>
> - Fie, and possibly Tush, Sirrah, how can you say such things in the face
> of the sparkly linguistic freshness you see all around you, not least on
> this list.
>
OK. Fair enough. Actually, one only has to look at the Peter Cole
excerpts kindly posted
by Anthony Frazer. Marvellous stuff, I must buy the book.
To Eleanor Margolies: thanks for the recommendation, I'll certainly try it.
American English does seems to be more capable of combining
'colloquialism and formality'. Maybe British English is more affected by
Class - Kathleen Raine has asserted that in the past the 'educated class'
spoke a different language to us commoners.
Incidentally, while looking for that Cookson review I came across a review
of Hughes' Ovid by Kathleen Raine in which she unfavourably compares some
of Hughes' lines with Pound's magical translation in Canto II.
Raine, of course, is a prime advocate of the 'decayed language' theory.
Alan B.
----------
> From: R I Caddel <[log in to unmask]>
> To: Alan Baker <[log in to unmask]>
> Cc: British Poets <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Re: entice new readers
> Date: 10 February 1998 16:28
>
> On Tue, 10 Feb 1998, Alan Baker wrote:
> > But the comparison does
> > raise the question that maybe the English
> > language has simply lost its freshness after
> > 400 years of use and misuse...
>
> - Fie, and possibly Tush, Sirrah, how can you say such things in the face
> of the sparkly linguistic freshness you see all around you, not least on
> this list.
>
> When Zukofsky quoted the gobbit of Golding I lifted, he did so with
> specific reference to its *modernity* - all the words and structures are
> directly accessible to us today. The language which most quickly passes
> its sell-by is surely the official, central "koine", the artificial
> received language which seems so universally applicable at the time. As
an
> instance, try those old news bulletins from 20 years ago - already the
> inflection and much of the vocabulary seem stilted as last week's
> youthcult terms - usable with irony or not at all.
>
> On the peripheries - however they're defined - language remains a fairly
> dynamic process, still capable of surprise (for me anyway). I'd be awful
> sorry if it ever stopped.
>
> RC
>
>
>
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