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Thanks for the comments on my translation of Bertran de Born's "Youth and
Age." As I expected, people on this list understand that the moral
evaluation of a piece of literature should take account the context of its
time. It strikes me that in a strange way and by the standards of his age,
Bertran may be seen as a progressive: he's arguing that the admirable
qualities summed up in the word "youth" really are a result of inner virtues
rather than of bodily condition, though the virtues he promotes may not be
the ones we admire. I liked Christopher Walker's alternate version of it,
though I think you lose a lot by giving up the rhymes. But when you've
committed yourself to the rhymes in translating this piece, that means there
are all sorts of other things you can't do. The two translations show
different ways of trying to solve this problem.
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The recent flood of poems is welcome but impossible for to keep up with.
Here are some comments on the ones which happened to catch my eye:
Audrey Friedman's "Museum of the Talking Boards" is a well crafted
conventional poem which vividly remembers what it's like to be a child.
It might have been better to end with a return to the past as museum
metaphor rather than the vague mathematical reference, which I found
puzzling.
Trevor Howard's "From Ruan Ji, (210-263 CE)" has a startlingly lovely second
stanza:
young leaves wilt,
sweet resins sweat;
the cool clouds stream
across the sky.
but the rest, though enjoyable, seemed to me pretty standard
Poundian/Cathay-like imagism.
David Bircumshaw's "Hotel Erotica" is interesting; the beginning is sort of
Hemingway-flat and then gets more thoughtful. I wonder though if it might
have been stronger to end it before going into the particulars of the people
being English tourists.
I thought Jill Jone's translation of Montale's "Meriggiare pallido e
assorto" was extremely good, though I have to judge it on its own merits as
an English poem, since I have only phrase-book Italian and don't know much
about Montale. The subtle semi-rhymes work well. But in the lines
while the quavering creak arises,
the cicada songs from bald peaks
the use of the appositive seems awkward: you almost think at first that
"songs" is a misprint for "sings" and then have to read it again to
understand the grammar. And I thought that the word "melancholy" is too
soft and Victorian sounding to be effective.
Ken Wolman's "THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS" gives a vivid and honest picture of
its situation. I think it would have been better to omit the first four
stanzas (by the way you've got two stanza 4's) and begin in medias res with
"Five years beyond that house, memories ..." Yes I know it's like carving
flesh from your own newborn child but there can be no excellence without
ruthlessness.
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I’m not ready to jump fully into the vortex of the Oresteia, since I haven’t
looked at it for some time, but I wanted to make one or two remarks. For
the Eumenides, surely the key concept is sublimation. They aren’t denied or
made irrelevant or disempowered: their furious power is absorbed into the
foundation of the community as the energy which empowers the enlightenment
which allows human beings to live together without destroying each other:
"No household," Athena tells them, "will flourish without you." They are
common id made common ego.
As for Apollo’s disparagement of the female, we shouldn’t forget that the
Greeks were keenly aware that a law-court advocate’s job was to say what
would win the case, not to speak the truth. There’s no reason a god should
be any different.
Incidentally, is everyone here familiar with A. E. Housman’s hilarious
Aeschylean pastiche? It’s available on several internet sites, including:
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/texts/housman.html
The Greek scholar D. S. Raven actually translated it into ancient Greek, and
by God it does sound like Aeschylus.
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Quote of the week:
Curs’d be the verse, how well soe’er it flow,
That tends to make one worthy man my foe.
-- Pope
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Jon Corelis [log in to unmask]
http://www.geocities.com/joncpoetics
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