The Wolf Interview: Charles Simic in conversation with James Byrne
James Byrne interviews Charles Simic at length, starting from New York, the city Simic first saw from a ship in the 1950s after a year in Paris. Simic says it still feeds his imagination, partly through the colour that struck him after grey postwar Europe, though he has lived in rural New Hampshire since 1973 and teaches part of the year in New York. He recalls how early work as a painter shaped his instincts for editing poems.
The conversation then takes up the books. Byrne reads Master of Disguises as a series of short films whose characters are left at a precipice, and Simic confirms the lack of resolution is deliberate. He explains the poem Nineteen Thirty-eight as a way to disguise himself among the events of the year of his birth, and says the memory-heavy That Little Something follows naturally from age. A passage on emigration recalls leaving Belgrade, a year of delay in Paris and the quotas and medical examination that made entry to the United States uncertain. On war, he says he stopped naming particular conflicts because Vietnam, Bosnia and Iraq seem to him one war, and he is troubled by an America grown used to being permanently at war.
Translation takes up a large share. Simic describes writing against Serbian nationalism from 1990 and the effect of the Yugoslav wars on his plans for an anthology. He discusses the extended edition of The Horse Has Six Legs, the differences between his friends Vasko Popa, a modernist rooted in folklore, and Ivan Lalic, heir to the French symbolists, and the idea of translation as an actor's medium, with its risk of writing like the poet one translates. He is sceptical that music teaches a poet rhythm.
The last questions concern impersonality in his work, his reticence about himself, the label surrealist, which he found absurd, and the habit of moving between eyes open and eyes closed. He calls insomnia a companion that makes a poet humble and philosophical. Asked about plans, he describes a Collected Poems covering fifty years and the dilemma of whether to revise awkward early poems. Readers of Simic will find an unusually wide-ranging conversation.
Poems in this selection
- Nineteen Thirty-eight
I want the reader to imagine the rest.
Charles Simic, The Wolf, issue 24
Insomnia forces you to become a philosopher and teaches humility.
Charles Simic, The Wolf, issue 24