¡Bemsha SWING!

11 abr 2006

What's great about that Ashbery translation is that it's both Baudelaire and Ashbery. It really does get at a particularly Baudelairean tone, as Henry eloquently explain in a comment below. Yet the poem can appear side by side with other JA poems and not be out of place. It's located at the exact point where the two styles meet. We might hypothesize what this point would look like before hand, but it's even better to have it. [Like O'Hara channeling Mayakovsky in a "A True Account of Talking to the Sun,"or Rilke in "Aus Einem April."] Schuyler's translation of a Dante sestina. Maybe Celan translating Dickinson would provide a similar pleasure (I haven't read his translations: I need someone to translate them back to English for me.) Pound and Li Po. Richard Howard doesn't do it for me. He is a poet, he is a fine translator of Roland Barthes, but I don't see that magical conjunction to two styles. It's a pretty rare event, in my view. That is, many translations are praised and read with profit, but when you really ask whether it is "poetry in English," you usually have to say no. Even Koch's Roussel doesn't do it for me. Lowell's imitations would be a good example if I liked Lowell. Since I don't appreciate his style, I can't appreciate its conjunction with the work of another poet either.

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Matthew Schmeer dijo...: At a translator's sympoisum I attended as an interested observer, I once told Richard Howard--to his face--that I could careless about striving for linguistic perfection in poetry translations from his beloved French because "I don't know French from a monkey's ass."

Howard was raised in a French-speaking household and has spoken the language since childood. He is also an elitest to the uncouth degree, and that alone makes my skin crawl. He had a way of looking down his nose at me through those thick-framed glasses with his eyebrows in a furrowed frown that just made me want to say outrageous things to see if I could provoke him.

I did. It totally threw him off his game for the rest of the session he was chairing.

I know--not a productive comment, but there it is.; 7:45 a. m.
Jonathan dijo...: That anecdote makes you look worse than Howard himself, elitist or not. If there's anything worse than an elitist, it's an anti-elitist, I always say.

The problem with Howard is not that he's elitist, but that he's a mediocre poet and translator of poetry. Of course, his translations of Barthes alone earn him some credit in my book.; 10:17 a. m.

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Blurbs & Reviews

"Jonathan Mayhew’s new work belongs to a certain class of surprising books: those so obviously necessary once they appear that it apparently required a stroke of genius to come up with the idea for them."

--Daniel Katz

"Jonathan Mayhew's Lorca is less the distinctive Spanish poet, whose murder in 1936 marked the beginning of the Civil War, than he is an American invention. From the 1940s to the end of the century, our poets have invoked Lorca-in translation, of course-as a Romantic, exotic, radical, and, in many cases, gay icon-the poet of mystery and the duende. The Lorca myth, Mayhew argues persuasively, has enriched American lyric, but it has also been an obstacle to a more adequately grounded understanding of Spanish poetry in the 20th century. Apocryphal Lorca is revisionist criticism at its most acute."

-Marjorie Perloff

"Enhanced by copious notes and an excellent bibliography, this book offers a perceptive, intriguing assessment of the Garcia Lorca created by the postwar generation of American poets." (Choice )

"Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game; he combines a breadth of knowlege of the field with acute analysis."

--John C. Wilcox, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Let me just cut through all the usual, boring book review preliminaries and say the following thing: Jonathan Mayhew has, in Apocryphal Lorca, written an amazing book. "

--Brandon Holmquest, Calque

"The great merit of Mayhew's study is his sustained effort to document and interrogate Lorca's reception, unique among American encounters with foreign literatures in its nature and extent."

--Lawrence Venuti, TLS.

"Se trata de Jonathan Mayhew y su extraordinario estudio Apocryphal Lorca. Translation, Parody, Kitsch. Esta obra se ocupa no de García Lorca sino de cómo los escritores estadounidenses han reinventado a Lorca, desde Spicer y Rothenberg hasta O’Hara y Koch. Asimismo, es una discusión de la Deep Image —¡cuánto hay que desmenuzar de ese capítulo!— y la manera en que la poética norteamericana se ha apropiado de lo lorqueano (o lorcaesco) y del concepto de lo 'otro' que éste representa. Éste es un libro repleto de sutilezas, de tesis, apuntes, datos."

--Heriberto Yépez

"Apocryphal Lorca, sin embargo, es mucho más que un estudio de las vidas posteriores de Lorca en la poesía americana entre principios de los años 50 y 70. También ofrece un acercamiento histórico a la traducción de su obra, descubriendo reseñas de prensa significativas y discurriendo acerca de reconocimientos críticos. El texto es elegante y fresco; el análisis amplio e históricamente específico."

--María Delgado, Revista de Literatura

¡Bemsha SWING!

11 abr 2006

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