It's fitting that one of America's greatest translators of poetry should have been inspired by one of the world's most poetic translations. W. S. Merwin's father was a Presbyterian minister who had, as Merwin puts it in the forward to his Selected Translations, a merely "rhetorical" interest in language, "a love of the sound of language [ … ] more or less apart from the meaning." One Saturday, the younger Merwin was listening to his father rehearse his Sunday sermon when he read the following passage in Isaiah from the King James Version of the Bible:
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