Sale 2530 - Fine Books & Manuscripts, February 20, 2020

152 c   SPENDER, STEPHEN. Archive of 68 items sent to translator Shozo Tokunaga: 65 letters Signed, “Stephen” or in full * 3 typescripts, Signed or with holograph emendations. The letters, including 56 Autograph Letters, and 9 Typed Letters, mostly on personal subjects but many with literary content, a few illustrated with sketches. Together 102 pages, 4to or 8vo, many on aerogram paper or Encounter stationery; generally good condition. Each with the original envelope or address panel. The typescripts, including a two-stanza poem Signed entitled “To a Japanese Friend Translating My English,” a 3-page untitled interview concerning his views on English literature and theater, and an 8-page essay entitled “The English Poet in the Modern World.” Together 12 pages, folio or 4to, written on rectos only; the essay with moderate scattered staining and chipped edges. Vp, 1957-94 [800/1,200] 8 October [1957]: “. . . I am planning to come to Japan in the spring, if I can get a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to give lectures at Japanese universities. . . . 22 October [1957]: “. . . I work all the morning at the magazine; and at home most evenings I do my own work. But I am not satisfied with my life, because I seem to waste too much time—which I do because I am not satisfied. Probably people in Japan get into this kind of tangle also. One reason why I want to spend several weeks in Japan and Asia is because I want to create a kind of distance between myself and my present life. . . .” 10 September 1958: “. . . I have been entirely taken up with Mary Stuart — the Schiller play which I translated and which is now running at the Edinburgh Festival. Fortunately it has gone very well. “I am very glad that your translations of my poems have been praised. “I like also your translation of Shinzue Ueda’s poem The Sea. The more I think about you, dearest Shozo, the more I see that you really are a poet in all your feelings, and your sensibility. . . . “. . . My stupid remarks about Wordsworth: What I meant was to draw a contrast between the Japanese attitude toward poetry, which I take to be that poetry is a matter of the poetic form and language coinciding with the poetic moment in experience—and on no account going outside this—and the English attitude, that poetry can essentially be about the whole of life, and that a poem which covers a lot of ideas or experiences, does not have to be good poetry all the time, in fact it rises to poetry. So what I really meant in saying that Wordsworth sometimes writes poetry that is not poetry at all, is that sometimes he simply writes a kind of chopped up rambling prose—although he also rises to occasions when he writes some of the greatest poetry in the English language. . . . “. . . My stupid remarks about Ezra Pound and the imagists: The imagists—who were influenced by their ideas about Japanese Haiku—thought that poetry should consist of nothing except images. Form and music left them indifferent . . . . What I care for in poetry is that it should become part of my central experience of living: and delight in imagery seems to me rather peripheral. . . .” 2 June 1970: “. . . One of the worst things (in a public way) that ever happened to me was to discover that Encounter was paid for by the CIA. So I don’t ever want to accept anything for which the money may come from the same source—indirectly even. . . .” 20 June 1982: “. . . A year ago, David Hockney and I went to China and we did a book called Chinese Journal about it. 60,000 words by me and about 100 photographs and drawings. . . .”