Ah yes, I remember I had already read it somewhere, please have a LOOK!
http://www.fieralingue.it/corner.php?pa=printpage&pid=365
and what I highly praised in Mark was that he was able to keep the same
format (a masterpiece!) from one language to the other. And I also remember
someone on this list said that it is not true that languages like Italian
and Spanish need more words than Anglo-Saxon languages in general to express
the same concept... which is not correct.
Best, Anny
Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
The aim of the poet is to awaken emotions in the soul, not to gather
admirers.
Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky
----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, January 07, 2005 4:01 PM
Subject: Re: Nonsense: LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT
Terrific, Mark, a wandering through the dictionary discarded (ing?).
And, ideally, I would hope to go along with you in that seeking for the
structure that only appears as you get to it.
I am reminded of something similar in painting: I once made the mistake
of accepting the earphone (as they were free that time) for a
retrospective show of Degas at the Tate. Reached this stunning brown
study of a woman after a bath, only to hear the voice tell me that
Degas 'never finished' it, as he had not returned to it after sketching
it in in the one colour. Blah blah. Well, I looked at it, & _saw_ that
he had looked at it at that point & found that it was finished, it was
_there_. Magnificently so.
Doug
>
>
> LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT
>
> The truth is I only care about words, not every word (I don’t care for
> the
> Ìword word, if truth be told) snow isn’t a word I care for (I don’t
> care to be cold, and snow–I mean to say lyric snow–has become so
> commonplace) one less word now: and for the letter n there are others.
> A multitude. Nabob, an exotic word–not the least chance to use it, a
> sonorous word, but there’s an overabundance of sonorous words, we can
> discard it: what’s left? The fugitive image of any word, lacking an
> image leaves a concept (leaping inside us) it crumbles: in truth I
> care not at all for the word nothing, abstractions leave me limp with
> boredom, tepid tepid abstractions: I want to see and touch (above all
> touch); I want to sniff the spoor of the word buckwheat, my god, how
> many combinations: the words are mill-stones turning; whatever word a
> mill-vane broken into syllables; and on the shore the dying, what does
> it say. Marah, marah: is that what it says? I listen closely, nothing
> but interference; and I taste, I crush a stem of purslane against my
> palate, but it clarifies or tells me nothing now: here on the edge,
> manna, masquerade are the remaining words, backward, or forward to
> this place, at the edge: what, to what to speak with words: listen to
> me, the bread that I’ve put on the table parts, down to the center of
> its husk, brings forth ash (ants brought forth once more): and then,
> what. Things are obscured by so much thought, classification and
> description, description doesn’t bring the chameleon back to the
> chameleon, doesn’t bring back the mother, doesn’t bring anything back
> to us, let us yield, that the jacaranda of this life is passing, I am
> homet (the lizard): nothing. A green thing that lost its tail. The
> masquerade of her whose veil is dropped, see the face’s skull, the
> body’s bones, skin of golgotha peeled away now: the donnybrook I was
> once, now I hear myself and slide inwards: outside a lovely day.
> Euphrates. Much distance. A god of nickle or zinc can’t cope with peo-
> ple, nitrogen has been enough to keep me alive. Spurious, but alive.
> With some or another word but not with every word. The word Capulí
> tells me nothing, it has nothing to do with me; dying, let’s see, I
> can’t adjust to its destiny: nor, finally, to the dictionary–too vast.
> At the final moment any word will do; linen, for instance, at that
> moment: the ark on one’s shoulder, bread on the table, hand on head,
> and at the head’s point of transcendence, be it the word wheatfield
> that I hear, for instance, in the yellow crossing of axles: or be it
> bread, by omission. And might I see made whole all crumbled things.
>
>
>
>
>
> At 06:25 PM 1/5/2005, you wrote:
>> On 6/1/05 3:15 AM, "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> > It seems to me that inversions are mirror images of systems of
>> order (which
>> > is I think what we mean by "sense") and as such make coherent and
>> > consistent "sense": what's been changed is the core metaphor, not
>> the
>> > process by which it's elaborated or the pattern it forms.
>>
>> > What I take to be
>> > nonsense, and I'm very invested in this, is unstructuredness,
>> which, given
>> > our human natures and the nature of the languages we've generated,
>> may in
>> > fact be impossible to achieve, either as writer or reader;
>> attempting to
>> > approach it nonetheless can serve to extend the boundaries of
>> possibility
>> > at the same time that it marks them.
>>
>> Hi Mark
>>
>> Swiftly - Yes, there's a difference between parody and satire or what
>> I
>> called "black humour" and nonsense. Which is not to say that the
>> boundaries
>> between them are not murky. The former very often rely on inversion
>> for
>> their various anarchies. They are not "revolutionary", in that they
>> do not
>> challenge the existing order but in a strange way pay tribute to it;
>> great
>> satirists (Swift, or even Terry Pratchett) are very often
>> conservative.
>> Though there's Brecht: you could argue however that his parodies of
>> homily
>> texts in the Manuel of Piety might be said to be equally tributes.
>>
>> Pure nonsense - some surrealist texts, say - baffles any attempt at
>> "sense".
>> But complete structurelessness is, as you say, an impossibility, and
>> I'm not
>> sure it's even a desirable impossibility - I find it very difficult to
>> imagine a poem that might give me aesthetic pleasure that had
>> absolutely no
>> structure. I very often like the kind of stuff which loses all
>> connectivity
>> except syntax, it does interesting things to my brain... And if it is
>> to be
>> funny, or not simply affectless, there has to be some recognisable
>> trace of
>> logic there, to permit the recognition of incongruities, to set up
>> enough of
>> an expectation for it to be imploded. This process is a bit more
>> complex,
>> anyway, than simple inversions, especially if seemingly random
>> elements
>> suddenly intrude and derail it.
>>
>> Best
>>
>> A
>>
>>
>> Alison Croggon
>>
>> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>> Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
>> Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
>
>
Douglas Barbour
Department of English
University of Alberta
Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada
(780) 436 3320
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
We both know the reason why you called
So stop wastin’ time tryin’ to soften up my fall
I know you wanna sweeten up the taste
But if you don’t mind I’ll just take my sorrow straight
Iris DeMent
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