Javier Marías Talks Translating John Ashbery

In a recent Paris Review interview, Michael LaPointe asks Javier Marías what it was like to translate John Ashbery's poetry. LaPointe begins, "[y]ou translated John Ashbery’s poetry into Spanish, and Ashbery always championed your work in the English-speaking world." From there: 

MARÍAS

I translated just one long poem, many years ago, the poem titled “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” which was the first time his poetry had been translated into Spanish. He was very kind. He came to Madrid and we had dinner, even though I was just someone who had translated his very long poem. Many years after that, I can’t remember why, he started reading my novels, and then he wrote to me saying he was very enthusiastic about them, and we started a correspondence. In fact, I received an email from him two or three days before he died, and I was planning to reply to him. He’d talked about Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and I had something to say about them, and I was preparing myself to answer that email when the news came that he had died. So I didn’t reply to that one. He was very old, but still, you’re not less sorry for somebody’s death just because he or she is old.

Read the complete interview at Paris Review.