disadvantage to Latin and Greek and had to, as it were, assert itself against them. I’ve been writing about this for this Literary Agenda I mentioned that evening [at The Society Club] – there’s a whole chapter on translations, and the sonnet comes into English from Petrach though Wyatt and Surrey. The iambic pentameter is made up by Surrey as a way of translating Virgil’s Aeneid. So that line, which is the standard line of English verse by the time it reaches Shakespeare, is an import, an equivalent of the Latin hexameter. It’s unrhyming. Chaucer had used rhyming iambic pentameters, but Surrey was the first to use unrhyming iambic pentameters: blank verse. It’s his way of arriving at a line which will have the sonority and variety of the Latin hexameter. So that’s something that came in through translation, and there are countless examples. Lots of forms are imports from abroad. Major poets fetch them in, starting with Chaucer and all the way through actually. If you look at the work of very substantial German writers like Paul Celan and Rilke, a massive part of their poetic oeuvre is translation. So if you take the five volumes of [Celan’s collected works], two or three are translations from Shakespeare, from Mandelstam, from the contemporary French surrealist poets and so forth. Rilke translated the whole of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, and they were not doing this for the money, these were things that they felt would benefit their own writing and it did, quite clearly. Hölderlin, the poet I know most about – the German Romantic and Classical poet – he translated Pindar in the most extraordinarily literal fashion, syllable by syllable, to see how close he could get to Greek, in order to come at a language of his own, which is then like nobody else’s, but ghosted by Greek. And he did two thousand lines, in fair copy, of this immensely difficult poet fracturing the German language. Where the Greek broke at the line endings he broke the German, to see if he could do the same. There was a thesis that German was like Greek in that it’s a agglutinative kind of language – you add bits – and so he was trying to do it literally syllable by syllable. And it was a completely solitary exercise; he showed it to nobody. It was his way of coming into his own language. He said very famously, ‘one’s own has to be learned as much as the foreign’. Through the foreign you come into what he called der freie Gebrauch des Eigenen, or the free use of one’s own, which is a wonderful phrase really. So you come into the free use of your own via this – the image he uses is the journeyman going abroad, staying abroad, steeping himself in abroad, and then coming back, because you can’t stay abroad forever otherwise you lose your own tongue – but you come into the free use of your own by this sojourning abroad in a foreign tongue. That used to be absolutely standard, I don’t say everyone practised it, but it was understood [to be valuable]. If you look at manuals of poetics in the
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