----- Original Message -----
From: "Dominic Fox" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2008 4:57 PM
Subject: Re: today's low
> Other poets Badiou likes: St-John Perse (already mentioned),
> Mandelstam, Brecht. No shortage of concrete human history around those
> three...
>
> Dominic
>
I wish my French were better. For years my own work has been inspired by
the *idea of St.-John Perse, esp. Anabase and Amers. An all-purpose epic,
celebrating no one culture or hero, built of allusions to archetypal
material (this is as close as I get to accepting the idea of archetypes) -
the City, the Building of the City, the Sea and the Voyage, the Swarming of
Peoples ... all grand stuff. But when I try to read my old Bollingen
hardcover my French isn't adequate, and then I start reading Eliot's
translation, and it's intolerable. That effect much French poetry has in
English, of someone playing piano with the pedal continually down. ---
Recently discovered two French poets who are marvelous even in translation,
Jacques Reda and Guy Goffette. Demotic, empirical, narrative - at a far
remove from Char and Bonnefoy.
Mandelstam in the old Merwin translation, recently reprinted. And Brecht,
always. When I lived in LA I often read his LA poems. "Drowning in the
tarpits / still with that same / dreadful smile."
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