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Monday, April 22, 2019

Merwin

The late Merwin translates the poem like this:

Not he who in spring goes out to the field
and loses himself in the blue festivities
of men whom he loves, and is blind to the old
leather beneath the fresh down, shall be my friend always

but you, true friendship, celestial pedestrian who in winter
leave your house in the breaking dawn and set out
on foot, and in our cold find eternal shelter,
and in our deep drought the voice of the harvests.

It's fine; there are a few things I don't like, like the "of men whom he loves" of the third line, the unsingable tongue-twister "celestial pedestrian." "in the breaking dawn" isn't idiomatic to me. "Field" is ok but "fields" or country / countryside sounds better.

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