There is no set of cultural references presumed to be shared by all educated readers. Eliot's notes to the Waste Land already posit the end of a common Victorian culture of reading. Pound takes this a step further. So I don't think that Henry Gould can say that there is a common, mainstream Eliotic tradition that we ignore at our peril. (He can say it, obviously, but I simply don't agree on this one point.) I could argue that the New York School of Poetry is the poetic mainstream, bringing together Auden, French surrealism, and the American avant-garde of WCW and Wallace Stevens. Yet I don't want to argue that. My autotranslations from the Spanish brought home this point to me. I feel free to refer to anything I know about, even something I learned of only yesterday. I don't assume any one reader will share any or all of my own references. In fact, my ideal reader is one who would get about 80%. I like the aleatory nature of the process, and the fact that those who read these poems in Spanish might understand a different set of referents. I'm not including footnotes.
T.S. Eliot is one of those poets I can read forever. He mesmerizes me. I often repeat lines from his poetry as I go through the day.
ResponderEliminarI have a much more intimate relationship with poetry in English than poetry in Spanish. With the exception of Quevedo and the anonymous poem "No me mueve Dios para quererte", no Spanish poet touches me on a visceral level. I can admire the beauty on a reasonable level, but it doesn't make me cry.