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Candice Ward wrote: > I assume that Waldrop is familiar with Mary Ann Caws as at least the editor > of Cornell's diaries, letters, and source files (again, maybe Randolph can > tell us--?), but it would be interesting to know how much (if any) > acquaintance she has with Caws's translations and/or theoretical writings on > surrealism--not to mention how (or even if) Waldrop sees her own work as > surrealist. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- More to follow on Waldrop and, yes, compliments on the generous contribution of the interview,--- but, as far as Caws: Waldrop herself is multilingual and has translated a great deal of French poetry. I'm not sure why she would be dependent on Caws as a filter for surrealism. I would think she'd know the French surrealists in the original. Caws, too, has always struck me as much more "conservative" (mannerly, pedagogical) than Waldrop in their choices of what's worthwhile to translate. I would ~think~ that Waldrop would see Caws' career as the sort of "bourgeois" tastes her own translations and writing have been inveighing against. Surrealism has never, never come to mind for me in reading Waldrop. Especially Breton/Magritte surrealism. Surrealism, via Breton, and "Surrealism in The Service of The Revolution" I understand to have seen itself as the third, messianic synthesis in the Hegelian-Marxist dialectic (the long-awaited, New Jerusalem synthesis achieved out of [hypo]thesis and antithesis). Waldrop's attitude toward the persistence of dialectic is not that dewy-eyed or utopian. Any homage to surrealism for her, I think, would have to proceed out of the wizened hindsight that surrealism ~failed~ to win its cultural-societal aims, that we may be in a surrealist ~aftermath~ but not in a viable, self-conscious surrealism. The dialectic is a distinct and constant presence hovering over the thought in Waldrop's work, but it's a much more Americanized, power-bound d., and she appears quite realistic in any hopes of its being "defeated." With the ~Erotics~ you mention, too, in Caws: the Waldrop I've read is feminist in a way boys' club surrealism couldn't be and ---again the dialectic--- she seems skeptical about any union out of male-female romance, presenting those two sides as eerily distanced and, perhaps, at best a dialogue that's an interchange of mutual ~translations,~ ---versus Breton's/surrealists' convulsive unities.