My Undertaking Is Not Difficult, Essentially. I

We Are Our Memory, We Are That Chimerical Museum Of Shifting Shapes, That Pile Of Broken Mirrors.

I Saw All The Mirrors On Earth And None Of Them Reflected Me.

We Did Meet Forty Years Ago. At That Time We Were Both Influenced By Whitman And I Said, Jokingly In Part, 'i Don't Think Anything Can Be Done In Spanish, Do You?' Neruda Agreed, But We Decided It Was Too Late For Us To Write Our Verse In English. We'd Have To Make The Best Of A Second-rate Literature.

I Think Of Myself Primarily As A Reader, Then Also A Writer, But That's More Or Less Irrelevant. I Think I'm A Good Reader, I'm A Good Reader In Many Languages, Especially In English, Since Poetry Came To Me Through The English Language, Initially Through My Father's Love Of Swinburn, Of Tennyson, And Also Of Keats, Shelley And So On - Not Through My Native Tongue, Not Through Spanish. It Came To Me As A Kind Of Spell. I Didn't Understand It, But I Felt It.

The Certainty That Everything Has Already Been Written Annuls Us, Or Renders Us Phantasmal.