"lyrikline.org is the platform on the internet on which poems are available to listen to, and to read both in their original languages and various translations: a concert of verse in the voices and languages of the authors.
Around 350 poets and 3500 poems in 39 languages are available by now as well as thousands of translations!"
11/30/06
11/29/06
In Botswana, New Zealand
To anyone squatting in Botswana’s dirt
making thin carvings from thinner shadows,
London’s falling down means
nothing, Paris’ falling means
nothing, Nuku’alofa’s … nothing. Cloistered
in clothes, you
stand, foot heavy,
jammed in my doorway. You
talk to me of changes. Someone has
predicted Jupiter’s fall from space, Saturn’s
fall, then Pluto’s, then Earth’s - that the
chopped-off head of God is going to
roll across the universe,
a gigantic football, all hair, flabby jowls and
long beard, You
stand, picture-book open and
expect me to believe in cartoons, in the religious sequence of
this will be our finest hour in
Botswana, New Zealand. I
pick at worms
turning over the soil, aerating the gaps between crops. I
break the clods with a shovel. Why
do people still knock on doors,
flap about on false wings and dance the apostolic
fandango? In Botswana, I live in a hut made of
particle board and when it rains
it stinks of chemicals – when it rains, gutters
wash houses down drains. The streets are unusually
empty. I find companionship
in the hairy man who jumps from his pit of clay, who
shouts and gesticulates at a thunderstorm
dumping its load. When he
crouches in the dirt, he draws me in.
Iain Britton
NEW ZEALAND
making thin carvings from thinner shadows,
London’s falling down means
nothing, Paris’ falling means
nothing, Nuku’alofa’s … nothing. Cloistered
in clothes, you
stand, foot heavy,
jammed in my doorway. You
talk to me of changes. Someone has
predicted Jupiter’s fall from space, Saturn’s
fall, then Pluto’s, then Earth’s - that the
chopped-off head of God is going to
roll across the universe,
a gigantic football, all hair, flabby jowls and
long beard, You
stand, picture-book open and
expect me to believe in cartoons, in the religious sequence of
this will be our finest hour in
Botswana, New Zealand. I
pick at worms
turning over the soil, aerating the gaps between crops. I
break the clods with a shovel. Why
do people still knock on doors,
flap about on false wings and dance the apostolic
fandango? In Botswana, I live in a hut made of
particle board and when it rains
it stinks of chemicals – when it rains, gutters
wash houses down drains. The streets are unusually
empty. I find companionship
in the hairy man who jumps from his pit of clay, who
shouts and gesticulates at a thunderstorm
dumping its load. When he
crouches in the dirt, he draws me in.
Iain Britton
NEW ZEALAND
11/28/06
Legislators of the world
In our dark times we need poetry more than ever, argues Adrienne Rich "In "The Defence of Poetry" 1821, Shelley claimed that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". This has been taken to suggest that simply by virtue of composing verse, poets exert some exemplary moral power - in a vague unthreatening way. In fact, in his earlier political essay, "A Philosophic View of Reform," Shelley had written that "Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged" etc. The philosophers he was talking about were revolutionary-minded: Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft. [...]
But when poetry lays its hand on our shoulder we are, to an almost physical degree, touched and moved. The imagination's roads open before us, giving the lie to that brute dictum, "There is no alternative". [...]
Poetry has the capacity to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossession, the subjection of women, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom - that word now held under house arrest by the rhetoric of the "free" market. This on-going future, written-off over and over, is still within view. All over the world its paths are being rediscovered and reinvented. [...]"
Read the full article in The Guardian >>
11/27/06
Enemy Nations, Emerging Voices
Enemy Nations, Emerging Voices,
a reading at the SF Main Library
This provocative reading features works from two new Words Without Borders anthologies: Literature from the Axis of Evil and Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora. These works celebrate the literature and humanity from so-called "enemy" nations and cultures. The event includes an appearance by special guest Alice Walker.
Wednesday November 29, 2006 6-8 pm (free)
San Francisco Main Library Auditorium
100 Larkin Street
San Francisco
Co-sponsored by The Center for the Art of Translation and Words Without Borders
a reading at the SF Main Library
This provocative reading features works from two new Words Without Borders anthologies: Literature from the Axis of Evil and Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora. These works celebrate the literature and humanity from so-called "enemy" nations and cultures. The event includes an appearance by special guest Alice Walker.
Wednesday November 29, 2006 6-8 pm (free)
San Francisco Main Library Auditorium
100 Larkin Street
San Francisco
Co-sponsored by The Center for the Art of Translation and Words Without Borders
Forugh Farrokhzad in Danish
By Mette Moestrup, Copenhagen, Denmark
The Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad has been translated into Danish by the young poet Shadi Angelina Bazeghi, who was born in Iran and is now a student at the Danish Author School in Copenhagen. As her teacher I had the pleasure to assist her. The night we finished the Danish version of Farrokhzad's collection Let us believe in the beginning of a cold season... in Shadi's apartment, the weather shifted from Indian summer to thunder and lightning and rain. We almost became superstitious! Well, in many ways, this publication – this dialogue between Persian and Danish – is important. As you might know, the political rhetoric in Denmark is quite xenophobic, especially when it comes to Muslim immigrants. The discussion about freedom of speech (in connection with the Muhammed-drawings) has not made the rhetoric less harsh.
Forugh Farrokhzad’s poems have been used by the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat in his photographic series "Women of Allah". On the cover of the Danish version of Let us believe in the beginning of a cold season... is a picture by Neshat: A woman is holding her hand in front of her mouth, but still she is saying something. On her hand are written some lines from the poem "I feel sorry for the flowerbed" in Persian.
Forugh Farrokzhad is a complex symbol of freedom of speech. Her poems can certainly not be used to confirm cultural racism. I also think that her pathos and sensuality is challenging the concepts of moderne poetry (in a Western definition) – but that might be another story.
Some quotes from "I feel sorry for the flowerbed":
"All our neighbours are planting/ bombs and guns/ in their gardens in stead of flowers"
"I fear the time/ which has lost its heart"
The Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad has been translated into Danish by the young poet Shadi Angelina Bazeghi, who was born in Iran and is now a student at the Danish Author School in Copenhagen. As her teacher I had the pleasure to assist her. The night we finished the Danish version of Farrokhzad's collection Let us believe in the beginning of a cold season... in Shadi's apartment, the weather shifted from Indian summer to thunder and lightning and rain. We almost became superstitious! Well, in many ways, this publication – this dialogue between Persian and Danish – is important. As you might know, the political rhetoric in Denmark is quite xenophobic, especially when it comes to Muslim immigrants. The discussion about freedom of speech (in connection with the Muhammed-drawings) has not made the rhetoric less harsh.
Forugh Farrokhzad’s poems have been used by the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat in his photographic series "Women of Allah". On the cover of the Danish version of Let us believe in the beginning of a cold season... is a picture by Neshat: A woman is holding her hand in front of her mouth, but still she is saying something. On her hand are written some lines from the poem "I feel sorry for the flowerbed" in Persian.
Forugh Farrokzhad is a complex symbol of freedom of speech. Her poems can certainly not be used to confirm cultural racism. I also think that her pathos and sensuality is challenging the concepts of moderne poetry (in a Western definition) – but that might be another story.
Some quotes from "I feel sorry for the flowerbed":
"All our neighbours are planting/ bombs and guns/ in their gardens in stead of flowers"
"I fear the time/ which has lost its heart"
More Global Poetics
"However, Modernism didn’t truly revolutionize Scandinavian poetry until [Finnish] Edith Södergran, Russian-born and German-educated, published a series of brash, radical books of free verse in the second half of the decade [1910's]. [...] From Södergran, [the later Swedish Modernist poets] received ideas of Russian Cubo- and Ego-Futurism as well as German Expressionism and French Symbolism. In her wake they remained highly international, reading and writing about wide range of movements and artists, including German Dadaism, Die Neue Sachlichkeit, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Eisenstein. Interestingly, many of them found a great connection to American Modernism. [...] It is important to note that the internationalism of Finland at this time was largely due to its precarious political situation. After centuries as a colony (first of Sweden then of Russia), Finland gained its independence with the Bolshevik Revolution. However independence was followed by civil war between Reds (supported by the Bolsheviks) and Whites (supported by various other European nations). The internationalism of poets like Södergran and [Henry] Parland can be seen as largely post-colonial. They were exposed to a variety of influences as subjects of an empire, and then engaged with other influences when that empire collapsed."
From Johannes Göransson's Introduction to his selection of Swedish poetry in translation in Typo Magazine, issue 07, now available, among other resources, also from the new Scandinavian Portal of the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC) (edited by me, and still very much under construction). I'm tempted to think that, again, any influence the portal may come to have, will be "largely due to [a] precarious political situation" where, after centuries of "national poetries", the poets in our countries are "exposed to variety of influences" as subjects of a World Poetry Community, where they, in turn, may even come to contribute to collapse of other "empires" (poetical if not political).
From Johannes Göransson's Introduction to his selection of Swedish poetry in translation in Typo Magazine, issue 07, now available, among other resources, also from the new Scandinavian Portal of the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC) (edited by me, and still very much under construction). I'm tempted to think that, again, any influence the portal may come to have, will be "largely due to [a] precarious political situation" where, after centuries of "national poetries", the poets in our countries are "exposed to variety of influences" as subjects of a World Poetry Community, where they, in turn, may even come to contribute to collapse of other "empires" (poetical if not political).
11/26/06
Stanza
Stanza is a Dutch weblog on international poetry with well over 400 poems translated into Dutch of more than 130 different poets from Argentina, Australia, Brasil, Canada, Cyprus, Germany, Finland, France, Greece, India, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Paraguay, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Uruguay, UK & US. Go to index >>
11/25/06
Ideas Towards a Theory of Translation in Eda
MURAT NEMET-NEJAT
I
"No gendered pronouns, no stable word order, Turkish is a tongue of radical melancholia."
"The Idea of a Book," Eda: an Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry, 2003
The above statement, which seems to be about the Turkish language, in truth is also an analysis of English. The statement asserts a tension, a dialectic between the two languages, removing the grammars of both from their states of naturalness. Substantiating them both, it turns them both into distinct systems of contemplation -what is there, and what is not here...
For instance, the natural thing for a Turkish translator to do is to use the appropriate gender pronoun in given passages. In Eda, I follow the reverse system. Unless the gender reference is absolutely specific, I shift the pronoun. This method -which results in a "translated text" which is more distant, more unsettling to the host reader- has two reasons. A submerged theme of coded homosexuality exists in the 20th Turkish poetry, a theme that gradually is liberated and comes to the surface. The Eda anthology is interested in this process of liberation.
Second, because the very concept of distinctions, between animate and inanimate, object and human, male and female, love and sex, human or divine does not exist in Sufism, which is the metaphysics at the heart of this language and poetry.
Consequently, the strategy of distance, of subtle disorientation becomes a portal to enter, or at least get a hint of, a completely different cultural matrix. The translation involves itself not only with individual poems, but also the society, the city, the culture in which the poem lives, from which it derives. The radical melancholia is hooked to a specific mode of consciousness, as it works itself through a specific language.
The Hour of Sleep
Seeing me he came from you
wanting himself, love, I was in you,
let him take from me, the wanter, what he wants
I am near you, I came near you, me,
hasn't flown yet, will go then,
you, time then, for your want.
Waited for your arrival, with you,
near, next someone someone, with me
I'll love him, he forgot it before,
Forgetting, he slept, the before, with the one there,
but he says he compares tears to me, his better self,
sleeping forget, said, hey you, the one here.
More than me you, I'll remember, I
sleep in you, me
if you want to see, come, look where I sleep.
Romeo, my Romeo's leaving me,
when you wake up, turn back, my lover, here, towards you,
as I sleep, me, on the road you meet, me, I'll meet you.
I had arrived, here, I want to find, here, again,
as I wake up be near me you found me
only I love as much as you love me, you.
Don't lie, love invisibly, me,
there where you spent the night
search me, can you sleep, then, near me, in you.
Let's sleep, let's, one-two-three-thirty,
four-five-six-thirty, seven-eight-nine-thirty,
ten-thirty, sleep time.
Once more, once more, once more,
I want to start from scratch.
Once more, once more, once more,
what doesn't stop stop.
Once more, once more, once more,
what runs away, follows.
(from Romeo and Romeo, by Ahmet Güntan, 1995, translated from Turkish by Murat Nemet-Nejat)
II
"As much as a collection of translations of poems and essays, this book is a translation of a language. Due to the fortuitous convergence of historical, linguistic and geographic factors, in the 20th century -from the creation of the Turkish Republic in the 1920's to the 1990's when Istanbul/Constantinople/Byzantium turned from a jewel-like city of contrasts of under a million to a city of twelve million- Turkey created a body of poetry unique in the 20th century, with its own poetics, world view and idiosyncratic sensibility. What is more these qualities are intimately related to the nature of Turkish as a language -its strengths and its defining limits. As historical changes occurred, the language in this poetry responded to them, flowered, changed; but always remaining a continuum, a psychic essence, a dialectic which is an arabesque. It is this silent melody of the mind -the cadence of its total allure- which this collection tries to translate. While every effort has been made to create the individual music of each poem and poet, none can really be understood without responding to the movement running through them, through Turkish in the 20th century. I call this essence eda, each poet, poem being a specific case of eda, unique stations in the progress of the Turkish soul, language.
In The Task of the Translator Walter Benjamin says that what gives a language 'translatability' is its distance from the host language. Eda is this distance."
"The Idea of a Book," Eda: an Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry, 2003
In Eda a state of being is transformed into a movement, dance of language. It does so by creating a narrative in which there are three characters. The first is the city of Istanbul, the body, the space in which the movement of the spirit occurs. The second is Turkish itself, a totally agglutinative language, with an absolutely flexible, permutable word order, which enables the language to record very subtle nuances of feeling, to record the process of perception as it emerges. The third is Sufism, originating from Central Asian Shamanism, which intuits a deep unity in multiplicity, in chaos. This impulse to unity balances the vertiginous impulse of the Turkish language and society towards chaos. It enables a state of extreme differentiation, in culture and poetry, to thrive as a living organism.
In Eda both sides of the translation pole see themselves in a new way, emerging from out of their systems. Turkish becomes aware of Eda as an organizing principle. In point of fact, this anthology, which includes many essays, basically written as a tool of understanding for Western audiences, has had a surprising and crucial function of self-definition for Turkish poets and critics. For once, they were able to see their achievements in their own terms, without being co-opted by Western terminology or thought systems, such as surrealism or symbolism, etc.
For the Western reader the situation is more complex, because Eda avoids familiar templates, points of reference to make the material familiar. The relationship is tangential, the text existing as a meta-language, which basically what translation is. Its presents to the host language reader a field, a dream of possible alternatives, which the host language can or may not take.
In that way, in a translation both languages move to a third place where language sees or may have the possibility of seeing itself in a new perspective, in that way transforming itself.
Sleep
Sleeping you depart,
forgetter of your leaving is, me
as I return from sleep, get,
you return from sleep, you.
As I return from sleep
if you return into
me, there forget
what it forgot, you.
Sleep with me, you,
in sleep you depart, from me,
in sleep I forget, I, I
depart, from you.
The sleeper departs, departer sleeps,
the mark in sleep, me,
I'll lull to sleep,
in me, what repeats itself.
Once more, once more, once more,
I want to start from scratch.
Once more, once more, once more,
what doesn't stop stop.
Once more, once more, once more,
what runs away, follows.
(from Romeo and Romeo, by Ahmet Güntan, translated from Turkish by Murat Nemet-Nejat)
Murat Nemet-Nejat
November 18, 2006
The New York Literary Translation Festival
Romanian Cultural Institute in New York and Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey
I "No gendered pronouns, no stable word order, Turkish is a tongue of radical melancholia."
"The Idea of a Book," Eda: an Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry, 2003
The above statement, which seems to be about the Turkish language, in truth is also an analysis of English. The statement asserts a tension, a dialectic between the two languages, removing the grammars of both from their states of naturalness. Substantiating them both, it turns them both into distinct systems of contemplation -what is there, and what is not here...
For instance, the natural thing for a Turkish translator to do is to use the appropriate gender pronoun in given passages. In Eda, I follow the reverse system. Unless the gender reference is absolutely specific, I shift the pronoun. This method -which results in a "translated text" which is more distant, more unsettling to the host reader- has two reasons. A submerged theme of coded homosexuality exists in the 20th Turkish poetry, a theme that gradually is liberated and comes to the surface. The Eda anthology is interested in this process of liberation.
Second, because the very concept of distinctions, between animate and inanimate, object and human, male and female, love and sex, human or divine does not exist in Sufism, which is the metaphysics at the heart of this language and poetry.
Consequently, the strategy of distance, of subtle disorientation becomes a portal to enter, or at least get a hint of, a completely different cultural matrix. The translation involves itself not only with individual poems, but also the society, the city, the culture in which the poem lives, from which it derives. The radical melancholia is hooked to a specific mode of consciousness, as it works itself through a specific language.
The Hour of Sleep
Seeing me he came from you
wanting himself, love, I was in you,
let him take from me, the wanter, what he wants
I am near you, I came near you, me,
hasn't flown yet, will go then,
you, time then, for your want.
Waited for your arrival, with you,
near, next someone someone, with me
I'll love him, he forgot it before,
Forgetting, he slept, the before, with the one there,
but he says he compares tears to me, his better self,
sleeping forget, said, hey you, the one here.
More than me you, I'll remember, I
sleep in you, me
if you want to see, come, look where I sleep.
Romeo, my Romeo's leaving me,
when you wake up, turn back, my lover, here, towards you,
as I sleep, me, on the road you meet, me, I'll meet you.
I had arrived, here, I want to find, here, again,
as I wake up be near me you found me
only I love as much as you love me, you.
Don't lie, love invisibly, me,
there where you spent the night
search me, can you sleep, then, near me, in you.
Let's sleep, let's, one-two-three-thirty,
four-five-six-thirty, seven-eight-nine-thirty,
ten-thirty, sleep time.
Once more, once more, once more,
I want to start from scratch.
Once more, once more, once more,
what doesn't stop stop.
Once more, once more, once more,
what runs away, follows.
(from Romeo and Romeo, by Ahmet Güntan, 1995, translated from Turkish by Murat Nemet-Nejat)
II
"As much as a collection of translations of poems and essays, this book is a translation of a language. Due to the fortuitous convergence of historical, linguistic and geographic factors, in the 20th century -from the creation of the Turkish Republic in the 1920's to the 1990's when Istanbul/Constantinople/Byzantium turned from a jewel-like city of contrasts of under a million to a city of twelve million- Turkey created a body of poetry unique in the 20th century, with its own poetics, world view and idiosyncratic sensibility. What is more these qualities are intimately related to the nature of Turkish as a language -its strengths and its defining limits. As historical changes occurred, the language in this poetry responded to them, flowered, changed; but always remaining a continuum, a psychic essence, a dialectic which is an arabesque. It is this silent melody of the mind -the cadence of its total allure- which this collection tries to translate. While every effort has been made to create the individual music of each poem and poet, none can really be understood without responding to the movement running through them, through Turkish in the 20th century. I call this essence eda, each poet, poem being a specific case of eda, unique stations in the progress of the Turkish soul, language.
In The Task of the Translator Walter Benjamin says that what gives a language 'translatability' is its distance from the host language. Eda is this distance."
"The Idea of a Book," Eda: an Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry, 2003
In Eda a state of being is transformed into a movement, dance of language. It does so by creating a narrative in which there are three characters. The first is the city of Istanbul, the body, the space in which the movement of the spirit occurs. The second is Turkish itself, a totally agglutinative language, with an absolutely flexible, permutable word order, which enables the language to record very subtle nuances of feeling, to record the process of perception as it emerges. The third is Sufism, originating from Central Asian Shamanism, which intuits a deep unity in multiplicity, in chaos. This impulse to unity balances the vertiginous impulse of the Turkish language and society towards chaos. It enables a state of extreme differentiation, in culture and poetry, to thrive as a living organism.
In Eda both sides of the translation pole see themselves in a new way, emerging from out of their systems. Turkish becomes aware of Eda as an organizing principle. In point of fact, this anthology, which includes many essays, basically written as a tool of understanding for Western audiences, has had a surprising and crucial function of self-definition for Turkish poets and critics. For once, they were able to see their achievements in their own terms, without being co-opted by Western terminology or thought systems, such as surrealism or symbolism, etc.
For the Western reader the situation is more complex, because Eda avoids familiar templates, points of reference to make the material familiar. The relationship is tangential, the text existing as a meta-language, which basically what translation is. Its presents to the host language reader a field, a dream of possible alternatives, which the host language can or may not take.
In that way, in a translation both languages move to a third place where language sees or may have the possibility of seeing itself in a new perspective, in that way transforming itself.
Sleep
Sleeping you depart,
forgetter of your leaving is, me
as I return from sleep, get,
you return from sleep, you.
As I return from sleep
if you return into
me, there forget
what it forgot, you.
Sleep with me, you,
in sleep you depart, from me,
in sleep I forget, I, I
depart, from you.
The sleeper departs, departer sleeps,
the mark in sleep, me,
I'll lull to sleep,
in me, what repeats itself.
Once more, once more, once more,
I want to start from scratch.
Once more, once more, once more,
what doesn't stop stop.
Once more, once more, once more,
what runs away, follows.
(from Romeo and Romeo, by Ahmet Güntan, translated from Turkish by Murat Nemet-Nejat)
Murat Nemet-Nejat
November 18, 2006
The New York Literary Translation Festival
Romanian Cultural Institute in New York and Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey
METAPHORS AND THE SUBSTITUTABILITY OF EXPRESSIONS IN LITERARY TEXTS
FRANZ JOSEF CZERNIN
Prolegomena
This text is part of the sketch of a theory of literary metaphor that I have been working on for some time. I want to thank two friends in particular for their faithful help. For one, Claudia Erdheim, University of Vienna, who has been helping me with criticism and suggestions for more than two years now. Secondly, Johannes Brandl, University of Salzburg, with whom a correspondence about metaphor that began more than five years ago was the impulse for my attempt at formulating my thoughts on metaphor as analytically as possible. Finally I would also like to thank Wolfgang Künne, University of Hamburg, who read this text and has saved me from at least some errors, as well as Severin Schroeder, Oxford University: the correspondence with him has also, I hope, led to the one or other elucidation in this text.
Introduction
In scientific literature on metaphor, it is often remarked that in statements interpreted as metaphorical, expressions with the same extension cannot be substituted salva veritate.
Arthur C. Danto for example writes "that in the [non-metaphorically interpreted, F.J.C.] sentence 'his water boiled' we can replace the expression 'boiled' with 'reached 100 degrees', not so however [in the metaphorically interpreted sentence, F.J.C.] 'his blood boiled'" Danto continues with a frequently given explanation for this phenomenon: "There are deep reasons for the missing substitutability in the case of 'his blood boiled'. They have to do with metaphors having an intensional structure, it being a characteristic of such structures to oppose substitution with equal expressions."
Statements that are interpreted as metaphors are therefore, according to Danto, similar to statements describing what someone thinks or believes and also similar to statements describing what could or must be the case. All these statements have an "intensional structure" or, more precisely, are statements to which the rules of extensional semantics do not apply.
What I will argue is this: Statements which occur in literary texts, metaphoric or not, hold a special status in this class of statements. Therefore I would like to take a closer look at how statements, particularly metaphorical statements, break the rules of extensional semantics in literary texts. Danto, by the way, seems to hint at an explanation similar to this theory: He speaks of there being a "reference to the form" in metaphorically interpreted statements. However, it is unclear what exactly he means by this.
In the following, I would like to demonstrate three things:
First: If "reference to the form" means that in metaphorically interpreted statements reference is made to the intensions of partial expressions, then Danto's explanation is insufficient for literary texts. For there is a whole set of other cases of non-substitutability which cannot be explained by reference to the intensions of names or predicates.
Secondly I would like to show that this non-substitutability applies to all names and predicates that appear in literary texts, and is thus – at least in literary texts – not specific to metaphoric expressions.
Thirdly I would like to show that this non-substitutability in literary texts can be satisfactorily explained by taking into account what I will call the "area of meaning" of names and of predicates. "Reference to the form" would then mean "reference to the area of meaning of names and predicates".
Read the full text in English >>
Read the full text in German >>
Prolegomena
This text is part of the sketch of a theory of literary metaphor that I have been working on for some time. I want to thank two friends in particular for their faithful help. For one, Claudia Erdheim, University of Vienna, who has been helping me with criticism and suggestions for more than two years now. Secondly, Johannes Brandl, University of Salzburg, with whom a correspondence about metaphor that began more than five years ago was the impulse for my attempt at formulating my thoughts on metaphor as analytically as possible. Finally I would also like to thank Wolfgang Künne, University of Hamburg, who read this text and has saved me from at least some errors, as well as Severin Schroeder, Oxford University: the correspondence with him has also, I hope, led to the one or other elucidation in this text.
Introduction
In scientific literature on metaphor, it is often remarked that in statements interpreted as metaphorical, expressions with the same extension cannot be substituted salva veritate.
Arthur C. Danto for example writes "that in the [non-metaphorically interpreted, F.J.C.] sentence 'his water boiled' we can replace the expression 'boiled' with 'reached 100 degrees', not so however [in the metaphorically interpreted sentence, F.J.C.] 'his blood boiled'" Danto continues with a frequently given explanation for this phenomenon: "There are deep reasons for the missing substitutability in the case of 'his blood boiled'. They have to do with metaphors having an intensional structure, it being a characteristic of such structures to oppose substitution with equal expressions."
Statements that are interpreted as metaphors are therefore, according to Danto, similar to statements describing what someone thinks or believes and also similar to statements describing what could or must be the case. All these statements have an "intensional structure" or, more precisely, are statements to which the rules of extensional semantics do not apply.
What I will argue is this: Statements which occur in literary texts, metaphoric or not, hold a special status in this class of statements. Therefore I would like to take a closer look at how statements, particularly metaphorical statements, break the rules of extensional semantics in literary texts. Danto, by the way, seems to hint at an explanation similar to this theory: He speaks of there being a "reference to the form" in metaphorically interpreted statements. However, it is unclear what exactly he means by this.
In the following, I would like to demonstrate three things:
First: If "reference to the form" means that in metaphorically interpreted statements reference is made to the intensions of partial expressions, then Danto's explanation is insufficient for literary texts. For there is a whole set of other cases of non-substitutability which cannot be explained by reference to the intensions of names or predicates.
Secondly I would like to show that this non-substitutability applies to all names and predicates that appear in literary texts, and is thus – at least in literary texts – not specific to metaphoric expressions.
Thirdly I would like to show that this non-substitutability in literary texts can be satisfactorily explained by taking into account what I will call the "area of meaning" of names and of predicates. "Reference to the form" would then mean "reference to the area of meaning of names and predicates".
Read the full text in English >>
Read the full text in German >>
11/24/06
Those Days: In Memory of Mohammad Mokhtari
Azar is the 9th month of the Iranian solar year. 30 days From 21st of November to 21st of December. Last days of autumn. Days of harvesting winds. Sometimes you pray for a magical amnesia, a total blank in the memory.
Poetic innovations, for a moment, surpass the techniques and forms; slip out of the texts and cross the intertextual relationships, come into the air and you can smell it, you can feel it, you can weight the load of words somewhere inside your chest. Sometime a poem is a metamorphosed poet based on the poetics of power melancholia.
These days the poet is a dead poem.
Poetic innovations, for a moment, surpass the techniques and forms; slip out of the texts and cross the intertextual relationships, come into the air and you can smell it, you can feel it, you can weight the load of words somewhere inside your chest. Sometime a poem is a metamorphosed poet based on the poetics of power melancholia.
These days the poet is a dead poem.
Mohammad Mokhtari left his residence at five o'clock in the afternoon of December 2 1998 and his body was identified at the coroner's office on December 8 1998. Know more.
Plurilingual readings
As my first entry on this «Multilanguage weblog» I would like to draw your attention toward a recording of a reading that took place on the release of the previous issue of the Norwegian web magazine nypoesi. The working title of the issue is «Språkbeherskelse» (one possible translation: «mastering language»): an attempt of approaching a plurilingual writing, situated both within and between languages. Caroline Bergvall read «Cropper», written in Norwegian and English and commissioned for this issue (the Norwegian word «kropper» means «bodies»); Bergvall, the Swedish poet Johan Jönson and the Danish poet Martin Glaz Serup read each others texts; Joar Tiberg is, without doubt, reading in Swedish, even though he doesn’t seem convinced that the text he’s reading actually is written in Swedish, and Monica Aasprong is doing a beautiful performance of Soldatmarkedet, a project I will return to in my next entry. Recordings of the reading is to be found here.
11/23/06
Dime, baby, la razón
I’ve just spent two months on the Texas-Mexico border, where reggaetón rules the airwave, at least among the young. What strikes me about this music is how easily and naturally English is woven into the Spanish lyrics. Since many of the singers and listeners are bilingual, this should come as no surprise. Here’s a snatch from the Puerto Rican Daddy Yankee:
Yes yo, tu sabes quien tiene el best flow
El dueño y señor del mambo
Me piden crema y la suelto
Yo baby let’s mambo
Living and breathing English, subjugated, we all have at least a smattering of English flourishing and festering, erecting condos in our brain cells. For Daddy Yankee, it has become second nature. What’s disturbing to me are instances where English-babbling subjects at the furthest reaches of Empire still feel compelled to drop a latinated anglo saxon into their literary labor. Consider, for example, these brief poems by the Vietnamese Nam Di:
Occasionally
không thể khóc nấc lên
nghe có vẻ giả tạo
cũng không thể khóc âm thầm
chẳng hiểu vì sao
chỉ thi thoảng
lắng nghe đâu đó
trong đêm
tiếng những giọt nước rơi
Uncertainty
Không gì tệ bằng sự không chắc chắn
về mình - về người - về mọi điều
Nó làm ta có cảm giác rơi xuống
rơi xuống với tốc độ
dù chậm chạp hay chóng mặt
vẫn khó thể gượng dậy
Không gì tệ bằng cảm giác rơi xuống
Nhói ở tim và buốt các mạch máu
cảm giác mất thăng bằng
về mình - về người - về mọi điều
Nó làm ta không thể định vị
dù nhắm mắt hay
mở trừng nhìn
As you can see, only her titles are in English, nothing else. I suppose that the use of English in a non-English poem is justified when you want to evoke a specifically English, American, Kiwi or Belizean reality, etc. Otherwise, dime, baby, la razón?
Yes yo, tu sabes quien tiene el best flow
El dueño y señor del mambo
Me piden crema y la suelto
Yo baby let’s mambo
Living and breathing English, subjugated, we all have at least a smattering of English flourishing and festering, erecting condos in our brain cells. For Daddy Yankee, it has become second nature. What’s disturbing to me are instances where English-babbling subjects at the furthest reaches of Empire still feel compelled to drop a latinated anglo saxon into their literary labor. Consider, for example, these brief poems by the Vietnamese Nam Di:
Occasionally
không thể khóc nấc lên
nghe có vẻ giả tạo
cũng không thể khóc âm thầm
chẳng hiểu vì sao
chỉ thi thoảng
lắng nghe đâu đó
trong đêm
tiếng những giọt nước rơi
Uncertainty
Không gì tệ bằng sự không chắc chắn
về mình - về người - về mọi điều
Nó làm ta có cảm giác rơi xuống
rơi xuống với tốc độ
dù chậm chạp hay chóng mặt
vẫn khó thể gượng dậy
Không gì tệ bằng cảm giác rơi xuống
Nhói ở tim và buốt các mạch máu
cảm giác mất thăng bằng
về mình - về người - về mọi điều
Nó làm ta không thể định vị
dù nhắm mắt hay
mở trừng nhìn
As you can see, only her titles are in English, nothing else. I suppose that the use of English in a non-English poem is justified when you want to evoke a specifically English, American, Kiwi or Belizean reality, etc. Otherwise, dime, baby, la razón?
Neologers
I have been thinking about neologisms in poetry while working on an essay on Maggie O’Sullivan’s Palace of Reptiles (published by Nate Dorward’s Gig press), and then writing some notes on the hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how lexicon in Wallace Stevens for the MLA. How and why all this hoobla? These are the opening lines of O’Sulllivan’s “Birth Palette”:
Lizard air lichens ivy driven urchin’s pry to a pounce.
Scribbled terrestrial traor, the paw actions tainy blee
scoa, blue scog. In eat, gashed harmonica stresses to
skull icon, jigged but shower, Crushtative bundles,
Doe, Owl, the Hare mantled in a planetary pivot.
Vulture-Jar, dragonfly & waterbeetle are we,
each veil of the glide species.
The sounds elicit that tangle bank Darwin describes, as they enable us to catch audible traces of other creatures in this “terrestrial traor”, and when listening to O’Sullivan read each word hangs momently separate in its phonemic glory, the syntactical time and logic line faint or non-existent. Seeing the words on a page, a reader familiar with the Pound tradition (that stretches on to Susan Howe at least) is likely to stop at the first unfamiliar word, the “traor”, and head off to the dictionaries. What does this mean, or is it a pure sound word, or a word in another language that can be translated? The first word I find in my OED, just visible in the field of the magnifying glass, is the word “blee,” about which the dictionary is unusually disparaging: “a purely poetical word in M.E., which gradually became obs.in the course of the 16th or early in the 17th c. (not in Shakspere); but being frequent in ballads and metrical romances it has been used by one or two modern poets.” Blee is clearly a word which the OED regards as unnecessary, “purely poetical,” and one which could have been conveniently been forgotten if not for these annoying poets—that “one or two” says it all. This entry is a reminder that there is a politics and economics of the lexicon, and some words are entrpreneurial while others are virtually unemployable.
Although recent literary theory and linguistics has insisted on a functional equivalence of signifying capability distributed amongst all signifiers equally, writers and even lexicographers often tacitly recognize that words vary in their power to do cultural work. The dictionary has no listing for “tainy” but it could be an adjectival form of “tain” (tin) which is listed, although this adjectival or adverbial form would be even more unusual than this already obsolete noun. “Traor” doesn’t figure at all, and is probably all that is left after the word “extraordinary” perished, appearing where we might have expected some such phrase as “extraordinary landscape”—or history or life. “Scog” is tricky. The dictionary lists a range of words, “scoggin”, “scoggery”, “scogh” and a whole range of variant spellings, although not, as far as I can see, the simple root “scog,” and provides a series of meanings including buffoonery, a wood or copse, a valve, and branchings of these core meanings. No wonder the dictionary occasionally has a go at poets. The boundaries of individual words are hard enough to demarcate, their spellings, pragmatics and semantics all promiscuously mingling over time, usage and misusage with others, without the poets keeping alive obsolete words that were never needed in the first place, or what is worse, improvising their own. I hope no-one sends a copy of Maggie O’Sullivan to the office of the dictionary. If they see this and her other volumes they may have a panic attack.
Daniel Rosenberg has recently argued that the preoccupation with neology during the French Revolution marks the “consciousness of change so crucial to the period.”(367), and that its opponents thought that language was one of the most active zones of conflict.[i] One of the most unusual attempts to set the revolution on its proper course, to improve the expressiveness and articulacy of the language available to the new nation, was the dictionary of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, La Néologie, ou vocabulaire de mots nouveaux, à renouveler, ou pris dans des acceptions nouvelles (1801). The issue was where power over language lay, with the arbitrariness of institutions or with the people, and a prime target was the authority aggrandized by the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française. “Neologers,” he says, “are everywhere, in the market halls just as in the Roman Forum, in the stock exchange, just as in the Senate. They are everywhere where liberty makes genius fruitful, where the imagination operates without constraint upon the models of nature, where thought can enlighten authority and defy tyranny.”(376) Mercier’s great work is set out as a dictionary because he believes that this force of change lies in the word rather than grammar and syntax, and it offers a list of words that he believes the world needs: anecdotiser, ininventif, ininflammable, inabstinence, paroler, républicide, scribomanie, are a few that give the flavour of his inventions (compare O’Sullivan’s coinages such as amuletic, engouled, outlered, unheavied). To make neologisms was to celebrate creativity, freedom and a confidence in a revolutionary future—all ambitions that partially explain the anxiout tut-tutting that most linguistic and literary authorities direct towards neologisms.
H.W.Fowler, in his classic account of good usage, sums up most of our common-sense beliefs about neologisms at the start of his book The King’s English (1908) whose title underlines the nationalist sentiments that support his views of language. It is old-fashioned now yet gets right down to the issues that still trouble such usage:
Most people of literary taste will say on this point “It must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh.” […] The progress of arts and sciences gives occasion for the large majority of new words; for a new thing we must have a new name; hence, for instance, motor, argon, appendicitis. […]A 'nonce-word' (and the use might be extended to 'nonce-phrase' and 'nonce-sense'—the latter not necessarily, though it may be sometimes, equivalent to nonsense) is one that is constructed to serve a need of the moment. The writer is not seriously putting forward his word as one that is for the future to have an independent existence; he merely has a fancy to it for this once. The motive may be laziness, avoidance of the obvious, love of precision, or desire for a brevity or pregnancy that the language as at present constituted does not seem to him to admit of. The first two are bad motives, the third a good, and the last a mixed one. But in all cases it may be said that a writer should not indulge in these unless he is quite sure he is a good writer.
So if you write neologisms you are supposedly making a tacit claim to literary excellence, unless you use nonce-words. Is that what O’Sullivan is doing, playing the nonce? Or are these words tokens of “progress” in some sense? Is this poem futural in its articulation, looking back from an impossible location from which “paw actions tainy blee scoa” would be a familiarly meaningful representation of vital life? The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1993) would strongly disagree: “Neologisms (new coined words) tend now to be associated with novelty more than freshness, and sometimes with strained effects.”
In his interview with Manuel Brito, Ron Silliman discusses an acoustic neologism of Robert Grenier’s, saying: “Here, thumpa is a ‘non-word’ that points to a surprisingly large body of other ‘non-words,’ all of which exploit the social category of the non-word as an aspect of their own agency the onomatopoetic loses its force if we don’t acknowledge its special condition and thus becomes ‘only’ a word.” O’Sullivan is a neologer, her acoustic neologisms are sound poetry that has considerable social scale as articulate expression, taking purely poetical words and emplacing them in history again. What makes these neologisms especially interesting is that they are neither deliberate names of officially progressive elements, no argon or uranium, nor are they ideological seeds of further revolution, yet they hum with some of those energies. I am still puzzling over how to think about their agency.
[i] Daniel Rosenberg, “Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s New Words,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 36:3, 2003, 367-386, 367.
Lizard air lichens ivy driven urchin’s pry to a pounce.
Scribbled terrestrial traor, the paw actions tainy blee
scoa, blue scog. In eat, gashed harmonica stresses to
skull icon, jigged but shower, Crushtative bundles,
Doe, Owl, the Hare mantled in a planetary pivot.
Vulture-Jar, dragonfly & waterbeetle are we,
each veil of the glide species.
The sounds elicit that tangle bank Darwin describes, as they enable us to catch audible traces of other creatures in this “terrestrial traor”, and when listening to O’Sullivan read each word hangs momently separate in its phonemic glory, the syntactical time and logic line faint or non-existent. Seeing the words on a page, a reader familiar with the Pound tradition (that stretches on to Susan Howe at least) is likely to stop at the first unfamiliar word, the “traor”, and head off to the dictionaries. What does this mean, or is it a pure sound word, or a word in another language that can be translated? The first word I find in my OED, just visible in the field of the magnifying glass, is the word “blee,” about which the dictionary is unusually disparaging: “a purely poetical word in M.E., which gradually became obs.in the course of the 16th or early in the 17th c. (not in Shakspere); but being frequent in ballads and metrical romances it has been used by one or two modern poets.” Blee is clearly a word which the OED regards as unnecessary, “purely poetical,” and one which could have been conveniently been forgotten if not for these annoying poets—that “one or two” says it all. This entry is a reminder that there is a politics and economics of the lexicon, and some words are entrpreneurial while others are virtually unemployable.
Although recent literary theory and linguistics has insisted on a functional equivalence of signifying capability distributed amongst all signifiers equally, writers and even lexicographers often tacitly recognize that words vary in their power to do cultural work. The dictionary has no listing for “tainy” but it could be an adjectival form of “tain” (tin) which is listed, although this adjectival or adverbial form would be even more unusual than this already obsolete noun. “Traor” doesn’t figure at all, and is probably all that is left after the word “extraordinary” perished, appearing where we might have expected some such phrase as “extraordinary landscape”—or history or life. “Scog” is tricky. The dictionary lists a range of words, “scoggin”, “scoggery”, “scogh” and a whole range of variant spellings, although not, as far as I can see, the simple root “scog,” and provides a series of meanings including buffoonery, a wood or copse, a valve, and branchings of these core meanings. No wonder the dictionary occasionally has a go at poets. The boundaries of individual words are hard enough to demarcate, their spellings, pragmatics and semantics all promiscuously mingling over time, usage and misusage with others, without the poets keeping alive obsolete words that were never needed in the first place, or what is worse, improvising their own. I hope no-one sends a copy of Maggie O’Sullivan to the office of the dictionary. If they see this and her other volumes they may have a panic attack.
Daniel Rosenberg has recently argued that the preoccupation with neology during the French Revolution marks the “consciousness of change so crucial to the period.”(367), and that its opponents thought that language was one of the most active zones of conflict.[i] One of the most unusual attempts to set the revolution on its proper course, to improve the expressiveness and articulacy of the language available to the new nation, was the dictionary of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, La Néologie, ou vocabulaire de mots nouveaux, à renouveler, ou pris dans des acceptions nouvelles (1801). The issue was where power over language lay, with the arbitrariness of institutions or with the people, and a prime target was the authority aggrandized by the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française. “Neologers,” he says, “are everywhere, in the market halls just as in the Roman Forum, in the stock exchange, just as in the Senate. They are everywhere where liberty makes genius fruitful, where the imagination operates without constraint upon the models of nature, where thought can enlighten authority and defy tyranny.”(376) Mercier’s great work is set out as a dictionary because he believes that this force of change lies in the word rather than grammar and syntax, and it offers a list of words that he believes the world needs: anecdotiser, ininventif, ininflammable, inabstinence, paroler, républicide, scribomanie, are a few that give the flavour of his inventions (compare O’Sullivan’s coinages such as amuletic, engouled, outlered, unheavied). To make neologisms was to celebrate creativity, freedom and a confidence in a revolutionary future—all ambitions that partially explain the anxiout tut-tutting that most linguistic and literary authorities direct towards neologisms.
H.W.Fowler, in his classic account of good usage, sums up most of our common-sense beliefs about neologisms at the start of his book The King’s English (1908) whose title underlines the nationalist sentiments that support his views of language. It is old-fashioned now yet gets right down to the issues that still trouble such usage:
Most people of literary taste will say on this point “It must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh.” […] The progress of arts and sciences gives occasion for the large majority of new words; for a new thing we must have a new name; hence, for instance, motor, argon, appendicitis. […]A 'nonce-word' (and the use might be extended to 'nonce-phrase' and 'nonce-sense'—the latter not necessarily, though it may be sometimes, equivalent to nonsense) is one that is constructed to serve a need of the moment. The writer is not seriously putting forward his word as one that is for the future to have an independent existence; he merely has a fancy to it for this once. The motive may be laziness, avoidance of the obvious, love of precision, or desire for a brevity or pregnancy that the language as at present constituted does not seem to him to admit of. The first two are bad motives, the third a good, and the last a mixed one. But in all cases it may be said that a writer should not indulge in these unless he is quite sure he is a good writer.
So if you write neologisms you are supposedly making a tacit claim to literary excellence, unless you use nonce-words. Is that what O’Sullivan is doing, playing the nonce? Or are these words tokens of “progress” in some sense? Is this poem futural in its articulation, looking back from an impossible location from which “paw actions tainy blee scoa” would be a familiarly meaningful representation of vital life? The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1993) would strongly disagree: “Neologisms (new coined words) tend now to be associated with novelty more than freshness, and sometimes with strained effects.”
In his interview with Manuel Brito, Ron Silliman discusses an acoustic neologism of Robert Grenier’s, saying: “Here, thumpa is a ‘non-word’ that points to a surprisingly large body of other ‘non-words,’ all of which exploit the social category of the non-word as an aspect of their own agency the onomatopoetic loses its force if we don’t acknowledge its special condition and thus becomes ‘only’ a word.” O’Sullivan is a neologer, her acoustic neologisms are sound poetry that has considerable social scale as articulate expression, taking purely poetical words and emplacing them in history again. What makes these neologisms especially interesting is that they are neither deliberate names of officially progressive elements, no argon or uranium, nor are they ideological seeds of further revolution, yet they hum with some of those energies. I am still puzzling over how to think about their agency.
[i] Daniel Rosenberg, “Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s New Words,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 36:3, 2003, 367-386, 367.
11/22/06
What I've learned about New Zealand/Aotearoa poetic invention (so far)
What I've learned so far about poetic invention in New Zealand/Aotearoa, or rather in the Auckland area of the North Island, since the two separate islands have a lot of separateness between them.
I have learned that the fledgling apparatuses of written poetry by Pacific writers are full of tricky potential. Dialect, certainly, is a mode of experimentation safely sidelined-though-interesting-isn't-it since Robert Burns insisted. Dialect gets at so many troubling aspects of invention: lexical mobility, usage contingency, 'which is to be master,' all that. And dialect use is central to much local invention, here.
I have learned that you can't tell a Pacific writer by his or her color-name. (An obvious lesson, but you wouldn't know that from the way depiction and selection sometimes happens here.) A recent anthology with the (for me) misleading title Niu Voices: contemporary Pacific fiction 1 contains poems as well. The anthology's editor was surprised to hear that 'fiction' isn't necessarily an umbrella category that includes 'poetry'; I was surprised at her surprise, but that is perhaps the subject for a conversation about genre categories. As I was about to say, some of the anthologies' writers are area persons whom I assumed were 'Pakeha,' the term for a Euro (mostly Anglo) Kiwi. Mostly this was a name assumption, on my part.
Kiwi is the term for any New Zealander; though some Maori call themselves Maori rather than Kiwi, and some people distinguish only between Maori and Pakeha, which is problematic since it leaves out the increasing numbers of, say, Asian Kiwis, not to mention the Samoan (pronounced with a long first 'a') and Tongan Kiwis. And others. And so far as Maori go, there are many individual iwi, or tribes, and some people use their iwi names to avoid the conglomerating effects of the single term Maori.
Meanwhile, back at the poetic invention ranch, I am slowly developing a notion of Archipelago Poetics, a conceptual circumstance rather than necessarily a geophysical one. More to come, on that score, at the Global Poetics seminar arranged by Jacob Edmund & just mentioned here by Charles.
I have learned that many writers do try to bridge the gap between Pacific writing inventiveness and a what I suppose could be called an identity-blend inventiveness, associated with often Pakeha or Euro-passing Kiwi experimentalists who blossomed in the 1960s, or as a result of the 1960s, and got more radical still when American Language poetry provided yet more permissions. On the Pakeha side, Murray Edmond edits a new online critical poetics journal, Ka Mate Ka Ora, that depends from the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz), established by Michele Leggott on the model of Buffalo's EPC. Ka Mate Ka Ora loosely translates as 'to be or not to be', without the suicidal implications, but with murderous ones (Robert Sullivan explains the history of the term in the journal's first issue). This new magazine provides a good example of that effort to blend Pacifica invention with more occidentally-based invention, this time in a critical context.
From the Pacifica/Pasifika side, as one example, there is Albert Wendt and his 2002 book The Book of the Black Star (Auckland University Press, which under Elizabeth Caffin has been a boon to New Zealand poetry for many years). This oversized black and white paperback looks like a hard-ink, deeply etched and etched-over version of Bob Brown, or more like Bob Grenier's Transpiration/transpiring with heavier inks and more drawing. Wendt mixes intense inks and circular, spiral, furry, solar drawing in and through the strong words. Samoan 'Le fetu uliuli' mixes with 'blue vocabulary of exploration' mixes with Close Encounters of the Third Kind 'As dawn dances across Ponsonby,' a fashionable Auckland inburb (my term for living areas so close to urb that they really can't be called sub). Wendt is a Samoan New Zealander, now living in Hawai'i. He seems to be a gruff counterpart to the much-loved Hone Tuwhare (pronounced 'tufalay', with the accent on the second syllable), another example of Pacifica invention.
Tuwhare's much-published and much-revered poetry surprised me because it can be seen to index the extent to which the literate population is fairly invention-ready, when it comes to poetry. Sure, there are poems of his that are simple observations - but the same can be said of, say, David Bromige's sweet moments, for all his experimental pedigree. I see this invention-readiness in my students, in these first few months of being in this land.
I have learned that the fledgling apparatuses of written poetry by Pacific writers are full of tricky potential. Dialect, certainly, is a mode of experimentation safely sidelined-though-interesting-isn't-it since Robert Burns insisted. Dialect gets at so many troubling aspects of invention: lexical mobility, usage contingency, 'which is to be master,' all that. And dialect use is central to much local invention, here.
I have learned that you can't tell a Pacific writer by his or her color-name. (An obvious lesson, but you wouldn't know that from the way depiction and selection sometimes happens here.) A recent anthology with the (for me) misleading title Niu Voices: contemporary Pacific fiction 1 contains poems as well. The anthology's editor was surprised to hear that 'fiction' isn't necessarily an umbrella category that includes 'poetry'; I was surprised at her surprise, but that is perhaps the subject for a conversation about genre categories. As I was about to say, some of the anthologies' writers are area persons whom I assumed were 'Pakeha,' the term for a Euro (mostly Anglo) Kiwi. Mostly this was a name assumption, on my part.
Kiwi is the term for any New Zealander; though some Maori call themselves Maori rather than Kiwi, and some people distinguish only between Maori and Pakeha, which is problematic since it leaves out the increasing numbers of, say, Asian Kiwis, not to mention the Samoan (pronounced with a long first 'a') and Tongan Kiwis. And others. And so far as Maori go, there are many individual iwi, or tribes, and some people use their iwi names to avoid the conglomerating effects of the single term Maori.
Meanwhile, back at the poetic invention ranch, I am slowly developing a notion of Archipelago Poetics, a conceptual circumstance rather than necessarily a geophysical one. More to come, on that score, at the Global Poetics seminar arranged by Jacob Edmund & just mentioned here by Charles.
I have learned that many writers do try to bridge the gap between Pacific writing inventiveness and a what I suppose could be called an identity-blend inventiveness, associated with often Pakeha or Euro-passing Kiwi experimentalists who blossomed in the 1960s, or as a result of the 1960s, and got more radical still when American Language poetry provided yet more permissions. On the Pakeha side, Murray Edmond edits a new online critical poetics journal, Ka Mate Ka Ora, that depends from the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre (www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz), established by Michele Leggott on the model of Buffalo's EPC. Ka Mate Ka Ora loosely translates as 'to be or not to be', without the suicidal implications, but with murderous ones (Robert Sullivan explains the history of the term in the journal's first issue). This new magazine provides a good example of that effort to blend Pacifica invention with more occidentally-based invention, this time in a critical context.
From the Pacifica/Pasifika side, as one example, there is Albert Wendt and his 2002 book The Book of the Black Star (Auckland University Press, which under Elizabeth Caffin has been a boon to New Zealand poetry for many years). This oversized black and white paperback looks like a hard-ink, deeply etched and etched-over version of Bob Brown, or more like Bob Grenier's Transpiration/transpiring with heavier inks and more drawing. Wendt mixes intense inks and circular, spiral, furry, solar drawing in and through the strong words. Samoan 'Le fetu uliuli' mixes with 'blue vocabulary of exploration' mixes with Close Encounters of the Third Kind 'As dawn dances across Ponsonby,' a fashionable Auckland inburb (my term for living areas so close to urb that they really can't be called sub). Wendt is a Samoan New Zealander, now living in Hawai'i. He seems to be a gruff counterpart to the much-loved Hone Tuwhare (pronounced 'tufalay', with the accent on the second syllable), another example of Pacifica invention.
Tuwhare's much-published and much-revered poetry surprised me because it can be seen to index the extent to which the literate population is fairly invention-ready, when it comes to poetry. Sure, there are poems of his that are simple observations - but the same can be said of, say, David Bromige's sweet moments, for all his experimental pedigree. I see this invention-readiness in my students, in these first few months of being in this land.
11/21/06
Jacob Edmond (New Zealand) has orgainzed a set of seminars called
for the American Comparative Literature meetings in Mexico. His call for papers provides an interesting take on the subject.
A New Global Poetics? II
for the American Comparative Literature meetings in Mexico. His call for papers provides an interesting take on the subject.
Modern Persian Poetry: The First Steps
The modern movements in Persian poetry began with the first stages of modernization processes in Iranian political and social orientations. The available information in English language on the internet is not very sufficient but maybe this article by Mahmoud Kianoush can give a perspective of what has happened during 40's and 50's.
The frontier Iranian poet, Forough Farokhzad.
To have an idea about the first modern works by Nima Youshij, the father of modern Persian poetry, I suggest you to see here.
The most influential Iranian modern poet, Ahmad Shamlou, can be visited here, and his translated poems can be found here.
The frontier Iranian poet, Forough Farokhzad.
Let Them Eat Pixels!
With the government controlling all media outlets, Vietnamese poets have gone online to publish and to read each other. A single website, Tien Ve, is responsible for this phenomenon. Established in 2002 by critic/writer Nguyen Hung Quoc and critic/writer/musician/translator Hoang Ngoc Tuan, both living in Australia, Tien Ve is unique because its contents are updated daily. Each morning, I wake up to find new poems, stories and translations to read, some of them even my own, submitted a day or an hour earlier. This webzine is alive and growing in front of everyone’s eyes, and the cross pollinations between these new works are amply evident. In a recent radio interview, Hoang Ngoc Tuan explains that his primary intention is to encourage experimentation, even if it means publishing imperfect poems, which are inevitable when real risks are taken. There is plenty of good to great stuff on here, however. Compared to the official verse culture in Vietnam, in which old men are browbeaten into penning puppy-love doggerel, where the more adventurous ones would insert a ghost or two into their stanzas to flaunt their “surrealist” credentials, Tien Ve kicks ass! Since it is practically the only literary forum in town, or, rather, the only game in the (Vietnamese) universe, many poets have chosen to use it as a repository for their entire oeuvre. With 1,043 writers in its archives, many of them international figures making their first appearance in Vietnamese, often without permission, of course—for Ossian’s sake, don’t sue this webzine—Tien Ve is an indispensable resource for Vietnamese readers and writers alike, their window into the world at large. But what lessons could there be here for citizens of supposedly healthy Western democracies? As a hyphenated American, I would guess that when torture, murder, plunder, systemic voting frauds, naked corruption and special renditions have become national policies, the day when all we’ll get to eat are pixels, if even that, is not too far away.
11/20/06
LITERATE TECHNOLOGIES
LANGUAGE, COGNITION, TECHNICITY
by Louis Armand
ISBN 80-7308-138-5 (paperback) 250pp
Publication date: October 2006
Why is there consciousness and not nothing?
What is the meaning of discourse?
What would it mean if machines could think?
Nokturno.org
aka "Finnish Ubu", maintained by the visual and concret poet Marko Niemi, is a site worth checking for latest in digital, sound, visual, and conceptual poetry, Finland and elsewhere. The site as such does not have a consistent English navigation, but by following Marko's blog, Nurotus, you'll keep posted on what happens there. I'd suggest you check out at least In Another's Voice, a new Nokturno series where Finnish and non-Finnish poets read each other's work - leading to great cross-pollination of sounds, both ways. As examples of Marko's own work, let me point you to "radarman tracks tanks bang bang" (after Christian Bök & bp Nichol), and "exquisite collage or andre going solo".
11/19/06
Louis Zukofsky, www.schreibheft.de
After an edition of "A"-9 by the edition hansjörg Mayer 1966
finally Louis Zukofsky is also discovered by german literature!
see: schreibheft (link)
"A"
Louis Zukofskys Großes Amerikanisches Gedicht
Contributions and Translations by
Gerd Burger, Felix Christen, Robert Creeley,
Oswald Egger, Robert Kelly, Birgit Kempker,
Benedikt Ledebur, Ezra Pound, Friedhelm Rathjen,
Werner Schmitz, Ulf Stolterfoht,
Rosmarie Waldrop, William Carlos Williams
and Louis Zukofsky
"A"-9
Reimschema (14 Verse, „umgekehrtes Sonett“, 3+3+4+4)
a
b
c
a
b
c
d
e
f
f
d
e
f
f
edition hansjörg mayer 1966:
die form
“a”-9 besteht aus zwei liedern das erste eine definition des wertes
das zweite eine definition der liebe beide sind dargestellt nach
guido cavalcantis donna mi priegha
die reime des zweiten liedes „a“-9 sind die selben wie die des ersten
in linearer folge welche in ihrer darlegung versuchen den klang
des original italienischen ins englische zu übertragen
die absicht von „a“-9 ist den klang im zusammenhang mit dem
inhalt zu sehen
nach ezra pound besteht jede strophe von donna mi priegha aus
14 end und 12 inner reim klängen was bedeutet dass von je
154 silben 52 im schema gebunden sind die strophe kehrt die
verhältnisse des sonnets um da die kurze schleife der
längeren vorangeht
diese umkehrung ist offensichtlich vorteilhaft für die strophe als teil
einer längeren komposition
jede strophe benützt 8 reim klänge 5 kommen 4 mal vor und 3 zwei
mal jedes lied von „a“-9 folgt cavalcantis schema genau
und lässt speziell die strukturelle verteilung der laute r und n
invariant das heisst die strukturen der r und n sind in original
und übersetzung identisch
Guido Cavalcanti
Canzone
donna mi priegha perch’i volglio dire
d’un accidente che sovente é fero
ed é sí altero ch’é chiamato amore
sicche chi l negha possa il ver sentire
ond a’l presente chonoscente chero
perch’ i no spero ch om di basso chore
atal ragione portj chonoscenza
ché senza natural dimostramento
non o talento di voler provare
laove nascie e chì lo fá criare
e qual è sua virtu e sua potenza
l’essenza e poi ciaschun suo movimento
e’ l piacimento che’l fá dire amare
e se hom per veder lo puó mostrare: –
in quella parte dove sta memoria
prende suo stato si formato chome
diafan dal lume d’ una schuritade
la qual da marte viene e fá dimora
elgli é creato e a sensato nome
d’ alma chostume di chor volontade
vien da veduta forma ches s’intende
che’l prende nel possibile intelletto
chome in subgetto locho e dimoranza
e in quella parte mai non a possanza
perchè da qualitatde non disciende
risplende in sé perpetuale effecto
non a diletto mà consideranza
perche non pote laire simiglianza: –
non é virtute mà da questa vene
perfezione ches si pone tale
non razionale mà che si sente dicho
fuor di salute giudichar mantene
e l antenzione per ragione vale
discerne male in chui é vizio amicho
di sua virtu seghue ispesso morte
se forte la virtú fosse impedita
la quale aita la contrara via
nonche opposito natural sia
mà quanto che da ben perfett e torte
per sorte non po dir om ch abbi vita
che stabilita non a singnioria
a simil puó valer quant uom l obblia: –
lesser é quando lo volere a tanto
ch oltre misura di natura torna
poi non si addorna di riposo maj
move changiando cholr riso in pianto
e ella fighura con paura storna
pocho soggiorna anchor di lui verdraj
che n gente di valore il piu si trova
la nova qualità move a sospirj
e vol ch om mirj in un formato locho
destandos’ira la qual manda focho
inmaginar nol puo hom che nol prova
e non si mova perch’ a llui si tirj
e non si aggirj per trovarvi giocho
e certamente gran saver nè pocho: –
da ssimil tragge complessione e sghuardj
che fá parere lo piacere piu certo
non puó choverto star quand é si giunto
non giá selvagge la biltá son dardj
ch a tal volere per temere sperto
hom seghue merto spirito che punto
e non si puó chonosciere per lo viso
chompriso biancho in tale obbietto chade
e chi ben aude forma non si vede
perchè lo mena chi dallui procede
fuor di cholore essere diviso
asciso mezzo schuro luce rade
fuor d’ongni fraude dice dengno in fede
chè solo da chostui nasce merzede: –
tu puoj sichuramente gir chanzone
dove ti piace c h i t o sì ornata
ch assa lodata sará tua ragione
dalle persone ch anno intendimento
di star con l’ altre tu non aj talento: –
translated by
Ezra Pound:
DONNA MI PREGA
(Dedicace – To Thomas Campion his ghost, and to the ghost of Henry Lawes, as prayer to the revival of music)
Because a lady asks me, I would tell
Of an affect that comes often and is fell
And is so overweening: Love by name,
E’en its deniers can now hear the truth,
I for the nonce to them that know it call,
Having no hope at all
that man who is base in heart
Can bear bear his part of wit
int the light of it,
And save they know’t aright from nature’s source
I have no will to prove Love’s course
or say
Where he takes rest; who maketh him to be;
Or what his active virtu is, or what his force;
Nay, nor his very essence or his mode;
What his placation; why he is in verb,
Or if a man have might
to show him visible to men’s sight.
In memory’s locus taketh he his state
Formed there in manner as a mist of light
Upon a dusk that is come from Mars and stays.
Love is created, hath a sensate name,
His modus takes from soul, form heart his will;
From form seen doth he start, that, understood,
Taketh in latent intellect –
As in a subject ready –
place and abode,
Yet in that place it ever is unstill,
Spreading its rays, it tendeth never down
By quality, but is its own effect unendingly
Not to delight, but in an ardour of thought
That the base likeness of it kindelth not.
It is not virtu, but perfection’s source
Lying within perfection postulate
Not by the reason, but ‘tis felt, I say.
Beyond salvation, holdeth its judging force,
Maintains intention reason’s peer and mate;
Poor in discernment, being thus weakness’ friend,
Often his power meeteth eith death in the end
Be he withstayed
or from true course
bewrayed
E’en though he meet not with hate
or villeiny
Save that perfection fails, be it but little;
Nor can man say he hathhis life by chance
Or that he hath not stablished seigniory
Or loseth power, e’en lost to memory.
He comes to be and is when will’s so great
It twists itself from out all natural measure;
Leisure’s adornment put he then never on,
Never thereafter, but moves changing state,
Moves changing colour, or to laugh or weep
Or wries the face with fear and little says,
Yea, resteth little
yet is found the most
Where folk or worth be host.
And his strange property sets sighs to move
And wills man look to unformèd space
Rousing there thirst
that breaketh into flame.
None can imagine love
that knows not love;
Love doth not move, but draweth all to him;
Nor doth he turn
for a whim
to find delight
Nor to seek out, surely, great knowledge or slight.
Look drawn from like,
delight maketh certain in seeming
Not can in covert cower,
beauty so near,
Not yet wild-cruel as darts,
So hath man craft from fear
in such his desire
To follow a noble spirit,
edge, that is, and point to the dart,
Though from her face indiscernible;
He, caught, falleth
plumb on to the spike of the targe.
Who well proceedeth, form not seeth,
following his own emanation.
There, beyond colour, essence set apart,
In midst of darkness light light giveth forth
Beyond all falsity, worthy of faith, alone
That in him solely is compassion born.
Safe may’st thou go my canzon wither thee pleaseth
Thou art so fair attired that every man and each
Shall praise thy speech
So he have sense or glow eith reason’s fire,
To stand with other
hast thou no desire
CANTO XXXVI
A Lady asks me
I speak in season
She seeks reason for an affect, wild often
That is so proud he hath Love for a name
Who denys it can hear the truth now
Wherefore I speak to the present knowers
Having no hope that low-hearted
Can bring sight to such reason
Be there not natural demonstration
I have no will to try proof-bringing
Or say where it hath birth
What is its virtu an power
Its being and every moving
Or delight whereby ‘tis called “to love”
Or if man can show it to sight.
Where memory liveth,
it takes its state
Formed like a diafan from light on shade
Which shadow cometh of Mars and remaineth
Created, having a name sensate,
Custom of the soul,
will from the heart;
Cometh from a seen form which being understood
Taketh locus and remaining in the intellect possible
Wherein hath he neither weight nor still-standing,
Descendeth not by quality but shineth out
Himself his own effect unendingly
Not in delight but in the being aware
Nor can he leave his true likeness otherwhere.
He is not vertu but cometh of that perfection
Which is so postulate not by the reason
But ‘tis felt, I say.
Beyond salvation, holdeth his judging force
Deeming intention to be reason’s peer and mate,
Poor in discernment, being thus weakness’ friend
Often his power cometh on death in the end,
Be it withstayed
and so swinging counterweight.
Not that it were natural opposite, but only
Wry’d a bit from the perfect,
Let no man say love cometh from chance
Or hath not established lordship
Holding his power even though
Memory hath him no more.
Cometh he to be
when the will
From overplus
Twisteth out of natural measure,
Never adorned with rest Moveth he changing colour
Either to laugh or weep
Contorting the face with fear
resteth but a little
Yet shall ye see of him That he is most often
With folk who deserve him
And his strange quality sets sighs to move
Willing man look into that forméd trace in his mind
And with such uneasiness as rouseth the flame.
Unskilled can not form his image,
He himself moveth not, drawing all to his stillness,
Neither turneth about to seek his delight
Nor yet to seek out proving
Be it so great or so small.
He draweth likeness and hue from like nature
So making pleasure more certain in seeming
Nor can stand hid in such nearness,
Beautys be darts tho’ not savage
Skilled from such fear a man follows
Deserving spirit, that pierceth.
Nor is he known from his face
But taken in the white light that is allness
Toucheth his aim
Who heareth, seeth no form
But is led by its emanation.
Being divided, set out from colour,
Disjunct in mid darknesss
Grazeth the light, one moving by other,
Being divided, divided from all falsity
Worthy of trust
From him alone mercy proceedeth.
Go, song, surely thou mayest
Wither it please thee
For so art thou ornate that thy reasons
Shall be praised from thy understanders,
With others hast thou no will to make company.
“Called thrones, balascio or topaze”
Eriugina was not understood in his time
“which explains, perhaps, the delay in condemning him”
And they went looking for Manicheans
And found, so far as I can make out, no Manicheans
So they dug for, and damned Scotus Eriugena
“Authority comes from right reason,
never the other way on”
Hence the delay in condemning him
Aquinas head down in a vacuum,
Aristotle which way in a vacuum?
Sacrum, sacrum, inluminatio coitu.
Lo Sordels si fo die Mantovana
of a castle named Goito.
“Five castles!
“Five castles!”
(king giv’ him five castles)
“And what the hell do I know about dye-works?!”
His Holiness has written a letter:
“CHARLES the Mangy of Anjou....
..way you treat your men is a scandal....”
Dilectis miles familiaris... castra Montis Odoriisii
Montis Sancti Silvestri pallete et pile...
In partibus Thetis....vineland
land tilled
the land incult
pratis nemoribus pascuis
with legal jurisdiction
his heirs of both sexes,
...sold the damn lot six weeks later,
Sordellus de Godio.
Quan ben m’albir e mon ric pensamen.
CANTO XXXVI
translated by
Benedikt Ledebur
frau, die mich fragt,
so sprechen will ich
sucht sie nach einem affekt, der so oft wild
und stolz ist dass er liebe genannt wird
wer es verneint soll die wahrheit erfahren
wobei ich zu dem heutigen wissenden spreche
ohne hoffnung dass niedrige gesinnung
einsicht gewinnt durch solche begründung
lässt es sich nicht natürlich aufzeigen
fehlt mir talent den beweis zu erbringen
oder zu sagen wo es zur welt kommt
worin sein mut und seine potenz liegt
oder entzücken wodurch es „zu lieben“ gerufen
oder ob ein mensch dem sehen es zeigen kann.
wo erinnerung lebt,
hat es seinen status
geformt wie ein diaphan aus licht im dunkel
dessen schatten von mars herrührt und bleibt
geschaffen, fühlt seinen namen,
gewohnheit der seele,
des herzens wille;
kommt von gesehener form die wird sie verstanden
locus hat und bleibt im möglichen des intellekts
worin sie weder gewicht noch stillstand gewinnt,
noch durch eigenschaft herabsteigt vielmehr hinaus scheint
sich selbst seinen eigenen effekt ohne ende
nicht im entzücken aber in dem bewusstsein
noch kann es sein wahres aussehen anderswo lassen.
es ist nicht mut doch kommts von dieser perfektion
die nicht gesetzt wird durch die vernunft
doch gefühlt wird, wie gesagt.
jenseits von rettung, hält es seine urteilskraft
absicht erachtend für der vernunft genoss und gefährte,
arm im unterscheiden, ist so der schwäche freund
findet seine stärke oft den tod am ende,
wird ihm widerstanden
und schwingt so das gegengewicht.
nicht dass es sein natürliches gegenteil, doch nur
ein bisschen weg vom perfekten,
lass niemanden sagen liebe käme vom zufall
oder hätte keine etablierte herrschaft
erhaltend ihre kraft sogar dann
wenn erinnerung sie nicht mehr behält.
kommt sie ins sein
wenn der wille
im überfluss
dreht sich aus natürlichem mass,
nie geziert mit ruhe Bewegt sie farbe wechselnd
entweder zum lachen oder weinen
verzerrt das gesicht mit furcht
ruht nur ein bisschen
dennoch wirst sehen du bei ihr Dass sie meist
mit volk das sie verdient
und ihre seltsame eigenschaft setzt seufzer zu bewegen
gewillte menschen zu blicken auf die geformte spur in seinem sinn
und mit solcher beunruhigung wie die flamme sie erzeugt.
ungeschickte können nicht formen ihr bild,
sie selbst bewegt nicht, zieht alles in ihre stille,
weder dreht sie sich ihr entzücken zu suchen
noch zu suchen nach beweisen
seien sie gross oder klein.
aussehen und tönung bezieht sie wie natur
macht sicherer so freude im scheinen
noch kann veborgen sie stehn in solcher nähe,
der schönheit seien pfeile jedoch nicht wild
geschickt durch solche furcht folgt ein mensch
verdienend geist, der durchbohrt.
noch wird erkannt sie am gesicht
doch wahrgenommen im weissen licht das alles ist
berührt ihr ziel
wer hört, sieht keine form
doch geführt wird durch seine emanation.
getrennt, ausgesetzt von farbe,
unverbunden mitten in dunkelheit
streift das licht, eines durchs andere bewegend,
getrennt, getrennt von aller falschheit
vertrauens würdig
von ihm allein geht gnade aus.
gehe, lied, sicher darfst du
wohin es dir gefällt
denn du bist so geschmückt dass deine gründe
werden gepriesen werden von deinen verstehern,
mit anderen hast du kein talent dich gemein zu machen.
„gerufene throne, balascio oder topas“
eriugina wurde nicht verstanden zu seiner zeit
„was, vielleicht, die verspätung seiner verdammung erklärt“
und sie zogen aus manichäer zu suchen
und fanden, soweit ich es ausmachen kann, keine manichäer
so gruben sie aus, und verdammten scotus eriugina
„autorität kommt vom richtigen grund,
niemals auf anderem weg“
daher die verspätung seiner verdammung
aquinas kopf hinunter in einem vacuum
aristoteles auf welche weise in einem vacuum?
sacrum, sacrum, iluminatio coitu.
lo sordels si fo di mantovana
von einer burg namens goito.
„fünf burgen!“
„fünf burgen!“
(könig gib ihm fünf burgen)
„und was zur hölle weiss ich über färber-arbeiten?!“
seine heiligkeit hat einen brief geschrieben:
„KARL der grausige von Anjou....
..weise wie du deine männer behandelst ist ein skandal....“
dilectis miles familiaris...castra montis odorisii
montis sancti silvestri pallete et pile...
in partibus thetis....weinland
land bestellt
das land unkultiviert
pratis nemoribus pascuis
mit legaler rechtsprechung
seine erben beiderlei geschlechts,
...verkauften das verdammte ganze sechs wochen später,
sordellus de godio.
quan ben m’albir e mon ric pensamen.
Louis Zukosfsky
Of things related as equated values,
The measure all use is time congealed labor
In which abstraction things keep no resemblance
To goods created; integrated all hues
Hide their natural use to one or one's neighbor.
So that were the things words they could say: Light is
Like night is like us when we meet our mentors
Use hardly enters into their exchanges,
Bought to be sold things, our value arranges;
We flee people who made us as a right is
Whose sight is quick to choose us as frequenters,
But see our centers do not show the changes
Of human labor our value estranges.
Values in series taking on as real
We affect ready gold a steady token
Flows in unbroken circuit and induces
Our being, wearies of us as ideal
Equals that heady crises eddy. Broken
Mentors, unspoken wealth labor produces,
Now loom as causes disposing our loci,
The foci of production: things reflected
As wills subjected; formed in the division
Of labor, labor takes on our imprecision -
Bought, induced by gold at no gain, though close eye
And gross sigh fixed upon gain have effected
Value erected on labor, prevision
Of surplus value, disparate decision.
Hands, heart, not value made us, and of any
Desired perfection the projection solely,
Lives worked us slowly to delight the senses,
Of their fire shall you find us, of the many
Acts of direction not defection - wholly
Dead labor, lowlier with time's offenses,
Assumed things of labor powers extorted
So thwarted we are together impeded -
The labor speeded while our worth decreases -
Naturally surplus value increases
Being incident to the pace exhorted:
Unsorted, indrawn, but things that time ceded
To life exceeded - not change, the mind pieces
The expanse of labor in us when it ceases.
Light acts beyond the phase day wills us into
Call a maturer day, the poor are torn - a
Pawl to adorn a ratchet - hope dim - eying
Move cangues, conjoined the coils of things they thin to,
While allayed furor the obscurer bourne, a
Stopped hope unworn, a voiced look, mask espying
That, as things, men want in us yet behoove us,
Disporve us least as things of light appearing
To the will gearing to light's infinite locus:
Not today but tomorrow is their focus.
No one really knows us who does not prove us,
None or times move us but that we wake searing
The labor veering from guises which cloak us,
As animate instruments men invoke us.
Dissemble - pledging complexions so guarded -
Cast of plied error leaves such error asserted
But stand obverted, men sight us things joined to
Change itself edging the full light discarded -
In machines' terror a use there averted -
Times have subverted the plenty they point to:
Things, we have not always known this division -
Misprision of interest, profit, rent - coded
Surplus, decoded as labor - evaded
As gain the source of all wealth so degraded
The land and the worker elude the vision -
A scission of surplus and use corroded
And still, things goaded by labor, nor faded,
But like light in which its action was aided.
We are things, say, like a quantum of action
Defined product of energy and time, now
In these words which rhyme now how song's exaction
Forces abstraction to turn from equated
Values to labor we have approximated.
An eye to action sees love bear the semblance
Of things, related is equated, - values
The measure all use who conceive love, labor
Men see, abstraction they feel, the resemblance
(Part, self-created, integrated) all hues
Show to natural use, like Benedict´s neighbor
Crying his hall's flown into the bird: Light is
The night isolated by stars (poled mentors)
Blossom eyelet enters pealing with such changes
As sweet alyssum, that not-madness, (ranges
In itself, there tho acting without right) is -
Whose sight is rays, "I shall go; the frequenters
That search our centers, love; Elysium exchanges
No desires; its thought loves what hope estranges."
Such need may see reason, the perfect real -
A body ready as love's steady token
Fed thought unbroken as pleasure induces -
True to thought wearies never its ideal
That loves love, head, every eddy. Broken
Plea, best unspoken, a lip's change produces
Suffers to confuse this thought and its loci,
The foci of things timelessly reflected -
Substance subjected to no human prevision,
Free as exists it loves: worms dig; imprecision
Of indignation cannot make the rose high
Or close sigh, therein blessedness effected
Thru power has directed love to envision
Where body is it bears a like decision.
Virtue flames value, merriment love - any
Compassed perfection a projection solely
Power, the lowly do not tune the senses;
More apt, more salutary body moves many
Minds whose direction makes defection wholly
Vague. This sole lee is love: from its offences
To self or others dies, and the extorted
Word, thwarted dream with eyes open; impeded
Not by things seeded from which strength increases;
Remindful of its deaths as loves decreases;
Happy with the dandelion unsorted,
Well-sorted by imagination speeded
To it, exceeded night lasts, the sun pieces
Its necessary nature, error ceases.
Love acts beyond the phase day wills it into -
Hate is obscure, errs, is pain, furor, torn - a
Lust to adorn aversion, hope - love eying
Its object joined to its cause, sees path into
Things the future or now, that poorer bourne, a
Past, a step, a worn, a voiced look, gone - eying
These, each in itself is saying, "behoove us,
Disprove us least as things of love appearing
In a wish gearing to light's infinite locus,
Balm or jewelweed is according to focus.
No one really knows us who does not love us,
Time does not move us, we are and love, searing
Remembrance - veering from guises which cloak us,
So defined as eternal, men invoke us."
A wise men pledging piety unguarded
Lives good not error. By love's heir are asserted
Song, light obverted to mind, joy enjoined to
Least death, act edging patience, envy discarde;
Difficult rare excellence, love's heir, averted
Loss seize the hurt head Apollo's eyes point to:
Ai, Ai Hyacinthus, the petals in vision -
The scission living acquiescence, coded
Tempers decoded for friendship, evaded
Image recurring to vigilance, raided
By falsehood burning it clear to the vision,
Derision transmuted by laughter, goaded
Voice holding the node at heart, song, unfaded
Understanding whereby action is aided.
Love speaks: "in wracked cities there is less action,
Sweet alyssum sometimes is not of time; now
Weep, love's heir, rhyme now how song's exaction
Is our distraction - related is equated,
How else is love's distance approximated."
Louis Zukofsky
Translated
by Benedikt Ledebur
A – 9
ein anreiz zur tat singt von dem ähnlichen
der dinge bezogen wie gewogene werte,
das mass aller zeit ist erstarrt zur arbeit
in deren abstraktheit die dinge nicht ähnlich den
geschaffenen gütern; integriert alle härte
hindert natürlich zu brauchen einen selbst und zu zweit.
so das waren dinge worte sie sagen: licht ist
wie nacht ist wie wir wenn wir treffen mentoren
brauchen kaum einzugehn in ihr einwenden,
kauft verkauft dinge, wir werte vollenden;
wir fliehen sie, die uns gemacht, was gericht ist
wessen sicht ist schnell, uns wählt als faktoren,
doch sieh unsre mitten nicht zeigen die wenden
der menschlichen arbeit unsrer werte entfremden.
werte in serien genommen als real
nehmen richtiges gold wir als wichtiges zeichen
fliesst in ständigem kreislauf und induziert
unser sein, trägt ab uns als ideal
gleicht aus der rauschenden krise tauschen. weichen
mentoren, verschwiegenen reichtum arbeit produziert,
jetzt tauchen als gründe auf, schieben unsre loci,
die foci der produktion: dinge reflektiert
als willen unterworfen; geformt in der teilung
von arbeit, arbeit setzt fort unsre unbestimmung –
gekauft, induziert durch gold, kein gewinn, doch augen zu
und grobes begehren fixiert auf gewinn haben erigiert
werte errichtet auf arbeit, vorhersehung
von noch mehr mehrwert, disparater entscheidung.
hände, herz, nicht wert machte uns, und von diesen
ersehnten perfektionen projektion allein,
leben werkte langsam zu erfreuen in sinnen,
von ihrem feuer sollst finden uns, von den vielen
akten des dirigierens nicht verlierens – ganzsein
toter arbeit, niedriger mit der zeit anrinnen,
angenommene dinge von arbeit kräfte erzwungen
in zangen sind wir zusammmen behindert –
die arbeit beschleunigt, unser wert muss abnehmen –
natürlich der mehrwert im tausch muss zunehmen,
der zustösst diesem pass bedungen:
unsortiert, einwärts, die dinge mit zeit vermindert
zu leben gesteigert – nicht wechsel, mentale schemen
aus weiten der arbeit in uns, die vergehen.
licht im schutz der phase taglang agiert zwingt in einen
ruf nach reiferem tag, die armen gezerrt – die
klaue geziert eine klinke – hoffe trüb – äugen
bewegt wachen, verbunden windungen dinge verfeinen,
ist alliiert furor dem obskureren bereich, die
verhoffte hoffnung unversehrt, gestimmter blick, masken bezeugen
das, wie dinge, menschen wollen in uns verdingen uns,
verwirkt uns zumindest in dingen das licht offenbarend
dem willen der führt zu licht’s unendlichem locus:
nicht heute doch schon morgen ist ihr focus.
wer nicht uns erprobt, kann auch nicht ersinnen uns,
nichts oder zeiten bewegen uns nur dass wir wachen darbend
die arbeit verwendet vom geist, der belog uns,
als belebte instrumente der mensch aufzog uns.
verstellen – pfändend komplexitäten gewartet –
wurf versetzter fehler lässt solche fehler bestehen
doch stehen verkehrt, menschen sicht uns dinge verbunden
zu wechseln sich säumend das volle licht im erstarrten –
maschinen im terror gebrauch dort andrehen –
zeiten zerrüttet die fülle die sie gebunden:
dinge, wir kannten nicht immer die division –
missbrauch des anteils, profits, zins’ – codierter
überfluss – decodiert als arbeit – bewertet
als gewinn die quelle des reichtums so entwertet
das land und der arbeiter entgeht der vision –
schnitt von gebrauch und überfluss korrodiert, er
und doch, dinge von arbeit getrieben, gehärtet,
aber wie licht in dem seine tat war geerdet.
wir sind dinge, sag, wie ein quantum von tat
definiertes produkt von energie und zeit, jetzt
in diesen worten die reim jetzt wie lied sie klart
der kräfte abstrakt zu drehn von gewogenen
werten zur arbeit im uns analogen.
ein aug zur tat sieht lieb trug die ähnlichen
dinge, bezogen ist gewogen, - werte
das mass aller die liebe erfahren, arbeit
menschen sehn, fühlen abstraktheit, was ähnlich den
(zum teil, selbst-geschaffen, integriert) alle härten
führen zu natürlichem gebrauch, wie benedikt zu zweit
beweint im fliessen halle in den vogel: licht ist
die nacht isoliert durch sterne (gepolte mentoren)
blüte lautgleich tritt ein mit solchen wendungen
wie süsses alyssum, diese nicht-verrücktheit, (endungen
in sich selbst, es gibt kein tun ohne recht) ist –
wessen sicht ist strahlen, „ich werde gehn; die faktoren
die unsere mitten suchen, liebe; elysium verwenden
keine sehnsüchte; sein denken liebt, was sie verfremden.
solch not mag den grund sehn, perfekt und real –
ein körper wirklich wie der liebe wichtiges zeichen
nährt denken ständig wie freude es induziert –
wahr es dem denken abträgt niemals sein ideal
das liebt liebe, kopf, jedes rauschen. auf weichen
lippen, ungesagt besser, bleibt bitten wechsel produziert
leiden verwirrt den gedanken uns seine loci,
die foci der dinge zeitlos reflektiert –
unterschied unterworfen keiner menschlichen teilung,
frei wie die liebe es ist: wurm grab; unbestimmung
der beleidigung kann nicht die rose erhöhen
noch lose wehen, darin glückseligkeit resultiert
aus kraft hat dirigiert der liebe vorsprung
wo körper ist was sie trägt wie entscheidung.
werte tugend entflammt, lieb lustvoll –diesen
verpassten perfektionen eine projektion allein
kräfte, nie stimmen die niedrigen sinne;
mehr geeignet, mehr heilsam der körper die vielen
geister bewegt, deren richtung vernichtung ganz sein
lässt vage. dies einzig beschatten ist liebe: in ihm ergrimmen
sich selbst oder andern erstirbt, und das erzwungen
wort, im zwang geträumt mit offenen augen; behindert
durch dinge gesät sie wird stärke zunehmen;
wird umgeistert von toden wie lieben abnehmen;
glücklich mit dem dandelion ungelungen,
gut gelungen durch phantasie geschwinder
bei ihm, gesteigert die nacht bleibt, der sonne wehen
notwendig seine natur, muss fehlen vergehen.
liebe im schutz der phase taglang agiert zwingt’s in einen –
hass ist obskur, irrt, ist schmerz, furor, zerrt – die
lust zu verziern aversion, hoffen – liebäugeln
sein objekt gebunden zur ursache, sieht pfad in seinen
dingen die zukunft oder jetzt, der ärmere bereich, die
vergangen, schritt, versehrt, blick gestimmt, ging –äugen
diese, jedes sagt zu sich selbst, „verdinge uns,
verwirk uns zumindest in dingen die lieb offenbarend
als wünschen, das führt uns zu licht’s unendlichem locus:
balsam und juwelenkraut passen zum focus.
wer nicht uns liebt, kann auch nicht erkennen uns,
zeit nicht bewegt uns, wir sind und lieben, darbend
errinnerung – gedreht vom geist der umbog uns,
so bestimmt als ewig, der mensch aufzog uns.
ein weiser mensch pietät pfändend unbewachte
lebt gut nicht fehler. der liebe erben entstehen
lied, licht zum geist gekehrt, freude befunden
geringstem tod, akt säumend geduld, neid verachtet;
schwierig seltene herrlichkeit, erben der lieb erwählen
verlust fassen die wunde kopf apollos augen erkunden:
ai, ai hyacinthus, die blätter in sicht schon –
die schnitte leben ergeben, kodierte
stimmungen decodiert für freundschaft, verkommen
bild sich rettend ins wachen, genommen
durch falschheit einbrennend klar es in die vision,
lächerlichkeit mutiert durch lachen, bestierte
stimme den knoten am herz sie hält, lied, unbenommen
verstehend wodurch die tat sie besonnen.
liebe spricht: „in kranken städten ist weniger tat,
süsses alyssum ist manchmal nicht aus zeit; jetzt
weinen, erben der lieb, reim jetzt wie lied sie klart
ist deine zerstreuung – bezogen ist gewogen,
wie sonst wär’s im der liebe steuerung analogen.“
“ ... the glass under water, the form that seems a form seen in a mirror ...”[i]
Nachbemerkungen zu Übersetzungen aus Zukofsky und Pound
Am 6. März 1935 schreibt in Italien, Rapallo, Ezra Pound in einem Brief („Dear Z/”) an Louis Zukofsky: „Being too DUMB to read Cavlalcanti, there was a little dabble / like Sitwell’s collecting Victorian mantlepiece ornnaments.“ (Der Telegrammstil seiner Briefe – orthographisch teilweise in einer Art verballhornenden Lautschrift - ist nicht immer leicht zu decodieren. Zu dumm/dumpf Cavalcanti zu lesen, bezieht sich dabble/Geplätscher wahrscheinlich auf das eigene Arbeiten. Edith Sitwell war eine englische Dichterin.) Am 15. März kontert Zukofsky in New York mit einer Einschätzung der Cantos 39 und 36: „I’m not going to tell the U.S.A., (even) if my word doesn’t spead further than the leetle maggiezeens, that in Mr. Pound’s last “Cantos” I have found nothing to move the cockles of my heart or the network of my brain, outside 5 lines (perfect lines) given over to Hathor & her box and some musical metaphysics of the Dark Cavalcanti.”[ii] Die “musikalische Metaphysik des dunklen Cavalcanti”, die hier Zukofskys Herz und Hirn bewegt, ist eben die Übersetzung von Cavalcantis Canzone Donna mi prega, die den Großteil des Canto 36 ausmacht (+ der Coda von 32 Versen, die Pound seiner Übersetzung anfügt).
Es ist nicht Pounds erste Übersetzung dieses Canzones. Für sein umfangreiches Essay Cavalcanti – Medievalism (1934 erschienen, seine Entstehung in den Literary Essays vom Herausgeber T.S. Eliot im Zeitraum 1910 – 1931 angesiedelt), hatte Pound das Canzone schon einmal übersetzt, und zwar, im Unterschied zu der Übersetzung in den Cantos, unter Beibehaltung des Canzone-Reimschemas, das die einzelne Strophe wie ein auf den Kopf gestelltes Sonett aussehen läßt, d.h. die 14 Endreime unterteilen die Strophe in 2 x 3 und 2 x 4 elfsilbige Verse. Dazu kommen beim Canzone Cavalcantis 12 Binnenreime pro Strophe, d.h. also, wie Pound feststellt, daß 52 von 154 Silben pro Strophe in ein Muster gebunden sind. Während er das Canzone in den höchsten Tönen lobt „The canzone was to poets of this period what the fugue was to musicians in Bach’s time“ nimmt Pound es auch gleich zum Anlass, das Sonett zu minoren dichterischen Form zu erklären: „Das Prestige des Sonetts im Englischen ist ein Relikt insularer Ignoranz. Das Sonett war keine große poetische Erfindung (invention). Das Sonett trat automatisch auf wenn irgend ein Kerl bei der Anstrengung, ein Canzone zu machen, stecken blieb.“ Und: „Das System [des Canzone] repräsentierte Versifikation in einem gesunden Zustand, als motz [Wort] noch nicht vom son [Klang] geschieden war und bevor das Sonett mit seiner dreckigen Arbeit begonnen hatte.“[iii]
In seinem Essay skizziert Pound die philosophischen und literarischen Einflüsse, denen Cavalcanti ausgesetzt war bzw. hätte sein können, und analysiert im Speziellen eben das Canzone und seine Hintergründe. „... es scheint mir das die Beliebtheit von Guidos Canzone, Donna mi Prega, sich Gründen verdankt, die dem modernen Leser nicht unmittelbar einleuchten. Ich meine damit, daß es Spuren einer Gedankentönung zeigt, die nicht mehr länger als gefährlich empfunden werden, die aber den Florentinern von A.D. 1290 genauso beschwichtigend vorgekommen sein mögen wie eine Konversation über Tom Paine, Marx, Lenin und Bucharin heute bei einem Treffen eines Vorstands methodistischer Banker in Memphis Tenn.“[iv] Im Faltblatt futura 5 – louis zukofsky „a“-9 der edition hansjörg mayer 1966, das die zwei englischen Übersetzungen Zukofskys samt dem italienischen Original Cavalcantis bringt, wird die erste Hälfte von „A“-9, die sich, wie auch die zweite, streng an formale Vorgaben des Cavalcanti-Gedichts wie End- und Binnenreime oder Verteilung bestimmter Buchstaben (r,n) hält, aber eine Resemantisierung im Lichte marxistischer Theorie vornimmt, zwischen 1938 und 1940 datiert, während die zweite Hälfte und Übersetzung nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg, zwischen 1948 und 1950 entstanden ist. In den Dreissigerjahren waren die Meinungsverschiedenheiten zwischen Pound und Zukofsky, die ja auch in poetischen Belangen existierten, punkto politischer Einstellung schon virulent, da sich Pound immer mehr Mussolini und den Faschisten einschließlich des bei dieser Fraktion herrschenden Antisemitismus zuwandte, während Zukofsky, aus einer jüdischen, aus Russland nach Amerika emigrierten Familie stammend, sich an den kommunistischen Gründervätern Marx und Lenin orientierte. Aber Pounds politische Einstellung war eben nicht immer so eindeutig gewesen, wie auch obiges Zitat aus dem Cavalcanti-Essay zeigt, wie er überhaupt dazu neigte, sich nicht widerspruchsfrei an Kategorien oder politische Richtungen zu halten.[v] So kann Zukofskys erste Übersetzung nicht nur als Hommage an Pound gelesen werden, sondern auch als Versuch, an seinen Freigeist zu apellieren und ihn an seine Einschätzung des Canzones zu erinnern, indem sie jene „beschwichtigende“ Wirkung für die heutigen Kapitalisten mit einer entsprechenden, neuen Bedeutungsebene zu erzielen sucht. Die ökonomischen Mechanismen sind ja auch für Pound ein Thema geblieben, das immer wieder poetisch verarbeitet wird, und Verse aus „A“-9 wie „misprison of interest, profit, rent – coded / surplus, decoded as labor – ...“ können durchaus auch im Sinne Pounds späterer Usura-Cantos (45, 51) gelesen werden. Von Zukofsky ist aber auch ein späterer Ausspruch über die Fixierung Pounds auf wirtschaftlichen Wucher und seine Überwindung überliefert: “I hope he isn’t crazy devoting so much time to the idea that they charged six-percent interest in Pisa, and how wonderful it was. No – rather ‘Imperial power is / and to us what is it? / The fourth; the dimension of stillness.’ That’s great Pound.”[vi]
Vor allem in den Anfängen seines ersten großen Werks, beim Verfassen von “A”-1 bis “A”-7 (1926-1930, wobei sich “A”-7 übrigens auch der Form des Canzones bedient) war Zukofsky, der in ständigem Austausch mit Pound stand und seine Kritik einforderte, sehr besorgt, daß seine Arbeit nicht in zu große Nähe zu den Cantos gebracht werde.[vii] Nicht nur „A“-9, das eben mit Cavalcanti direkt Bezug auf ein Canto Pounds nimmt, sondern auch Zukofskys Essay von 1929 „Ezra Pound: The Cantos[viii]“ können als ein Zeichen dafür gelten, daß sich Zukofsky von dieser Sorge befreit hat. Von den Cantos werden 1 – 27 besprochen, ein Abschnitt behandelt ausdrücklich die Übersetzungen Pounds: „zwei Erscheinungen machen sich ständig geltend: lebendige Übersetzung des Werks von bestimmten Dichtern, die eine Technik erfunden haben; und Hommage, obwohl dies meistens zwischen den Zeilen erscheint, an die Dichter selbst, deren Charaktere Pound für die Dauer eines Gedichtes übersetzt hat, nicht nur dramatisiert, um selbst nichts als ihre Widerspiegelung (reflection) zu werden.“[ix] Wenn auch sowohl Zukofsky wie Pound Geschichtsfragmente in ihren Gedichten collagieren, und Zukofsky mit BOTTOM: On Shakespeare[x] vorgeführt hat, wie tief er in historisches Material eindringen und sein intertextuelles Arbeiten mit ihm verweben kann, zeigen Pounds Essays, wie der über Cavalcanti, daß nicht nur bei den Übersetzungen der historische Kontext eine wichtigere und objektivierendere Rolle spielt, so wie bestimmte historische Persönlichkeiten eine paradigmatische. Den freigeistigen Cavalcanti, d.h. zu dieser Zeit: neuplatonisch beeinflusst und Averroes, Avicenna näher als Aristoteles und Thomas von Aquin, schätzt er höher ein als den konservativen und rachehungrigen Dante, und es entbehrt nicht einer gewissen Ironie, wenn Zukofsky die Cantos in seinem Essay mit der Divina Comedia vergleicht. Wie verflochten Pounds Beschäftigung mit Cavalcanti und Zukofskys Übersetzung ist, kann vielleicht eine Erklärung Pounds zu dem „da marte“ des vierten Verses der zweiten Strophe aus dem Canzone exemplifizieren: „Da Marte: Ich nehme an als ‘Impuls’ (I suppose as ‚impulse’). Auf jeden Fall gibt es a eine neuplatonische Gradierung der Annahme von Möglichkeiten da der Geist durch sieben Sphären in die Materie herabsteigt, via das Tor des Krebses: im Saturn als Vernunft; in Jupiter praktisch und moralisch; in Mars das ‚geistige’/“begeisterte“ (‚spirited’); in Venus als das Sinnliche.“[xi] Könnte doch sein, daß sich der Anfang von „A“-9, „an impulse to action ...“ auch dieser Erklärung Pounds verdankt. Solche Spekulationen haben natürlich etwas Fadenscheiniges, da sind die historisch fundierteren oder hinterfragten Spekulationen Pounds, der Cavalcantis Gedicht mit der Lichttheorie seines Grossetestes in Verbindung bringt, oder die vielen lateinischen Quellen, die er zum Vokabular Cavalcantis anführt, schon erhellender, auch seine Ausführungen über die Funktion der (Verurteilung zum) Manichäer zu Cavalcantis Zeit und später: „Für Jahrhunderte galt, daß, wenn man einen Menschen nicht leiden konnte, man ihn einen Manichäer nannte, so wie in gewissen Kreisen heute man ihn einen Bolschewisten nennt, um seinen Verdienstmöglichkeiten zu schaden.“[xii] (Siehe die Coda des Canto 36.) Natürlich darf es bei Pound nicht an apodiktischen Behauptungen fehlen, etwa wenn er behauptet, daß die beste Periode italienischer Dichtung mit dem Jahr 1321 endet. Daraus resultiert eine abschätzige Bemerkung über Giacomo Leopardi, dieser habe nur Shakespeare gelesen und imitiert. Sprechen wir nicht über die differenzierte und höfliche Charakterisierung der deutschen Sprache, die er gegen Ende des Cavalcanti-Essays gibt.
Mit dem Bild vom „Glas unter Wasser“ aus dem betitelnden Eingangszitat will Pound die Bildmächtigkeit eines Cavalcanti oder Dante anschaulich machen, die er auch mit den scharfen Grenzen der Malerei im 14. Jhdt., eines Boticelli etc., in Verbindung bringt. Ihre Formulierungen und Sprachfiguren würden treffen, worauf sie zielen, und es zum Strahlen bringen, im Gegensatz zu den späteren Sprachornamenten eines Petrarcas. „ Bei Guido gibt es die ‚Figur’, den stark metaphorischen oder ‚bildlichen’ Ausdruck mit der Absicht, eine bestimmte Bedeutung mitzuteilen oder zu interpretieren. Bei Petrach ist sie Ornament, das schönste Ornament, das er finden konnte, aber es ist kein unersetzliches Ornament, oder eines, das er nicht auch woanders hätte benützen können ...“[xiii] Hier deutet Pound schon die Verwandtschaft zu den eigenen poetischen Prinzipien an, für die das treffende Bild die Grundlage bildet, seien es nun die der frühen Phase, seines Imagismus, der es noch im Namen trägt, oder die späteren für die er andere seltsame Namen ersinnt. Und hier liegt auch die eigentliche, bzw. poetische Auseinandersetzung (und welche Auseinandersetzung ist zwischen Poeten eigentlich?) mit Zukofsky, dessen Hinwendung zum System Sprache er vorwirft, die Verbindung zur gesprochenen Sprache zu verlieren, und dessen Versuche, sprachliche Analogien zu mathematischer Strukturbildung zu finden, er aus dem Mangel am Hinschauen herleitet, wobei Pound selbst ja wie Zukofsky beim Schreiben die Nähe zur Musik, zu Bach und zur Fuge, suchte, was auf ähnliches hinausläuft. Zukofsky sieht allerdings, typischer Dichterstreit, das Prinzip der Fuge, in seinem „A“, dessen Gedichte sich aus einander entwickelten, besser verwirklicht als in den Cantos, die für Verläufe von Fugen zu fragmentiert seien. Um 1930 hat Zukofsky, vielleicht als weiterer Versuch, zu seinem Vorbild in Distanz zu gehen, zusammen mit Freunden (William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, and Carl Rakosi) eine Dichtungsrichtung gegründet. Diese Bekenner nannten sich Objektivisten, und Zukofsky umreißt ihr Anliegen in einem Interview einmal so: “Wir neigen zu einem expressiven und musikalischen Vers eher als zu einem großsprecherischen. Wir suchen die Plastizität der Worte und ihre Beziehungen untereinander und ihre musikalischen Verbindungen eher als Denotationen.“[xiv] Denken Sie an Zukofskys Charakterisierung des Canto 36: „musikalische Metaphysik des dunklen Cavalcanti“!
Daß solcher „Richtungsstreit“ nicht nur vom Generationenkonflikt herrührt oder nur auf Scharmützel um Einfluss hinausläuft, sondern auch poetische Grundlagen hat bzw. poetischen Niederschlag findet, teilt sich beim Übersetzen der Übersetzungen, d.h. beim genauen Lesen der Gedichte mit, wobei die Gewichtungen Pounds reliefartigere Strukturen zur Folge zu haben scheinen, klarere oder auch gröbere Unterscheidungen, während Zukofskys Texte eben vernetzter, verästelter und ziselierter sind, was denkfaule Mißgunst oft mit Kraftlosigkeit in Verbindung bringt. (Was nichts mit der gebotenen Vorsicht zu tun hat, bei mathematischen und musikalischen Neigungen nicht in kitschige Lyrismen zu verfallen.) Am Ende seines Cavalcanti-Essays bringt Pound eine so klare wie grobe Einteilung von Übersetzungen: Die eine Art, die er ‚interpretative translation’ nennt, könne nicht alle Arbeit für den linguistisch faulen Leser tun, sie können nur zeigen, wo der Schatz liegt, führe also den Leser näher an das Original heran und motiviere, dieses zu lesen. Die andere Art, ‚other sort’, falle in den Bereich des originären Schreibens, der Übersetzer schaffe einfach ein neues Gedicht. Vielleicht ließe sich auch das Bild vom Glas unter Wasser und der Richtungsstreit Pound/Zukofsky für einen Lyrismus zu Übersetzungen mißbrauchen: denn ist nicht das System der erdichteten Sprache das Glas, durch das wir auf die vom Verunklarenden umwogte Wirklichkeit schauen, wie auf einen Text, und sei dieser auch in einer anderen Sprache? Oder ist Dichtung das, was Dinge wie Wasser umgibt, und gute Übersetzungen sind, wie Glas im Wasser, nicht mehr als solche wahrnehmbar?
[i] “...das Glas unter Wasser, die Form die eine im Spiegel gesehene Form scheint...“ Ezra Pound, Cavalcanti-Medievalism in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot (Hrsg., ) New Directions Books, New York 1968, S.154
[ii] Pound/Zukofsky, Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, Barry Ahearn (Hrsg.), New Directions Books, New York 1987, S. 162 & 164
[iii] Ezra Pound, Cavalcanti-Medievalism in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot (Hrsg., ) New Directions Books, New York 1968, S. 168 ff.
[iv] Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot (Hrsg.), New Directions Books, New York 1968, S.149
[v] vgl. Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of a Modern American Poetics, Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994, S. 76:” Pound, an admirer of Mussolini, and Zukofsky, an admirer of Lenin (see Zukofsky’s poem “Constellation”), might well have found themselves debating on the opposite sides of that forum. But in actuality, Pound, who admired both these “men of action”, felt comfortable about pairing Mussolini and Lenin: “Practical men like Lenin and Mussolini differ from inefficients like Otto Bauer in that they have a sense of time.” In fact, Pound praised Lenin’s desire to eliminate bureaucracy, a problem that he felt the English and Americans had failed to eliminate.”
[vi] vgl. Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of a Modern American Poetics, Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994, S. 78
[vii] vgl. ebd. S.46 ff.
[viii] Prepositions +The Collected Critical Essays, Louis Zukofsky, Wesleyan University Press, 2000, S.67 ff.
[ix] ebd. S. 72
[x] Erstpublikation 1963,Ark Press, University of Texas. Weseleyan University Press 2002
[xi] Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot (Hrsg.), New Directions Books, New York 1968, S.184
[xii] ebd. S. 176
[xiii] ebd. S. 154
[xiv] Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of a Modern American Poetics, Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994, S. 94
finally Louis Zukofsky is also discovered by german literature!
see: schreibheft (link)
"A"
Louis Zukofskys Großes Amerikanisches Gedicht
Contributions and Translations by
Gerd Burger, Felix Christen, Robert Creeley,
Oswald Egger, Robert Kelly, Birgit Kempker,
Benedikt Ledebur, Ezra Pound, Friedhelm Rathjen,
Werner Schmitz, Ulf Stolterfoht,
Rosmarie Waldrop, William Carlos Williams
and Louis Zukofsky
"A"-9
Reimschema (14 Verse, „umgekehrtes Sonett“, 3+3+4+4)
a
b
c
a
b
c
d
e
f
f
d
e
f
f
edition hansjörg mayer 1966:
die form
“a”-9 besteht aus zwei liedern das erste eine definition des wertes
das zweite eine definition der liebe beide sind dargestellt nach
guido cavalcantis donna mi priegha
die reime des zweiten liedes „a“-9 sind die selben wie die des ersten
in linearer folge welche in ihrer darlegung versuchen den klang
des original italienischen ins englische zu übertragen
die absicht von „a“-9 ist den klang im zusammenhang mit dem
inhalt zu sehen
nach ezra pound besteht jede strophe von donna mi priegha aus
14 end und 12 inner reim klängen was bedeutet dass von je
154 silben 52 im schema gebunden sind die strophe kehrt die
verhältnisse des sonnets um da die kurze schleife der
längeren vorangeht
diese umkehrung ist offensichtlich vorteilhaft für die strophe als teil
einer längeren komposition
jede strophe benützt 8 reim klänge 5 kommen 4 mal vor und 3 zwei
mal jedes lied von „a“-9 folgt cavalcantis schema genau
und lässt speziell die strukturelle verteilung der laute r und n
invariant das heisst die strukturen der r und n sind in original
und übersetzung identisch
Guido Cavalcanti
Canzone
donna mi priegha perch’i volglio dire
d’un accidente che sovente é fero
ed é sí altero ch’é chiamato amore
sicche chi l negha possa il ver sentire
ond a’l presente chonoscente chero
perch’ i no spero ch om di basso chore
atal ragione portj chonoscenza
ché senza natural dimostramento
non o talento di voler provare
laove nascie e chì lo fá criare
e qual è sua virtu e sua potenza
l’essenza e poi ciaschun suo movimento
e’ l piacimento che’l fá dire amare
e se hom per veder lo puó mostrare: –
in quella parte dove sta memoria
prende suo stato si formato chome
diafan dal lume d’ una schuritade
la qual da marte viene e fá dimora
elgli é creato e a sensato nome
d’ alma chostume di chor volontade
vien da veduta forma ches s’intende
che’l prende nel possibile intelletto
chome in subgetto locho e dimoranza
e in quella parte mai non a possanza
perchè da qualitatde non disciende
risplende in sé perpetuale effecto
non a diletto mà consideranza
perche non pote laire simiglianza: –
non é virtute mà da questa vene
perfezione ches si pone tale
non razionale mà che si sente dicho
fuor di salute giudichar mantene
e l antenzione per ragione vale
discerne male in chui é vizio amicho
di sua virtu seghue ispesso morte
se forte la virtú fosse impedita
la quale aita la contrara via
nonche opposito natural sia
mà quanto che da ben perfett e torte
per sorte non po dir om ch abbi vita
che stabilita non a singnioria
a simil puó valer quant uom l obblia: –
lesser é quando lo volere a tanto
ch oltre misura di natura torna
poi non si addorna di riposo maj
move changiando cholr riso in pianto
e ella fighura con paura storna
pocho soggiorna anchor di lui verdraj
che n gente di valore il piu si trova
la nova qualità move a sospirj
e vol ch om mirj in un formato locho
destandos’ira la qual manda focho
inmaginar nol puo hom che nol prova
e non si mova perch’ a llui si tirj
e non si aggirj per trovarvi giocho
e certamente gran saver nè pocho: –
da ssimil tragge complessione e sghuardj
che fá parere lo piacere piu certo
non puó choverto star quand é si giunto
non giá selvagge la biltá son dardj
ch a tal volere per temere sperto
hom seghue merto spirito che punto
e non si puó chonosciere per lo viso
chompriso biancho in tale obbietto chade
e chi ben aude forma non si vede
perchè lo mena chi dallui procede
fuor di cholore essere diviso
asciso mezzo schuro luce rade
fuor d’ongni fraude dice dengno in fede
chè solo da chostui nasce merzede: –
tu puoj sichuramente gir chanzone
dove ti piace c h i t o sì ornata
ch assa lodata sará tua ragione
dalle persone ch anno intendimento
di star con l’ altre tu non aj talento: –
translated by
Ezra Pound:
DONNA MI PREGA
(Dedicace – To Thomas Campion his ghost, and to the ghost of Henry Lawes, as prayer to the revival of music)
Because a lady asks me, I would tell
Of an affect that comes often and is fell
And is so overweening: Love by name,
E’en its deniers can now hear the truth,
I for the nonce to them that know it call,
Having no hope at all
that man who is base in heart
Can bear bear his part of wit
int the light of it,
And save they know’t aright from nature’s source
I have no will to prove Love’s course
or say
Where he takes rest; who maketh him to be;
Or what his active virtu is, or what his force;
Nay, nor his very essence or his mode;
What his placation; why he is in verb,
Or if a man have might
to show him visible to men’s sight.
In memory’s locus taketh he his state
Formed there in manner as a mist of light
Upon a dusk that is come from Mars and stays.
Love is created, hath a sensate name,
His modus takes from soul, form heart his will;
From form seen doth he start, that, understood,
Taketh in latent intellect –
As in a subject ready –
place and abode,
Yet in that place it ever is unstill,
Spreading its rays, it tendeth never down
By quality, but is its own effect unendingly
Not to delight, but in an ardour of thought
That the base likeness of it kindelth not.
It is not virtu, but perfection’s source
Lying within perfection postulate
Not by the reason, but ‘tis felt, I say.
Beyond salvation, holdeth its judging force,
Maintains intention reason’s peer and mate;
Poor in discernment, being thus weakness’ friend,
Often his power meeteth eith death in the end
Be he withstayed
or from true course
bewrayed
E’en though he meet not with hate
or villeiny
Save that perfection fails, be it but little;
Nor can man say he hathhis life by chance
Or that he hath not stablished seigniory
Or loseth power, e’en lost to memory.
He comes to be and is when will’s so great
It twists itself from out all natural measure;
Leisure’s adornment put he then never on,
Never thereafter, but moves changing state,
Moves changing colour, or to laugh or weep
Or wries the face with fear and little says,
Yea, resteth little
yet is found the most
Where folk or worth be host.
And his strange property sets sighs to move
And wills man look to unformèd space
Rousing there thirst
that breaketh into flame.
None can imagine love
that knows not love;
Love doth not move, but draweth all to him;
Nor doth he turn
for a whim
to find delight
Nor to seek out, surely, great knowledge or slight.
Look drawn from like,
delight maketh certain in seeming
Not can in covert cower,
beauty so near,
Not yet wild-cruel as darts,
So hath man craft from fear
in such his desire
To follow a noble spirit,
edge, that is, and point to the dart,
Though from her face indiscernible;
He, caught, falleth
plumb on to the spike of the targe.
Who well proceedeth, form not seeth,
following his own emanation.
There, beyond colour, essence set apart,
In midst of darkness light light giveth forth
Beyond all falsity, worthy of faith, alone
That in him solely is compassion born.
Safe may’st thou go my canzon wither thee pleaseth
Thou art so fair attired that every man and each
Shall praise thy speech
So he have sense or glow eith reason’s fire,
To stand with other
hast thou no desire
CANTO XXXVI
A Lady asks me
I speak in season
She seeks reason for an affect, wild often
That is so proud he hath Love for a name
Who denys it can hear the truth now
Wherefore I speak to the present knowers
Having no hope that low-hearted
Can bring sight to such reason
Be there not natural demonstration
I have no will to try proof-bringing
Or say where it hath birth
What is its virtu an power
Its being and every moving
Or delight whereby ‘tis called “to love”
Or if man can show it to sight.
Where memory liveth,
it takes its state
Formed like a diafan from light on shade
Which shadow cometh of Mars and remaineth
Created, having a name sensate,
Custom of the soul,
will from the heart;
Cometh from a seen form which being understood
Taketh locus and remaining in the intellect possible
Wherein hath he neither weight nor still-standing,
Descendeth not by quality but shineth out
Himself his own effect unendingly
Not in delight but in the being aware
Nor can he leave his true likeness otherwhere.
He is not vertu but cometh of that perfection
Which is so postulate not by the reason
But ‘tis felt, I say.
Beyond salvation, holdeth his judging force
Deeming intention to be reason’s peer and mate,
Poor in discernment, being thus weakness’ friend
Often his power cometh on death in the end,
Be it withstayed
and so swinging counterweight.
Not that it were natural opposite, but only
Wry’d a bit from the perfect,
Let no man say love cometh from chance
Or hath not established lordship
Holding his power even though
Memory hath him no more.
Cometh he to be
when the will
From overplus
Twisteth out of natural measure,
Never adorned with rest Moveth he changing colour
Either to laugh or weep
Contorting the face with fear
resteth but a little
Yet shall ye see of him That he is most often
With folk who deserve him
And his strange quality sets sighs to move
Willing man look into that forméd trace in his mind
And with such uneasiness as rouseth the flame.
Unskilled can not form his image,
He himself moveth not, drawing all to his stillness,
Neither turneth about to seek his delight
Nor yet to seek out proving
Be it so great or so small.
He draweth likeness and hue from like nature
So making pleasure more certain in seeming
Nor can stand hid in such nearness,
Beautys be darts tho’ not savage
Skilled from such fear a man follows
Deserving spirit, that pierceth.
Nor is he known from his face
But taken in the white light that is allness
Toucheth his aim
Who heareth, seeth no form
But is led by its emanation.
Being divided, set out from colour,
Disjunct in mid darknesss
Grazeth the light, one moving by other,
Being divided, divided from all falsity
Worthy of trust
From him alone mercy proceedeth.
Go, song, surely thou mayest
Wither it please thee
For so art thou ornate that thy reasons
Shall be praised from thy understanders,
With others hast thou no will to make company.
“Called thrones, balascio or topaze”
Eriugina was not understood in his time
“which explains, perhaps, the delay in condemning him”
And they went looking for Manicheans
And found, so far as I can make out, no Manicheans
So they dug for, and damned Scotus Eriugena
“Authority comes from right reason,
never the other way on”
Hence the delay in condemning him
Aquinas head down in a vacuum,
Aristotle which way in a vacuum?
Sacrum, sacrum, inluminatio coitu.
Lo Sordels si fo die Mantovana
of a castle named Goito.
“Five castles!
“Five castles!”
(king giv’ him five castles)
“And what the hell do I know about dye-works?!”
His Holiness has written a letter:
“CHARLES the Mangy of Anjou....
..way you treat your men is a scandal....”
Dilectis miles familiaris... castra Montis Odoriisii
Montis Sancti Silvestri pallete et pile...
In partibus Thetis....vineland
land tilled
the land incult
pratis nemoribus pascuis
with legal jurisdiction
his heirs of both sexes,
...sold the damn lot six weeks later,
Sordellus de Godio.
Quan ben m’albir e mon ric pensamen.
CANTO XXXVI
translated by
Benedikt Ledebur
frau, die mich fragt,
so sprechen will ich
sucht sie nach einem affekt, der so oft wild
und stolz ist dass er liebe genannt wird
wer es verneint soll die wahrheit erfahren
wobei ich zu dem heutigen wissenden spreche
ohne hoffnung dass niedrige gesinnung
einsicht gewinnt durch solche begründung
lässt es sich nicht natürlich aufzeigen
fehlt mir talent den beweis zu erbringen
oder zu sagen wo es zur welt kommt
worin sein mut und seine potenz liegt
oder entzücken wodurch es „zu lieben“ gerufen
oder ob ein mensch dem sehen es zeigen kann.
wo erinnerung lebt,
hat es seinen status
geformt wie ein diaphan aus licht im dunkel
dessen schatten von mars herrührt und bleibt
geschaffen, fühlt seinen namen,
gewohnheit der seele,
des herzens wille;
kommt von gesehener form die wird sie verstanden
locus hat und bleibt im möglichen des intellekts
worin sie weder gewicht noch stillstand gewinnt,
noch durch eigenschaft herabsteigt vielmehr hinaus scheint
sich selbst seinen eigenen effekt ohne ende
nicht im entzücken aber in dem bewusstsein
noch kann es sein wahres aussehen anderswo lassen.
es ist nicht mut doch kommts von dieser perfektion
die nicht gesetzt wird durch die vernunft
doch gefühlt wird, wie gesagt.
jenseits von rettung, hält es seine urteilskraft
absicht erachtend für der vernunft genoss und gefährte,
arm im unterscheiden, ist so der schwäche freund
findet seine stärke oft den tod am ende,
wird ihm widerstanden
und schwingt so das gegengewicht.
nicht dass es sein natürliches gegenteil, doch nur
ein bisschen weg vom perfekten,
lass niemanden sagen liebe käme vom zufall
oder hätte keine etablierte herrschaft
erhaltend ihre kraft sogar dann
wenn erinnerung sie nicht mehr behält.
kommt sie ins sein
wenn der wille
im überfluss
dreht sich aus natürlichem mass,
nie geziert mit ruhe Bewegt sie farbe wechselnd
entweder zum lachen oder weinen
verzerrt das gesicht mit furcht
ruht nur ein bisschen
dennoch wirst sehen du bei ihr Dass sie meist
mit volk das sie verdient
und ihre seltsame eigenschaft setzt seufzer zu bewegen
gewillte menschen zu blicken auf die geformte spur in seinem sinn
und mit solcher beunruhigung wie die flamme sie erzeugt.
ungeschickte können nicht formen ihr bild,
sie selbst bewegt nicht, zieht alles in ihre stille,
weder dreht sie sich ihr entzücken zu suchen
noch zu suchen nach beweisen
seien sie gross oder klein.
aussehen und tönung bezieht sie wie natur
macht sicherer so freude im scheinen
noch kann veborgen sie stehn in solcher nähe,
der schönheit seien pfeile jedoch nicht wild
geschickt durch solche furcht folgt ein mensch
verdienend geist, der durchbohrt.
noch wird erkannt sie am gesicht
doch wahrgenommen im weissen licht das alles ist
berührt ihr ziel
wer hört, sieht keine form
doch geführt wird durch seine emanation.
getrennt, ausgesetzt von farbe,
unverbunden mitten in dunkelheit
streift das licht, eines durchs andere bewegend,
getrennt, getrennt von aller falschheit
vertrauens würdig
von ihm allein geht gnade aus.
gehe, lied, sicher darfst du
wohin es dir gefällt
denn du bist so geschmückt dass deine gründe
werden gepriesen werden von deinen verstehern,
mit anderen hast du kein talent dich gemein zu machen.
„gerufene throne, balascio oder topas“
eriugina wurde nicht verstanden zu seiner zeit
„was, vielleicht, die verspätung seiner verdammung erklärt“
und sie zogen aus manichäer zu suchen
und fanden, soweit ich es ausmachen kann, keine manichäer
so gruben sie aus, und verdammten scotus eriugina
„autorität kommt vom richtigen grund,
niemals auf anderem weg“
daher die verspätung seiner verdammung
aquinas kopf hinunter in einem vacuum
aristoteles auf welche weise in einem vacuum?
sacrum, sacrum, iluminatio coitu.
lo sordels si fo di mantovana
von einer burg namens goito.
„fünf burgen!“
„fünf burgen!“
(könig gib ihm fünf burgen)
„und was zur hölle weiss ich über färber-arbeiten?!“
seine heiligkeit hat einen brief geschrieben:
„KARL der grausige von Anjou....
..weise wie du deine männer behandelst ist ein skandal....“
dilectis miles familiaris...castra montis odorisii
montis sancti silvestri pallete et pile...
in partibus thetis....weinland
land bestellt
das land unkultiviert
pratis nemoribus pascuis
mit legaler rechtsprechung
seine erben beiderlei geschlechts,
...verkauften das verdammte ganze sechs wochen später,
sordellus de godio.
quan ben m’albir e mon ric pensamen.
Louis Zukosfsky
A -9
An impulse to action sings of a semblanceOf things related as equated values,
The measure all use is time congealed labor
In which abstraction things keep no resemblance
To goods created; integrated all hues
Hide their natural use to one or one's neighbor.
So that were the things words they could say: Light is
Like night is like us when we meet our mentors
Use hardly enters into their exchanges,
Bought to be sold things, our value arranges;
We flee people who made us as a right is
Whose sight is quick to choose us as frequenters,
But see our centers do not show the changes
Of human labor our value estranges.
Values in series taking on as real
We affect ready gold a steady token
Flows in unbroken circuit and induces
Our being, wearies of us as ideal
Equals that heady crises eddy. Broken
Mentors, unspoken wealth labor produces,
Now loom as causes disposing our loci,
The foci of production: things reflected
As wills subjected; formed in the division
Of labor, labor takes on our imprecision -
Bought, induced by gold at no gain, though close eye
And gross sigh fixed upon gain have effected
Value erected on labor, prevision
Of surplus value, disparate decision.
Hands, heart, not value made us, and of any
Desired perfection the projection solely,
Lives worked us slowly to delight the senses,
Of their fire shall you find us, of the many
Acts of direction not defection - wholly
Dead labor, lowlier with time's offenses,
Assumed things of labor powers extorted
So thwarted we are together impeded -
The labor speeded while our worth decreases -
Naturally surplus value increases
Being incident to the pace exhorted:
Unsorted, indrawn, but things that time ceded
To life exceeded - not change, the mind pieces
The expanse of labor in us when it ceases.
Light acts beyond the phase day wills us into
Call a maturer day, the poor are torn - a
Pawl to adorn a ratchet - hope dim - eying
Move cangues, conjoined the coils of things they thin to,
While allayed furor the obscurer bourne, a
Stopped hope unworn, a voiced look, mask espying
That, as things, men want in us yet behoove us,
Disporve us least as things of light appearing
To the will gearing to light's infinite locus:
Not today but tomorrow is their focus.
No one really knows us who does not prove us,
None or times move us but that we wake searing
The labor veering from guises which cloak us,
As animate instruments men invoke us.
Dissemble - pledging complexions so guarded -
Cast of plied error leaves such error asserted
But stand obverted, men sight us things joined to
Change itself edging the full light discarded -
In machines' terror a use there averted -
Times have subverted the plenty they point to:
Things, we have not always known this division -
Misprision of interest, profit, rent - coded
Surplus, decoded as labor - evaded
As gain the source of all wealth so degraded
The land and the worker elude the vision -
A scission of surplus and use corroded
And still, things goaded by labor, nor faded,
But like light in which its action was aided.
We are things, say, like a quantum of action
Defined product of energy and time, now
In these words which rhyme now how song's exaction
Forces abstraction to turn from equated
Values to labor we have approximated.
An eye to action sees love bear the semblance
Of things, related is equated, - values
The measure all use who conceive love, labor
Men see, abstraction they feel, the resemblance
(Part, self-created, integrated) all hues
Show to natural use, like Benedict´s neighbor
Crying his hall's flown into the bird: Light is
The night isolated by stars (poled mentors)
Blossom eyelet enters pealing with such changes
As sweet alyssum, that not-madness, (ranges
In itself, there tho acting without right) is -
Whose sight is rays, "I shall go; the frequenters
That search our centers, love; Elysium exchanges
No desires; its thought loves what hope estranges."
Such need may see reason, the perfect real -
A body ready as love's steady token
Fed thought unbroken as pleasure induces -
True to thought wearies never its ideal
That loves love, head, every eddy. Broken
Plea, best unspoken, a lip's change produces
Suffers to confuse this thought and its loci,
The foci of things timelessly reflected -
Substance subjected to no human prevision,
Free as exists it loves: worms dig; imprecision
Of indignation cannot make the rose high
Or close sigh, therein blessedness effected
Thru power has directed love to envision
Where body is it bears a like decision.
Virtue flames value, merriment love - any
Compassed perfection a projection solely
Power, the lowly do not tune the senses;
More apt, more salutary body moves many
Minds whose direction makes defection wholly
Vague. This sole lee is love: from its offences
To self or others dies, and the extorted
Word, thwarted dream with eyes open; impeded
Not by things seeded from which strength increases;
Remindful of its deaths as loves decreases;
Happy with the dandelion unsorted,
Well-sorted by imagination speeded
To it, exceeded night lasts, the sun pieces
Its necessary nature, error ceases.
Love acts beyond the phase day wills it into -
Hate is obscure, errs, is pain, furor, torn - a
Lust to adorn aversion, hope - love eying
Its object joined to its cause, sees path into
Things the future or now, that poorer bourne, a
Past, a step, a worn, a voiced look, gone - eying
These, each in itself is saying, "behoove us,
Disprove us least as things of love appearing
In a wish gearing to light's infinite locus,
Balm or jewelweed is according to focus.
No one really knows us who does not love us,
Time does not move us, we are and love, searing
Remembrance - veering from guises which cloak us,
So defined as eternal, men invoke us."
A wise men pledging piety unguarded
Lives good not error. By love's heir are asserted
Song, light obverted to mind, joy enjoined to
Least death, act edging patience, envy discarde;
Difficult rare excellence, love's heir, averted
Loss seize the hurt head Apollo's eyes point to:
Ai, Ai Hyacinthus, the petals in vision -
The scission living acquiescence, coded
Tempers decoded for friendship, evaded
Image recurring to vigilance, raided
By falsehood burning it clear to the vision,
Derision transmuted by laughter, goaded
Voice holding the node at heart, song, unfaded
Understanding whereby action is aided.
Love speaks: "in wracked cities there is less action,
Sweet alyssum sometimes is not of time; now
Weep, love's heir, rhyme now how song's exaction
Is our distraction - related is equated,
How else is love's distance approximated."
Louis Zukofsky
Translated
by Benedikt Ledebur
A – 9
ein anreiz zur tat singt von dem ähnlichen
der dinge bezogen wie gewogene werte,
das mass aller zeit ist erstarrt zur arbeit
in deren abstraktheit die dinge nicht ähnlich den
geschaffenen gütern; integriert alle härte
hindert natürlich zu brauchen einen selbst und zu zweit.
so das waren dinge worte sie sagen: licht ist
wie nacht ist wie wir wenn wir treffen mentoren
brauchen kaum einzugehn in ihr einwenden,
kauft verkauft dinge, wir werte vollenden;
wir fliehen sie, die uns gemacht, was gericht ist
wessen sicht ist schnell, uns wählt als faktoren,
doch sieh unsre mitten nicht zeigen die wenden
der menschlichen arbeit unsrer werte entfremden.
werte in serien genommen als real
nehmen richtiges gold wir als wichtiges zeichen
fliesst in ständigem kreislauf und induziert
unser sein, trägt ab uns als ideal
gleicht aus der rauschenden krise tauschen. weichen
mentoren, verschwiegenen reichtum arbeit produziert,
jetzt tauchen als gründe auf, schieben unsre loci,
die foci der produktion: dinge reflektiert
als willen unterworfen; geformt in der teilung
von arbeit, arbeit setzt fort unsre unbestimmung –
gekauft, induziert durch gold, kein gewinn, doch augen zu
und grobes begehren fixiert auf gewinn haben erigiert
werte errichtet auf arbeit, vorhersehung
von noch mehr mehrwert, disparater entscheidung.
hände, herz, nicht wert machte uns, und von diesen
ersehnten perfektionen projektion allein,
leben werkte langsam zu erfreuen in sinnen,
von ihrem feuer sollst finden uns, von den vielen
akten des dirigierens nicht verlierens – ganzsein
toter arbeit, niedriger mit der zeit anrinnen,
angenommene dinge von arbeit kräfte erzwungen
in zangen sind wir zusammmen behindert –
die arbeit beschleunigt, unser wert muss abnehmen –
natürlich der mehrwert im tausch muss zunehmen,
der zustösst diesem pass bedungen:
unsortiert, einwärts, die dinge mit zeit vermindert
zu leben gesteigert – nicht wechsel, mentale schemen
aus weiten der arbeit in uns, die vergehen.
licht im schutz der phase taglang agiert zwingt in einen
ruf nach reiferem tag, die armen gezerrt – die
klaue geziert eine klinke – hoffe trüb – äugen
bewegt wachen, verbunden windungen dinge verfeinen,
ist alliiert furor dem obskureren bereich, die
verhoffte hoffnung unversehrt, gestimmter blick, masken bezeugen
das, wie dinge, menschen wollen in uns verdingen uns,
verwirkt uns zumindest in dingen das licht offenbarend
dem willen der führt zu licht’s unendlichem locus:
nicht heute doch schon morgen ist ihr focus.
wer nicht uns erprobt, kann auch nicht ersinnen uns,
nichts oder zeiten bewegen uns nur dass wir wachen darbend
die arbeit verwendet vom geist, der belog uns,
als belebte instrumente der mensch aufzog uns.
verstellen – pfändend komplexitäten gewartet –
wurf versetzter fehler lässt solche fehler bestehen
doch stehen verkehrt, menschen sicht uns dinge verbunden
zu wechseln sich säumend das volle licht im erstarrten –
maschinen im terror gebrauch dort andrehen –
zeiten zerrüttet die fülle die sie gebunden:
dinge, wir kannten nicht immer die division –
missbrauch des anteils, profits, zins’ – codierter
überfluss – decodiert als arbeit – bewertet
als gewinn die quelle des reichtums so entwertet
das land und der arbeiter entgeht der vision –
schnitt von gebrauch und überfluss korrodiert, er
und doch, dinge von arbeit getrieben, gehärtet,
aber wie licht in dem seine tat war geerdet.
wir sind dinge, sag, wie ein quantum von tat
definiertes produkt von energie und zeit, jetzt
in diesen worten die reim jetzt wie lied sie klart
der kräfte abstrakt zu drehn von gewogenen
werten zur arbeit im uns analogen.
ein aug zur tat sieht lieb trug die ähnlichen
dinge, bezogen ist gewogen, - werte
das mass aller die liebe erfahren, arbeit
menschen sehn, fühlen abstraktheit, was ähnlich den
(zum teil, selbst-geschaffen, integriert) alle härten
führen zu natürlichem gebrauch, wie benedikt zu zweit
beweint im fliessen halle in den vogel: licht ist
die nacht isoliert durch sterne (gepolte mentoren)
blüte lautgleich tritt ein mit solchen wendungen
wie süsses alyssum, diese nicht-verrücktheit, (endungen
in sich selbst, es gibt kein tun ohne recht) ist –
wessen sicht ist strahlen, „ich werde gehn; die faktoren
die unsere mitten suchen, liebe; elysium verwenden
keine sehnsüchte; sein denken liebt, was sie verfremden.
solch not mag den grund sehn, perfekt und real –
ein körper wirklich wie der liebe wichtiges zeichen
nährt denken ständig wie freude es induziert –
wahr es dem denken abträgt niemals sein ideal
das liebt liebe, kopf, jedes rauschen. auf weichen
lippen, ungesagt besser, bleibt bitten wechsel produziert
leiden verwirrt den gedanken uns seine loci,
die foci der dinge zeitlos reflektiert –
unterschied unterworfen keiner menschlichen teilung,
frei wie die liebe es ist: wurm grab; unbestimmung
der beleidigung kann nicht die rose erhöhen
noch lose wehen, darin glückseligkeit resultiert
aus kraft hat dirigiert der liebe vorsprung
wo körper ist was sie trägt wie entscheidung.
werte tugend entflammt, lieb lustvoll –diesen
verpassten perfektionen eine projektion allein
kräfte, nie stimmen die niedrigen sinne;
mehr geeignet, mehr heilsam der körper die vielen
geister bewegt, deren richtung vernichtung ganz sein
lässt vage. dies einzig beschatten ist liebe: in ihm ergrimmen
sich selbst oder andern erstirbt, und das erzwungen
wort, im zwang geträumt mit offenen augen; behindert
durch dinge gesät sie wird stärke zunehmen;
wird umgeistert von toden wie lieben abnehmen;
glücklich mit dem dandelion ungelungen,
gut gelungen durch phantasie geschwinder
bei ihm, gesteigert die nacht bleibt, der sonne wehen
notwendig seine natur, muss fehlen vergehen.
liebe im schutz der phase taglang agiert zwingt’s in einen –
hass ist obskur, irrt, ist schmerz, furor, zerrt – die
lust zu verziern aversion, hoffen – liebäugeln
sein objekt gebunden zur ursache, sieht pfad in seinen
dingen die zukunft oder jetzt, der ärmere bereich, die
vergangen, schritt, versehrt, blick gestimmt, ging –äugen
diese, jedes sagt zu sich selbst, „verdinge uns,
verwirk uns zumindest in dingen die lieb offenbarend
als wünschen, das führt uns zu licht’s unendlichem locus:
balsam und juwelenkraut passen zum focus.
wer nicht uns liebt, kann auch nicht erkennen uns,
zeit nicht bewegt uns, wir sind und lieben, darbend
errinnerung – gedreht vom geist der umbog uns,
so bestimmt als ewig, der mensch aufzog uns.
ein weiser mensch pietät pfändend unbewachte
lebt gut nicht fehler. der liebe erben entstehen
lied, licht zum geist gekehrt, freude befunden
geringstem tod, akt säumend geduld, neid verachtet;
schwierig seltene herrlichkeit, erben der lieb erwählen
verlust fassen die wunde kopf apollos augen erkunden:
ai, ai hyacinthus, die blätter in sicht schon –
die schnitte leben ergeben, kodierte
stimmungen decodiert für freundschaft, verkommen
bild sich rettend ins wachen, genommen
durch falschheit einbrennend klar es in die vision,
lächerlichkeit mutiert durch lachen, bestierte
stimme den knoten am herz sie hält, lied, unbenommen
verstehend wodurch die tat sie besonnen.
liebe spricht: „in kranken städten ist weniger tat,
süsses alyssum ist manchmal nicht aus zeit; jetzt
weinen, erben der lieb, reim jetzt wie lied sie klart
ist deine zerstreuung – bezogen ist gewogen,
wie sonst wär’s im der liebe steuerung analogen.“
“ ... the glass under water, the form that seems a form seen in a mirror ...”[i]
Nachbemerkungen zu Übersetzungen aus Zukofsky und Pound
Am 6. März 1935 schreibt in Italien, Rapallo, Ezra Pound in einem Brief („Dear Z/”) an Louis Zukofsky: „Being too DUMB to read Cavlalcanti, there was a little dabble / like Sitwell’s collecting Victorian mantlepiece ornnaments.“ (Der Telegrammstil seiner Briefe – orthographisch teilweise in einer Art verballhornenden Lautschrift - ist nicht immer leicht zu decodieren. Zu dumm/dumpf Cavalcanti zu lesen, bezieht sich dabble/Geplätscher wahrscheinlich auf das eigene Arbeiten. Edith Sitwell war eine englische Dichterin.) Am 15. März kontert Zukofsky in New York mit einer Einschätzung der Cantos 39 und 36: „I’m not going to tell the U.S.A., (even) if my word doesn’t spead further than the leetle maggiezeens, that in Mr. Pound’s last “Cantos” I have found nothing to move the cockles of my heart or the network of my brain, outside 5 lines (perfect lines) given over to Hathor & her box and some musical metaphysics of the Dark Cavalcanti.”[ii] Die “musikalische Metaphysik des dunklen Cavalcanti”, die hier Zukofskys Herz und Hirn bewegt, ist eben die Übersetzung von Cavalcantis Canzone Donna mi prega, die den Großteil des Canto 36 ausmacht (+ der Coda von 32 Versen, die Pound seiner Übersetzung anfügt).
Es ist nicht Pounds erste Übersetzung dieses Canzones. Für sein umfangreiches Essay Cavalcanti – Medievalism (1934 erschienen, seine Entstehung in den Literary Essays vom Herausgeber T.S. Eliot im Zeitraum 1910 – 1931 angesiedelt), hatte Pound das Canzone schon einmal übersetzt, und zwar, im Unterschied zu der Übersetzung in den Cantos, unter Beibehaltung des Canzone-Reimschemas, das die einzelne Strophe wie ein auf den Kopf gestelltes Sonett aussehen läßt, d.h. die 14 Endreime unterteilen die Strophe in 2 x 3 und 2 x 4 elfsilbige Verse. Dazu kommen beim Canzone Cavalcantis 12 Binnenreime pro Strophe, d.h. also, wie Pound feststellt, daß 52 von 154 Silben pro Strophe in ein Muster gebunden sind. Während er das Canzone in den höchsten Tönen lobt „The canzone was to poets of this period what the fugue was to musicians in Bach’s time“ nimmt Pound es auch gleich zum Anlass, das Sonett zu minoren dichterischen Form zu erklären: „Das Prestige des Sonetts im Englischen ist ein Relikt insularer Ignoranz. Das Sonett war keine große poetische Erfindung (invention). Das Sonett trat automatisch auf wenn irgend ein Kerl bei der Anstrengung, ein Canzone zu machen, stecken blieb.“ Und: „Das System [des Canzone] repräsentierte Versifikation in einem gesunden Zustand, als motz [Wort] noch nicht vom son [Klang] geschieden war und bevor das Sonett mit seiner dreckigen Arbeit begonnen hatte.“[iii]
In seinem Essay skizziert Pound die philosophischen und literarischen Einflüsse, denen Cavalcanti ausgesetzt war bzw. hätte sein können, und analysiert im Speziellen eben das Canzone und seine Hintergründe. „... es scheint mir das die Beliebtheit von Guidos Canzone, Donna mi Prega, sich Gründen verdankt, die dem modernen Leser nicht unmittelbar einleuchten. Ich meine damit, daß es Spuren einer Gedankentönung zeigt, die nicht mehr länger als gefährlich empfunden werden, die aber den Florentinern von A.D. 1290 genauso beschwichtigend vorgekommen sein mögen wie eine Konversation über Tom Paine, Marx, Lenin und Bucharin heute bei einem Treffen eines Vorstands methodistischer Banker in Memphis Tenn.“[iv] Im Faltblatt futura 5 – louis zukofsky „a“-9 der edition hansjörg mayer 1966, das die zwei englischen Übersetzungen Zukofskys samt dem italienischen Original Cavalcantis bringt, wird die erste Hälfte von „A“-9, die sich, wie auch die zweite, streng an formale Vorgaben des Cavalcanti-Gedichts wie End- und Binnenreime oder Verteilung bestimmter Buchstaben (r,n) hält, aber eine Resemantisierung im Lichte marxistischer Theorie vornimmt, zwischen 1938 und 1940 datiert, während die zweite Hälfte und Übersetzung nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg, zwischen 1948 und 1950 entstanden ist. In den Dreissigerjahren waren die Meinungsverschiedenheiten zwischen Pound und Zukofsky, die ja auch in poetischen Belangen existierten, punkto politischer Einstellung schon virulent, da sich Pound immer mehr Mussolini und den Faschisten einschließlich des bei dieser Fraktion herrschenden Antisemitismus zuwandte, während Zukofsky, aus einer jüdischen, aus Russland nach Amerika emigrierten Familie stammend, sich an den kommunistischen Gründervätern Marx und Lenin orientierte. Aber Pounds politische Einstellung war eben nicht immer so eindeutig gewesen, wie auch obiges Zitat aus dem Cavalcanti-Essay zeigt, wie er überhaupt dazu neigte, sich nicht widerspruchsfrei an Kategorien oder politische Richtungen zu halten.[v] So kann Zukofskys erste Übersetzung nicht nur als Hommage an Pound gelesen werden, sondern auch als Versuch, an seinen Freigeist zu apellieren und ihn an seine Einschätzung des Canzones zu erinnern, indem sie jene „beschwichtigende“ Wirkung für die heutigen Kapitalisten mit einer entsprechenden, neuen Bedeutungsebene zu erzielen sucht. Die ökonomischen Mechanismen sind ja auch für Pound ein Thema geblieben, das immer wieder poetisch verarbeitet wird, und Verse aus „A“-9 wie „misprison of interest, profit, rent – coded / surplus, decoded as labor – ...“ können durchaus auch im Sinne Pounds späterer Usura-Cantos (45, 51) gelesen werden. Von Zukofsky ist aber auch ein späterer Ausspruch über die Fixierung Pounds auf wirtschaftlichen Wucher und seine Überwindung überliefert: “I hope he isn’t crazy devoting so much time to the idea that they charged six-percent interest in Pisa, and how wonderful it was. No – rather ‘Imperial power is / and to us what is it? / The fourth; the dimension of stillness.’ That’s great Pound.”[vi]
Vor allem in den Anfängen seines ersten großen Werks, beim Verfassen von “A”-1 bis “A”-7 (1926-1930, wobei sich “A”-7 übrigens auch der Form des Canzones bedient) war Zukofsky, der in ständigem Austausch mit Pound stand und seine Kritik einforderte, sehr besorgt, daß seine Arbeit nicht in zu große Nähe zu den Cantos gebracht werde.[vii] Nicht nur „A“-9, das eben mit Cavalcanti direkt Bezug auf ein Canto Pounds nimmt, sondern auch Zukofskys Essay von 1929 „Ezra Pound: The Cantos[viii]“ können als ein Zeichen dafür gelten, daß sich Zukofsky von dieser Sorge befreit hat. Von den Cantos werden 1 – 27 besprochen, ein Abschnitt behandelt ausdrücklich die Übersetzungen Pounds: „zwei Erscheinungen machen sich ständig geltend: lebendige Übersetzung des Werks von bestimmten Dichtern, die eine Technik erfunden haben; und Hommage, obwohl dies meistens zwischen den Zeilen erscheint, an die Dichter selbst, deren Charaktere Pound für die Dauer eines Gedichtes übersetzt hat, nicht nur dramatisiert, um selbst nichts als ihre Widerspiegelung (reflection) zu werden.“[ix] Wenn auch sowohl Zukofsky wie Pound Geschichtsfragmente in ihren Gedichten collagieren, und Zukofsky mit BOTTOM: On Shakespeare[x] vorgeführt hat, wie tief er in historisches Material eindringen und sein intertextuelles Arbeiten mit ihm verweben kann, zeigen Pounds Essays, wie der über Cavalcanti, daß nicht nur bei den Übersetzungen der historische Kontext eine wichtigere und objektivierendere Rolle spielt, so wie bestimmte historische Persönlichkeiten eine paradigmatische. Den freigeistigen Cavalcanti, d.h. zu dieser Zeit: neuplatonisch beeinflusst und Averroes, Avicenna näher als Aristoteles und Thomas von Aquin, schätzt er höher ein als den konservativen und rachehungrigen Dante, und es entbehrt nicht einer gewissen Ironie, wenn Zukofsky die Cantos in seinem Essay mit der Divina Comedia vergleicht. Wie verflochten Pounds Beschäftigung mit Cavalcanti und Zukofskys Übersetzung ist, kann vielleicht eine Erklärung Pounds zu dem „da marte“ des vierten Verses der zweiten Strophe aus dem Canzone exemplifizieren: „Da Marte: Ich nehme an als ‘Impuls’ (I suppose as ‚impulse’). Auf jeden Fall gibt es a eine neuplatonische Gradierung der Annahme von Möglichkeiten da der Geist durch sieben Sphären in die Materie herabsteigt, via das Tor des Krebses: im Saturn als Vernunft; in Jupiter praktisch und moralisch; in Mars das ‚geistige’/“begeisterte“ (‚spirited’); in Venus als das Sinnliche.“[xi] Könnte doch sein, daß sich der Anfang von „A“-9, „an impulse to action ...“ auch dieser Erklärung Pounds verdankt. Solche Spekulationen haben natürlich etwas Fadenscheiniges, da sind die historisch fundierteren oder hinterfragten Spekulationen Pounds, der Cavalcantis Gedicht mit der Lichttheorie seines Grossetestes in Verbindung bringt, oder die vielen lateinischen Quellen, die er zum Vokabular Cavalcantis anführt, schon erhellender, auch seine Ausführungen über die Funktion der (Verurteilung zum) Manichäer zu Cavalcantis Zeit und später: „Für Jahrhunderte galt, daß, wenn man einen Menschen nicht leiden konnte, man ihn einen Manichäer nannte, so wie in gewissen Kreisen heute man ihn einen Bolschewisten nennt, um seinen Verdienstmöglichkeiten zu schaden.“[xii] (Siehe die Coda des Canto 36.) Natürlich darf es bei Pound nicht an apodiktischen Behauptungen fehlen, etwa wenn er behauptet, daß die beste Periode italienischer Dichtung mit dem Jahr 1321 endet. Daraus resultiert eine abschätzige Bemerkung über Giacomo Leopardi, dieser habe nur Shakespeare gelesen und imitiert. Sprechen wir nicht über die differenzierte und höfliche Charakterisierung der deutschen Sprache, die er gegen Ende des Cavalcanti-Essays gibt.
Mit dem Bild vom „Glas unter Wasser“ aus dem betitelnden Eingangszitat will Pound die Bildmächtigkeit eines Cavalcanti oder Dante anschaulich machen, die er auch mit den scharfen Grenzen der Malerei im 14. Jhdt., eines Boticelli etc., in Verbindung bringt. Ihre Formulierungen und Sprachfiguren würden treffen, worauf sie zielen, und es zum Strahlen bringen, im Gegensatz zu den späteren Sprachornamenten eines Petrarcas. „ Bei Guido gibt es die ‚Figur’, den stark metaphorischen oder ‚bildlichen’ Ausdruck mit der Absicht, eine bestimmte Bedeutung mitzuteilen oder zu interpretieren. Bei Petrach ist sie Ornament, das schönste Ornament, das er finden konnte, aber es ist kein unersetzliches Ornament, oder eines, das er nicht auch woanders hätte benützen können ...“[xiii] Hier deutet Pound schon die Verwandtschaft zu den eigenen poetischen Prinzipien an, für die das treffende Bild die Grundlage bildet, seien es nun die der frühen Phase, seines Imagismus, der es noch im Namen trägt, oder die späteren für die er andere seltsame Namen ersinnt. Und hier liegt auch die eigentliche, bzw. poetische Auseinandersetzung (und welche Auseinandersetzung ist zwischen Poeten eigentlich?) mit Zukofsky, dessen Hinwendung zum System Sprache er vorwirft, die Verbindung zur gesprochenen Sprache zu verlieren, und dessen Versuche, sprachliche Analogien zu mathematischer Strukturbildung zu finden, er aus dem Mangel am Hinschauen herleitet, wobei Pound selbst ja wie Zukofsky beim Schreiben die Nähe zur Musik, zu Bach und zur Fuge, suchte, was auf ähnliches hinausläuft. Zukofsky sieht allerdings, typischer Dichterstreit, das Prinzip der Fuge, in seinem „A“, dessen Gedichte sich aus einander entwickelten, besser verwirklicht als in den Cantos, die für Verläufe von Fugen zu fragmentiert seien. Um 1930 hat Zukofsky, vielleicht als weiterer Versuch, zu seinem Vorbild in Distanz zu gehen, zusammen mit Freunden (William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, and Carl Rakosi) eine Dichtungsrichtung gegründet. Diese Bekenner nannten sich Objektivisten, und Zukofsky umreißt ihr Anliegen in einem Interview einmal so: “Wir neigen zu einem expressiven und musikalischen Vers eher als zu einem großsprecherischen. Wir suchen die Plastizität der Worte und ihre Beziehungen untereinander und ihre musikalischen Verbindungen eher als Denotationen.“[xiv] Denken Sie an Zukofskys Charakterisierung des Canto 36: „musikalische Metaphysik des dunklen Cavalcanti“!
Daß solcher „Richtungsstreit“ nicht nur vom Generationenkonflikt herrührt oder nur auf Scharmützel um Einfluss hinausläuft, sondern auch poetische Grundlagen hat bzw. poetischen Niederschlag findet, teilt sich beim Übersetzen der Übersetzungen, d.h. beim genauen Lesen der Gedichte mit, wobei die Gewichtungen Pounds reliefartigere Strukturen zur Folge zu haben scheinen, klarere oder auch gröbere Unterscheidungen, während Zukofskys Texte eben vernetzter, verästelter und ziselierter sind, was denkfaule Mißgunst oft mit Kraftlosigkeit in Verbindung bringt. (Was nichts mit der gebotenen Vorsicht zu tun hat, bei mathematischen und musikalischen Neigungen nicht in kitschige Lyrismen zu verfallen.) Am Ende seines Cavalcanti-Essays bringt Pound eine so klare wie grobe Einteilung von Übersetzungen: Die eine Art, die er ‚interpretative translation’ nennt, könne nicht alle Arbeit für den linguistisch faulen Leser tun, sie können nur zeigen, wo der Schatz liegt, führe also den Leser näher an das Original heran und motiviere, dieses zu lesen. Die andere Art, ‚other sort’, falle in den Bereich des originären Schreibens, der Übersetzer schaffe einfach ein neues Gedicht. Vielleicht ließe sich auch das Bild vom Glas unter Wasser und der Richtungsstreit Pound/Zukofsky für einen Lyrismus zu Übersetzungen mißbrauchen: denn ist nicht das System der erdichteten Sprache das Glas, durch das wir auf die vom Verunklarenden umwogte Wirklichkeit schauen, wie auf einen Text, und sei dieser auch in einer anderen Sprache? Oder ist Dichtung das, was Dinge wie Wasser umgibt, und gute Übersetzungen sind, wie Glas im Wasser, nicht mehr als solche wahrnehmbar?
[i] “...das Glas unter Wasser, die Form die eine im Spiegel gesehene Form scheint...“ Ezra Pound, Cavalcanti-Medievalism in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot (Hrsg., ) New Directions Books, New York 1968, S.154
[ii] Pound/Zukofsky, Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, Barry Ahearn (Hrsg.), New Directions Books, New York 1987, S. 162 & 164
[iii] Ezra Pound, Cavalcanti-Medievalism in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot (Hrsg., ) New Directions Books, New York 1968, S. 168 ff.
[iv] Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot (Hrsg.), New Directions Books, New York 1968, S.149
[v] vgl. Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of a Modern American Poetics, Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994, S. 76:” Pound, an admirer of Mussolini, and Zukofsky, an admirer of Lenin (see Zukofsky’s poem “Constellation”), might well have found themselves debating on the opposite sides of that forum. But in actuality, Pound, who admired both these “men of action”, felt comfortable about pairing Mussolini and Lenin: “Practical men like Lenin and Mussolini differ from inefficients like Otto Bauer in that they have a sense of time.” In fact, Pound praised Lenin’s desire to eliminate bureaucracy, a problem that he felt the English and Americans had failed to eliminate.”
[vi] vgl. Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of a Modern American Poetics, Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994, S. 78
[vii] vgl. ebd. S.46 ff.
[viii] Prepositions +The Collected Critical Essays, Louis Zukofsky, Wesleyan University Press, 2000, S.67 ff.
[ix] ebd. S. 72
[x] Erstpublikation 1963,Ark Press, University of Texas. Weseleyan University Press 2002
[xi] Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot (Hrsg.), New Directions Books, New York 1968, S.184
[xii] ebd. S. 176
[xiii] ebd. S. 154
[xiv] Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of a Modern American Poetics, Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1994, S. 94
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