I have a copy of the facsimile of the original draft. The slash and burn by
Pound is wonderful - a surgeon with a keen eye and ear for what is of some
value, and which doesn't slow the whole thing down to a dirge.
Maybe it is on the web somewhere? It would be good for all to see.
Andrew
On 26 April 2010 17:02, Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]>wrote:
> Hi, Desmond,
>
>
> <<
> The first draft came out on McRumens GU blog, when sporting with Carol late
> last year. And there's still a few mistakes, an 'a' here and there that was
> missed out and causes a timy judder.
>
>>
>>>
> If you're still correcting, you might want to change this:
>
> "the potential gibberish was salvaged by Pound, who the dedication by Eliot
> reads when trasnlated from the Greek - 'the better craftsmen'."
>
> -- it was Italian, not Greek, "Il miglior fabrio" (if I remember
> correctly). Dante in the Divine Comedy, referring to Guido Cavalcanti, or
> someone.
>
> Your whole post raises the interesting question of whether we're all a bit
> too glib in ascribing the authorship of "The Waste Land" to Eliot, in the
> sense that some of the things of interest about it -- the jump cuts and
> register jumping -- might be a result (an artifact?) of Pound's editing.
> This might tie in with how it's really uncharacteristic of the rest of
> Eliot's poetry. Even the way reference is used, where you *have to know the
> source for the text quoted or referred to, to make sense of the poem (rather
> than a knowledge of the source adding to what we read), is more
> characteristic of Pound in e.g. "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" than Eliot elsewhere.
>
> There's also the existence of the original MS, with Pound's annotations and
> cuts, that Eliot's widow published a few years ago. Anyone seen this? I
> haven't myself, which says something about my interest in "The Waste Land".
>
> Comes down to it, I find Prufrock a lot more interesting. I chased the
> original drafts for this, in The March Hare Notebooks, trying to disentangle
> the American and English strands in the poem, when I couldn't be bothered to
> look at the original draft of "The Waste Land".
>
> Robin
>
>
> <<
> If you want a laugh, I'm going to start another thread linking to Todd
> Swift's first Guest Blogger post, of a week long residency, on the Best
> American Poetry blog, in which he is presenting a 'roll call of the 'best'
> 25 young British poets writing today, for an American audience.
>
>
> http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2010/04/the-young-british-poets-by-todd-swift.html
>
>>
>>>
> Yikes!! I just began to look at this -- the second and third paragraphs
> have to be parodic. Or is this man serious?
>
> "Charles Bernstein and John Ashbery are coterie poets here, read by few and
> feared by most who do read them – let alone Hart Crane or William Carlos
> Williams."
>
> Is he *really saying, as that 'let alone' implies, that Brits are more
> familiar with Bernstein and Ashbery than Crane and WCW? Or is it just
> clumsy phrasing? Ashbery *might possibly (now) be better known here than
> Hart Crane, but Bernstein better known than Carlos Williams? I find this
> just a tad unlikely.
>
> R.
--
Andrew
http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
'Mother Waits for Father Late' republished available at
http://www.picaropress.com/
http://frankshome.org/AndrewBurke.html
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