It's a shame Greg Perry doesn't hear Richard Wilbur's voice in his poems, but, hey, nobody's perfect, and in the course of wondering about it he gave me a potential clue to something that's been bothering me. Greg quotes Wilbur on Frost from this interview:
If you put enough stresses into a Robert Frost line to have it be a pentameter, then you're going to have to be making New England cadences. Now if someone attempts a poetry of distinctive speech rhythms without a metrical base, I think a good part of the intended emphasis is going to get away.
In an article in the archives (subscribe! $18 bucks a year!) at Contemporary Poetry Review, Justin Quinn laments that ethnic and cultural differences all melt into the generic multicultural poetry of identity poetics. The same seems to me to happen with translations — mostly from Spanish, since I read that fairly well, but also from languages I can barely puzzle through, such as Italian, Portuguese, and French, and even from Greek and other languages that are Greek to me — they all sound almost as if they'd been written by the same person; there's no clue beyond topical references that the original poems were written by members of some particular culture. There are some exceptions, mostly metrical: Rafael Campo's translations of Lorca's late sonnets sound like Lorca and are quintessentially Spanish in feeling; I'm not sure what 17th French sounded like, but Richard Wilbur's translations of classical French theater don't sound like Wilbur, and his Moliere sounds different from his Racine.
Each language, until recently, had its characteristic meter(s): Spanish endecasílabo, French syllabics, Greek quantities, English accentual-syllabics, and so on. In poets like Antonio Machado, Rubén Darío, Octavio Paz, and Pablo Neruda, who knew in their bones, even if they did not use those meters, it's easy to hear even in their shared language that Spain, Nicaragua, Mexico, and Chile were very different worlds. Now everyone is freed from such strictures, everyone sounds the same, and the original language, the place of birth, is a mere accident.
7:42:05 PM 
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