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25 oct 2009

Review of my book by Heriberto Yépez. This one is in Spanish:

.... Se trata de Jonathan Mayhew y su extraordinario estudio Apocryphal Lorca. Translation, Parody, Kitsch (The University of Chicago Press, 2009). 

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. 

Si alguien quiere comenzar a entender la poesía norteamericana de posguerra, este libro es una vía para aproximarse a esta tradición desde un ángulo inesperado, un Lorca que, en muchos sentidos, parecerá irreal a los lectores latinoamericanos típicos, el Lorca del duende, esa teoría lorquiana que es menor entre nosotros y fue protagónica en el imaginario de la poética en Estados Unidos.



In other words: "What I'm talking about is JM and his extraordinary study AP.... This work is not about García Lorca but rather about how US writers reinvented Lorca, from Spicer and Rothenberg to O'Hara and Koch. It is also a discussion of the Deep Image--how we have to read this chapter in detail!--and the way American poetics has appropriated the lorquian (or lorcaesque) and of the concept of the "other" that it represents. This book is full to the brim of subtleties, of these, of facts. If somehow wants to begin to understand postwar American poetry, this book is a way of approaching this tradition from an unexpected angle, a Lorca that, in many ways, will seem unreal to typical Latin American readers: the Lorca of the duende, this Lorquian theory that is more minor among us and that was the main thrust in the imaginary of US Poetics."

4 comentarios:

  1. Babelfish translated "el Lorca del duende" as "the Lorca of the genie". The genie, of course, being one of the markers of our "orientalism", i.e., our kitschy appropriation of the Arab world.

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  2. Nice review. (FWIW, whenever I read "Mayhew is a critic who is at the top of his game", I wonder whether the blurbist has achieved quite the praise he intended.)

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  3. Curious whether you've read anything on Mahmoud Darwish's borrowings from Lorca...

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  4. I'm vaguely familiar with the fact that he's been cited as an influence on Darwish.

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