[W T Clark]

I read an article by Davis recently. I sympathised greatly with this:
"This is Mandelstam's great gift: through a kind of synesthesia, a freak of consciousness heightened by a cultural linguistic predisposition, Mandelstam heard sense in rhyme and cadence. Sound is absorbed, and honored, as an essential vehicle of meaning, or better, as meaning itself."

And I wondered if this paragraph was spoken directly to Carl and I:
"How, then, to respond as a translator? To imitate the structure of the poetry would be to violate the essential principle of Mandelstam's prosody, which is the organic, indivisible relationship of sound and meaning. The only possible course is to obey that principle, to reimagine the poem, in a way re-hear it, in one's own language and in one's own time. Is it then so strange that the gorgeous pyrotechnics of Mandelstam's response in Russian should become, in contemporary English, a subdued, a dogged muttering?"