Well, if I may venture a guess on our disagreement on this, Alison, I think the reason the twangs don't stick out for you may not be so much the linebreaks as that you are more comfortable with the dominant diction of the poem, that other tone of the English hall where "stray trampled paths," "wind burns sere" "fall sets in" and "the thorn/walks in the hall," and "bright flowers fade." The diction, along with the personfication of paths and thorn, and the syntactical inversion all strike a note that is a little, well, old-fashioned?. And since I'm not humming along with the dominant chord, the twangs and sierras aren't subsumed.
Best,
Rebecca
Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
-------Original Message-------
From: Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 04/19/03 11:02 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: another working
>
> Thanks, Trevor. Don't know when I'll get a chance to look those up,
but I'll file it: you never know. I've sort of assumed, from the
earlier works, that these are versions rather than straight out
translations. Something struck me forcibly: when Rebecca wrote out
the American folk song bits, they stuck out like the proverbials, so
I went back to the poem to check my responses, because they hadn't
struck me in that way at all when I read it. Even with that
consciousness in mind, they still didn't. The twangs and sierras
are (for me) somehow subsumed in the stronger rhythms of the poem,
and become part of its flavour rather than a dominant chord or too
much pepper. To woefully mix my metaphors. It's to do with the line
breaks, I think. Hmmm.
Best
A
>
>Thanks for those comments, Alison. There's a scholarly translation with
>detailed commentary by Donal Holzman, Poetry & Politics: The Life & Work
of
>Juan Chi (CUP, 1976), while John Cayley's Wellsweep Press issued a
>'literary' version by someone I can't remember sometime in the late 80s,
I
>think. The former is very worthy but far too stiff for my liking, whereas
>the latter takes so many structural liberties as to render the poems
totally
>spineless. Do my prejudices show? I'm hoping it's another case of what
>Rebecca suggested about Vallejo: the more considered workings the better.
I
>don't have a full set of the Chinese texts, but at this point I could
only
>bounce off them in spots anyway, so that doesn't matter. The originals
are
>famously susceptible to a variety of readings, from personal lyric to
>political allegory arthritic with learned references. I'm trying to
convey
>my own sense of the raw excitement of the poems in the way a personal
voice
>seems to twist and writhe to be heard through all the Confucian cliches
and
>pathetic fallacies. The short line I'm using strikes me as quite
American,
>but I'm trying to preserve a dense, almost archaic, texture of grammar
and
>syntax; this is my way of registering the tensions I'm interested in. And
>all the time, those beautiful clear images just keep coming; I just have
to
>make sure I don't get in their way . . .
--
Alison Croggon
Editor
Masthead Online
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