I think there's another issue here, one that I confront all the time
as a translator, but operative within a given language as well.
Frost's somewhat fatuous statement that poetry is what gets lost in
translation--certainly not always the case--would be more accurate if
it named the loss "context." Context is what the poet doesn't bother
to mention but assumes that his local (geographically or
linguistically), contemporary audience knows without being told, and,
more intimately, what's peculiar to his own life and unconsciously
so. And the loss is finally inevitable--a lot of daily knowledge is
absent from even so precise a chronicler as Proust, and poetry tends
towards far greater brevity and compression as a goal in itself.
So, we read Thomas with reduced awareness of the streets he walked,
his shopping, his education, the texture of his work day and his home
time, and the pressure of the news. Even if we try to reclaim them
through a heroic Braudelian effort the best we can achieve is
incomplete and self-conscious. And he's a near-contemporary writing
more or less the same language we speak and write. Think of the
distance from us of Donne, Chaucer, Basho or the author of El libro
del mio Cid. Take the Canterbury Tales, a road cycle with no
description of a road, a horseback journey on which the horses make
no demands and the saddle imposes no pain. Let alone the social and
spiritual, to which Chaucer alludes but which we only have incomplete
access to by means of scholarship.
As with Chaucer, we can't really read the poem that Thomas wrote--he
assumed the context as a part of his text that didn't need
mentioning, just as if when one mentions the redness of a rose and
nothing else about it one expects a reader to know about the thorns.
Which is to say that reading the poem without an awareness of the
blitz is to strip it of much of its meaning and power, reading the
poem with that awareness is to distance oneself from the immediate
experience of it.
So it goes.
Mark
At 01:17 PM 8/24/2007, you wrote:
>Seems slightly barren to segregate politics out of poetry completely
>... and seers, so 12th century.
>
>On 8/24/07, kasper salonen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > "The poet is the seer, but the prose, the film and the radio work are
> > more politically aware"
> >
> > I like this distinction
> >
> > KS
> >
> > On 24/08/07, Roger Day <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > > Thomas's psychodrama played out in that poem has little do with
> > > Sitwell's fertive spinning. He might have intended it as a political
> > > gesture - after all, he worked for the BBC during the war - but for
> > > Thomas, the poetry was for being the seer, the ur-worldly, biblical
> > > prohphet so little intentionally political is in the poem. The
> > > politics is in the context, the refusal to mourn, get on with life
> > > during war. Without the context, it becomes something else.
> > >
> > > The poet is the seer, but the prose, the film and the radio work are
> > > more politically aware; he himself kept the two apart.
> > >
> > > Roger
> > >
> > > On 8/24/07, Jon Corelis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > > > "In that great poem A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child
> > > > in London, with its dark, magnificent, proud movement, we see Death
> > > > in its reality -- as a return to the beginning of things, as a robing,
> > > > a sacred investiture in those who have been our friends since the
> > > > beginning of Time. Bird, beast, and flower have their part in the
> > > > making of mankind. The water drop is holy, the wheat ear a place of
> > > > prayer. The 'fathering and all-humbling darkness' itself is a
> > > > begetting force. Even grief, even tears, are a begetting. 'The
> > > > stations of the breath' are the stations of the Cross."
> > > >
> > > > -- Edith Sitwell
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Is the unstated fact that the poem is about a child who died in the
> > > > Blitz make this a political poem? Does knowing or not knowing it
> > > > change the poem?
> > > >
> > > > --
> > > > ===================================
> > > >
> > > > Jon Corelis www.geocities.com/jgcorelis/
> > > >
> > > > ===================================
> > > >
> > >
> > >
> > > --
> > > My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
> > > "In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons."
> > > Roman Proverb
> > >
> >
>
>
>--
>My Stuff: http://www.badstep.net/
>"In peace, sons bury their fathers. In war, fathers bury their sons."
>Roman Proverb
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