘than any I have met so far*?

 

XLVIII

«"Yo siempre te amaré", jura el poeta. Esto me parece fácil jurarlo yo también. "Te amaré a las 4.15 de la tarde del martes próximo" ¿sigue siendo eso igual de fácil?»

 

XLIX

1 will love You whatever happens, even though . . / — there follows a list of catastrophic miracles — (even though , I should like to say, all the stones of Baalbek split into exact quarters , the rooks of Repton utter dire prophecies in Greek and the Windrush bellow imprecations in Hebrew, Time run boustrophedon and Paris and Vienna thrice be lit again by gas)

 

Do I believe that these events might conceivably occur during my lifetime? If not, what have I promised? I will love You whatever happens, even though you put on twenty pounds or become afflicted with a moustache: dare I promise that?