My response to your translation of Theocritus is in no way about political
correctness. I think I was pointing out that regardless of your intentions
you apparently don't know the linguistic seas in which you're attempting to
navigate.
Robert Kelly's comment about your transcription, with which I heartily
agree, is, on the other hand, precisely about political correctness in the
sense of attentiveness to the freight of history that a usage carries.
Putting aside the by now bizarre assumption that there is a normative
dialect as a universally understood standard of comparison, the kind of
transliteration you attempt has a long history in the US, beginning with
minstrel shows and ceasing to be a respectable literary practice in the
30's. It always had some racist overtones and has had nothing but in the
last 60-odd years. Do you think that's what Theocritus was getting at, or
are you merely unaware?
Translation, as you apparently are aware, is a matter of finding cultural
equivalents. It's never easy, especially across such large distances of
space or time. I think it's fair to say that it's always impossible to find
equivalent social classes in vastly different societies, and that's what it
seems to me you've tried to do. The markers, linguistic included, mean
different things in different places.
At 01:19 PM 4/11/98 PDT, you wrote:
> Oh, good, some responses. I was beginning to think you were all on the
nod
>out there.
>
> > From: Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]>
> > This is an act of incredible naivete (incredible, surely, given the
> > multivocality of the mass media) that shows no evidence that Jon Corelis
> > has ever been closer to the American South than Smokey and the Bandit...
>
> Apparently Mark Weiss didn't like it. Actually I'm surprised I haven't
>gotten more responses like this, given how sensitive everyone is about ethnic
>identity today. My defense is to reiterate that I was trying, not to reflect
>any social reality, but to explore what could be done with a stereotype by
>emphasizing rather than hiding the fact that it is a stereotype.
>
> Another defense: whatever my version's defects, when was the last time
you
>saw a translation from the classics which was *controversial*?
>
> > From: Robert Kelly <[log in to unmask]>
> >
> > a spirited and lovely version of Theocritus --- I think your readers (like
> > Kinsella's respnse already in) may have more trouble with the
> > transcription, the _written dialect_ look. When I imagine it re-spelled
> > in Ordinary, except for those words which are dramatically different (he'p
> > for help, etc), I think I see a poem that will in no way call into
> > question the matter of sympathy.
> >
>
> I'm particularly grateful for the adjective "spirited", which is what
I was
>aiming for because most translations from the classics most certainly are
not.
>I always thought for instance that Lattimore's Homer and tragedy versions,
which
>are perhaps the most popular in American schools, should have been printed in
>grey ink on grey paper.
>
> Robert Kelly's comments on the transcription are interesting, because the
>poem exists in two versions, one in standard spelling, and the other with the
>dialect phonetically spelled, the latter being the one I sent. (If anyone
wants
>the ordinary version, please send me email.) I offered the editor of The
Dark
>Horse both, and it was his decision, rather to my surprise, to choose the
>phonetic one.
>
> > From: John Kinsella <[log in to unmask]>
> >
> > Interesting but I have problems with the Othering involved in the
> > "dynamic equivalent" employed here. Unless we are to read the process
> > as ironic, in which case the point is made about artifice and construct -
> > and fair enough - but without a "sympathy" that Theocritus for all his
> > manipulation certainly had. And if there is "sympathy", where exactly
> > is it coming from?
>
> The poems of Theocritus are, I think, masked drama, and the central
problem
>in interpreting them is to define the relationship of the mask to what is
>inside it. This problem may never be solved, due to our lack of knowledge of
>their specific cultural and social context (yes we know a lot about the
>Alexandrian era but not nearly enough about the aesthetics of the small
group of
>men who created its poetry.) But my sense is that often in his work
whoever is
>inside the mask is peeping over the edge of it to relish the uproar which the
>mask is causing. The reactions here indicate that my version may be true to
>Theocritus at least in this sense.
>
>To: BRITPOE([log in to unmask])
>
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