Thanks for this, Candice. Can you say what is your preferred translation of
B for us over the Heaney??
Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
> I'm impressed by and grateful to Frederick and Chris
> for their elegant and informed posts on lyric and
> narrative. Everything they say can also be applied to
> _Beowulf_, which, as a medievalist, is the epic I know
> best. Here is a work of poetry that strives to be a
> story, one of the preservation of history and
> record-keeping, hence the plethora of names of people
> and places. (The "singer of tales" is no mean title
> for Albert Lord's study of the oral tradition.)
>
> _Beowulf_ is, in fact, an amalgamation of three
> stories performed by singer/poets: Beowulf and
> Grendal, Beowulf and Grendel's mother, and Beowulf and
> the dragon--any one of which could do duty as a
> relatively short poem, while all 3 stories together
> speak of a grand occasion. The names recorded in
> _Beowulf_ are crucial to the singer/historian, who
> keeps those names alive, which is why Seamus Heany's
> translation (in which he changes the names for the
> sake of ungergrad readers) is such a travesty.
>
> Well, speaking of soap boxes, I'll get off mine now.
>
> Cheers,
> Candice
>
> I think the lyric-narrative polarization in recent
> times owes much to Robert Frost, who separated them in
> his own practice rather than using lyric
>
>
>
> --- Chris Jones <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Frederick, many thanks for the comments. You have
>> said in a far clearer
>> and fluent way what goes to the essential core of a
>> poetics I argue for
>> and support and have spent a good part of my life
>> trying to think. (The
>> cost of this is I throw out 80 to 90 percent of what
>> I write as
>> uninteresting and not worth keeping. I am not that
>> prolific.)
>>
>> It is interesting that in terms of prose novels,
>> historically, a poetics
>> of the limited lyric is also pushed and usually
>> known as realist novels
>> as opposed to modernist novels. But more so, even in
>> recent poetics this
>> limited lyricism is still pushed and more often in
>> the name of a
>> Heideggerean poetics which in the second coming is
>> given the name of
>> Derrida and Deconstruction. This is why I am so
>> opposed to such a
>> poetics and consider it to be a hermeneutics of
>> colonialism or to be
>> even more blunt and use Lenin's term, an imperialist
>> hermeneutics. Or
>> put another way, the Heideggerean song of the Earth
>> is an imperial first
>> person lyric. A song too often repeated in critical
>> journals as
>> so-called critical discourse in Latin derived terms
>> and as if the term
>> critical is an embarrassed silence on the journal's
>> masthead.
>> Deconstruction becomes an excuse to avoid real
>> critique in this slippery
>> way. (There is perhaps a real Derrida, but who reads
>> him?)
>>
>> Perhaps this is also why I find Dorothy Porter's
>> verse novels not only
>> interesting but important and I would say very
>> important in terms of
>> recent Australian poetics. (I will always remember
>> Dorothy saying to the
>> Postmodernists critics; I am a Romantic. Think about
>> the poet's critical
>> twist in terms of POV, here, and feel free to
>> laugh.)
>>
>> Anyways, I will get off me soapbox and press the
>> send button.
>>
>> best wishes
>>
>> Chris Jones.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, 2007-01-13 at 10:46 -0500, Frederick Pollack
>> wrote:
>>
>>>>
>>> Chris goes directly to an issue I consider crucial
>> for my poetry and for
>>> poetry generally. I've read very little
>> narratology, so I'll speak only in
>>> my own terms. For a poet, writing narrative is
>> psychologically and
>>> existentially different from writing lyric - i.e.,
>> it feels different, and
>>> involves a different stance towards experience. A
>> critic, theorist, or
>>> reader, looking at a work from the outside, will
>> see more continuity. To
>>> ask which impulse (towards narrative or lyric) is
>> primary within poets is
>>> different from asking which need is greater for
>> readers. And to ask either
>>> question in a historical vacuum creates
>> chicken-or-egg aporias.
>>> Historically, and therefore (I think) in essence,
>> both the poetic impulse
>>> and the poetic need are for storytelling. The
>> traditional primacy of the
>>> epic results not merely from the imposed wishes of
>> ancient, medieval, or
>>> Renaissance princes but from a basic intuition:
>> poetry should tell the tale
>>> of the tribe, explain the universe, and advance
>> values. The kind of tales,
>>> cosmologies, and values desired by the men who
>> paid for epics may have
>>> amounted to propaganda; in the hands of good poets
>> they became criticism.
>>> (I'm thinking primarily of Virgil here, but even
>> the Nibelungenlied and the
>>> Song of Roland "criticize" the bloody worlds they
>> seem to celebrate.)
>>>
>>> For over two centuries now, poetry has meant lyric
>> poetry. The ancient and
>>> Renaissance hierarchy of genres was not inverted
>> but discarded. Yet every
>>> lyric poet, writing "about" his or her own grief ,
>> pique, or ecstasy, is
>>> writing in the context of a larger story, being
>> recited by society as a
>>> whole. The tribe is always telling its own,
>> unexamined tale, and imposing
>>> it. Today the theme of that tale is that
>> individual and immediately
>>> interpersonal experience is primary; that it
>> alone, in fact, is real.
>>> However much mainstream poets may despise Margaret
>> Thatcher's "There is no
>>> such thing as society, there are only men, women,
>> and families," they accept
>>> it in their poetic practice. Which is why I find
>> it increasingly hard to
>>> read literary journals. One more dead father, one
>> more walk along the
>>> beach, yet another dreadful divorce ... for me,
>> mainstream (or workshop, or
>>> magazine-verse) poets blur into one bourgeois
>> figure, miserable but
>>> comfortable. They asume two things: 1) that
>> however predictable experience
>>> may be, sensibility is unique; 2) that if
>> sensibility is adequately captured
>>> in a style, it alone can make average experiences
>> seem unique, important,
>>> and "universal." When they succeed, their poems
>> suggest some timeless,
>>> human truth. But timelessness is an illusion, and
>> humanity consists of
>>> classes and ideologies in continual conflict. The
>> synchronic, solipsistic
>>> mainstream lyric cannot encompass this fact. All
>> contemporary "political"
>>> poems fail, because poets as poets are in flight
>> from politics, i.e., from
>>> history.
>>>
>>> More later, perhaps, but must run.
>>>
>>
>
>
>
>
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