Well, of course Waldrop wouldn't need to read the surrealists in
translation--Caws's or anyone else's--Jeffrey, and I never suggested she
would. They are fellow translators with some common interests (poetry, for
one, art for another--and one specific artist, Joseph Cornell). Caws,
moreover, is not only a translator of surrealists, among others, but also a
theorist of surrealism. As for what makes Waldrop seem at least somewhat
surrealistic to me, it's her similarly fragmented body-in-parts, as I
indicated, along with the constant disjunction or slippage between
perceptual and sensorial orders (between specialist vocabularies too). The
way her gaze is at once penetrating, sometimes violently so, and oblique is
also reminiscent of surrealism. In fact, what Caws theorizes as the
"surrealist look" in her book of that title could serve as a good
description of Waldrop's way of proceeding in poem after poem--the way she
surrenders herself to what she's taking in with her looking--not to mention
what she herself says about her translating practice in the interview.

Here's a quotation from the Caws interview--which is well worth reading in
its own right, btw--that leaped out at me in the wake of the Waldrop
selection:

"What I meant by the 'surrealist look' was of course the way in which the
viewer is necessarily implicated, folded into the look at the object and the
way the object, whatever it is, whether it's a person or a thing, is folded
into the vision of the person looking. Here's the reason surrealism
interests me: precisely because the viewer has such a chance to remake the
way that the whole thing is constructed. The way that perception is set up.
It's an interactive sport, if you like, the surrealist look."

Waldrop seems quite sporty to me!

Candice








Jeffrey Jullich wrote:

> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> More to follow on Waldrop and, yes, compliments on the generous contribution
> of
> the interview,--- but, as far as Caws:
>
> Waldrop herself is multilingual and has translated a great deal of French
> poetry. I'm not sure why she would be dependent on Caws as a filter for
> surrealism. I would think she'd know the French surrealists in the original.
> Caws, too, has always struck me as much more "conservative" (mannerly,
> pedagogical) than Waldrop in their choices of what's worthwhile to translate.
> I
> would ~think~ that Waldrop would see Caws' career as the sort of "bourgeois"
> tastes her own translations and writing have been inveighing against.
>
> Surrealism has never, never come to mind for me in reading Waldrop.
> Especially
> Breton/Magritte surrealism. Surrealism, via Breton, and "Surrealism in The
> Service of The Revolution" I understand to have seen itself as the third,
> messianic synthesis in the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic (the long-awaited, New
> Jerusalem synthesis achieved out of [hypo]thesis and antithesis). Waldrop's
> attitude toward the persistence of dialectic is not that dewy-eyed or utopian.
> Any homage to surrealism for her, I think, would have to proceed out of the
> wizened hindsight that surrealism ~failed~ to win its cultural-societal aims,
> that we may be in a surrealist ~aftermath~ but not in a viable, self-conscious
> surrealism. The dialectic is a distinct and constant presence hovering over
> the thought in Waldrop's work, but it's a much more Americanized, power-bound
> d., and she appears quite realistic in any hopes of its being "defeated."
>
> With the ~Erotics~ you mention, too, in Caws: the Waldrop I've read is
> feminist
> in a way boys' club surrealism couldn't be and ---again the dialectic--- she
> seems skeptical about any union out of male-female romance, presenting those
> two
> sides as eerily distanced and, perhaps, at best a dialogue that's an
> interchange
> of mutual ~translations,~ ---versus Breton's/surrealists' convulsive unities.