From W.S. Merwin’s The Mays of Ventadorn – his meeting Ezra Pound as a young college student (with Pound still locked in St. Elizabeth’s).
He told me he imagined I was serious, and that if I was I should learn languages, “so as not to be at the mercy of translators.” And then I should translate, myself. “If you’re going to be a poet,” he said, “you have to work at it every day. You should write about seventy-five lines a day. But at your age you don’t have anything to write about. You may think you do, but you don’t. So get to work translating. The Provencal is the real source. The poets are closest to music. They hear it. They write to it. Try to learn the Provencal, at least some of it, if you can. Meanwhile, the others. Spanish is all right. The Romancero is what you want there. Get as close to the original as you can. It will make you use your English and find out what you can do with it.”
……
[afterwards] we managed to maintain a flurry of correspondence for a while. He sent me bits of gnomic instruction on post cards, always scrawled in pencil, the handwriting clearly reflecting his quick impulsiveness. The most memorable of them read, in full, “Read seeds not twigs EP.”
Extracts 