I'd like to apologize to the list for the tedium, and increasing exasperation, of my last few posts. It would be convenient to blame Jeff for his frustrating manner of stalling the discussion in what I see as peripheral or irrelevant argument, but obviously I share some responsibility for allowing myself to be de-railed. I would suggest that if the topic is to continue in any useful way we dispense with further point-scoring. I would make a plea to Jeff at least to trust my sincerity with regard to the various statements I've made so I don't have to keep needlessly repeating the same things: our approaches are in many respects deeply opposed (though not in every respect as I've tried to show), but I think it would help clarify that opposition if I wasn't having continually to manoeuvre myself out of positions with which I have no particular sympathy, and which Jeff, with his extensive reading in literary theory, is keen to have me occupy. So my counsel is simply a bit more care and caution in reading each other's posts.

Robin, and Alison,
Both your posts that make a connection with theatre, and both of you made me feel that I had too quickly conceded the singularity, or the exception, of poetry. Not for the same reasons, and not nearly as absolutely as Jeff, I do think of poetry as often making different demands on language. I see it as having both an intimate and an oblique or even a subverting relation to speech, but there are risks in divorcing the art from speech as well as from the novel, or the short story, or theatre; in making it a sealed-off entity with very special privileges, and those are ones that Alison's post dwells on.
  In the case of King Lear it would obviously be idiotic to sever the play from the poetry in which it's composed, and the interpretative decisions made in staging the play cannot be so easily dismissed as Jeff's response suggests. The director must choose in this case between two understandings of a line, and now a third, absurd one.  I'd always assumed it was Lear's button, and that interpretation makes far more sense to me. But still a decision has to be made by the director, and this is an analogous one to the decisions a critic makes in reading a poem. Jeff's position that all interpretations are equally valid is quite possibly a watertight one, but comes, it seems to me, at an annihilating cost to the art. I still feel that it isn't at all a defence against elitism, that the elitism it defends against is merely a phantom dreamt up within the hygienic precincts of literary theory.

As regards translation, a topic that Robin has raised, and which has particular relevance to Forrest-Thompson whose work is scattered with translated fragments from Sappho (Robin) to Mallarme' (Sutherland).  In the last weeks I've been working on two translations, one of short stories, the other of poetry and (in the light of this discussion) was wondering what difference was involved in the work. For the moment I've nothing very conclusive to offer - except a banal distinction that the first draft for prose is a laborious activity which involves, at least for me, the attempt to make sure an accurate draft is established. What fun there is comes in the later stages of moving it away from a wooden literalism. With the poems that process seem to occur almost at the outset, and immediately or pretty quickly vaults over the anhedonic graft. I don't think this is due merely to word length, but at the same time I don't wish to over-stress the "exceptionalism" of poetry even in translation.
Still considering this...
Jamie



-----Original Message----- From: Robin Hamilton
Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2013 7:32 PM

To: [log in to unmask]AC.UK
Subject: Re: "Multiple Registers, Intertextuality and Boundaries of Interpretation in Veronica Forrest-Thompson"

Jamie:,

When you say:

<<
If I claim that in
Frost's 'Mending Wall' the opening line "Something there is that doesn't
love a wall" refers to tortoises, and explain that I happen to know that
tortoises are particularly averse to walls, then, in the absence of any
evidence I can adduce from the poem, any reader will have a right to say I'm
completely off my trolley. You may well support me by saying that it is my
right to take anything I want from a poem, and I'm grateful for your
support, but I don't think you should be encouraging me.

... I think you finger the core of the problem.

If we agree (as I assume most of us do) that poems are open to multiple
readings (and are read by multiple readers), then an argument is possible.
Once we deny that there is any possibility of misreading - that, at an
extreme, "All readings of a text are of equal value" - then the possibility
of dialogue leaves by the window.  (Which particular window of the room it
leaves by is open to discussion, but it certainly doesn't leave by the
door).

I was about to say that this issue cannot be avoided by editors, or
directors of plays, but I realise that I should also add, appositely in this
context, translators.  At the end of the day, one (for the moment) line of a
text rather than another must be printed, one set of stage actions
performed, or one set English words chosen to represent an Italian original.
When I was, in an earlier incarnation and for my sins, lecturing on literary
theory, I'd pick a crux from the end of _King Lear_ to illustrate this.
"Prithee undo this button" -- which button, Cordelia's or Lear's?  A
plausible case can be made for either, but on stage one must be chosen --
either the actor playing Lear gestures towards the dead Cordelia, imagining
she is alive (the Lear Still Deluded reading), or he gestures towards his
own throat (the Lear Asking For Help reading).  The act of interpretive
choice has consequences.  It is, of course, possible to blur the stage
business, by leaving the line ambiguous (which seems to me, in editorial
terms, comparable to failing to footnote a problematic line of a text rather
than, at the least, indicating there is a problem there).

It would be possible, I imagine, to envisage a scenario, in which the line
occurs just after Lear has scrabbled across the stage and is fiddling wildly
with the codpiece of the Third Spearcarrier.  I shall now think of this
reading, in deference to your Frost example, as the Tortoise Reading of the
Lear Crux.

Editors, directors, and translators are forced to confront situations which
are elsewhere blithely discussed in abstract terms.  This, among other
reasons, is why I prefer Foucault's retort, in "What Is An Author?" to the
text by Barthes which provoked Foucault's response.  I hadn't realised,
which seems possible from the tone of part of this discussion, that Barthes'
"Death of the Author" could still be considered holy writ -- it's not as if
Foucault's challenge is particularly new.  It was, after all, first
delivered as a lecture in 1969, two years after Barthes' piece appeared.

Best,

Robin