My thanks to Douglas and Robin for their comments on the Anacreontea.
Maybe we should set up a translation episode, where we all do the same
piece.
The discussion of killer poetry seems to me uncomfortably close to
the generalized idolization of criminality by which bourgeois
intellectuals so often get their vicarious kicks. I suppose I'm a
bourgeois intellectual myself, but I'm perhaps atypical in never having
managed to look with even secret admiration on men who make their way in
the world with guns and knives. Yes this includes presidents and
armies. Maybe it's the effect of having grown up in some of Chicago's
more challenging neighborhoods.
It also makes me reflect that up to a half century ago many poets had
killed in their time because many men had killed in their time.
Consider the patrons, aged twenty to seventy five, of a typical London
local pub or New York corner bar circa 1955. Do the math about when the
previous wars were, and you can see that a substantial segment of the
company must at some point have zipped some one. Having killed whether
you were a poet or not was something much more common then than now.
But it's true that T. E. Lawrence boasted as one of his
qualifications for translating the Odyssey was that like Odysseus he had
"killed many men."
Bonus free apothegm I just thought up: Of that of which we are
unable to speak, we must make poetry.
====
There ain't no sanity clause.
-- Chico Marx
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