I think the following quotation from an interview with Harry Mathews -
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/wuc/foreignness -, one of my
favourite writers, addresses questions raised by Dominic & others about
referentiality &/ or constraints: > I find that what most intensifies
the reading experience is the awareness that a hidden pattern or
structure exists, without one's exactly knowing what it is. This makes
the reader sit up and pay attention.<
This has certainly been true of my reading over the decades, whether a
writing pattern or a thought system is concerned. I can almost exactly
parallel Fred's experience with Rilke's Elegies, first read in 1962 in
Leishman's version with the facing original, then the original alone in
a 2ndhand Insel edition picked up in a Freiburg bookshop in the mid-60s
that I still treasure - in fact, I'm still wondering at/about the
underlying set of concepts & correspondences when I read them, the point
being that that wonder intensifies my receptiveness to the text. It's a
question of "poetic density" as Mathews says later in the interview
(which reminds me of Pound's "dichten=condensare").
Probably all old hat to you, but it just struck me anew this morning.
The problem with Chinese (or any?) poetry in translation is that a web
of implied reference & concepts must be verbally created by the
translator to avoid sententiousness - Pound and Brecht manage that,
Waley & Graham sometimes. - Stray thoughts from a stray cat. Speaking of
cats, either a cat or someone else deposited a cat foetus complete with
placenta next the breakfast table in the bowered area before the house I
mainly live in. A gift or a warning? We buried it with due honours at
the pathside nearby before breakfasting.
mj
--
A man may write of love, and not be in love, as well as of husbandrie, and not goe to plough: or of witches, and be none: or of holinesse, and be flat prophane. - Giles Fletcher the Elder.
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