'Context' is a neat way to put it, Mark, & I agree. Especially the bit
about how the poet can never be sure of what small things in her own
life are there but unapparent to him, let alone to the readers (now, or
then).
I certainly think that the Blitz as background are important to that
poem of Thomas's.
And there are a special few of his poems I continue to admire, although
some just don't cut it with me any more.... (but that one does).
Doug
On 24-Aug-07, at 12:16 PM, Mark Weiss wrote:
> 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.
Douglas Barbour
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