¡Bemsha SWING!

30 ene 2007

Condescension is probably the worst sin in a critic. Any idiot can find bad lines in Whitman or Crane. Finding purplish or overwritten passages in writers makes a certain kind of critic feel superior. Aha! I wouldn't have written that! He says. Yes, but did you invent an entire new style, like Whitman did? Did you ever write a single phrase half as brilliant as "adagios of islands"? Quondam dormitat Homerus.

2 comentarios:

Henry Gould dijo...: I respect a critic who calls a spade a spade. It's a service to literature. But it bothers me that Logan would depend so much on Cranes' character flaws (they were massive, I guess) to dismiss the poetry. It seems Logan feels the estimate of Crane is too high, and he wants to bring it down a peg. But in the process he overdoes it. He misses most of the things that make Crane great.

Would the world be better off if we'd had a meeker, milder, more morally-scrupulous Crane, who wrote well-mannered poems like Logan's? I don't think so.

For me one of the great things about Crane is that he actually TRIED to picture American culture & history within the design of a poetic myth. In the attempt he really soared above so much run-of-the-mill poetizing. He came awfully close to lifting "America" into this impossibly strange orphic-lyric dimension...; 9:42 a. m.
Jonathan dijo...: Agreed. He doesn't bother telling us why Crane is considered important in the first place. He is too busy dismissing him for his personal life and for the grandiose vision of The Bridge. Everything from Crane he quotes is done dismissively.; 11:05 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!

30 ene 2007

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