¡Bemsha SWING!: Cortázar

8 jul 2011

Cortázar

As an undergraduate i read all the Cortázar I could. Los premios, a strange novel about a group of people who win, as a prize, a trip on a ship on which strange things happen. All the brilliant short stories, like "Continuidad de los parques" and "La casa tomada." Rayuela, of course. I am not particularly interested now in Cortázar, but he defined a certain moment in my own development as a reader. I don't know if I could ever go back and be a really interested reader, but it strikes me that someone could go back to this body of work and do something interesting with it.

7 comentarios:

Spanish prof dijo...: Have you seen "Vendredi soir" (2002), by Claire Denis? It's a French take on "Autopista al Sur", about a woman caught in a traffic jam in Paris on, of course, a Friday night, and a stranger she picked up. I highly suggest it. Here is the link to the movie in Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Friday-Night-Val%C3%A9rie-Lemercier/dp/B0000C23D1/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1310133954&sr=8-7; 9:08 a. m.
Vance Maverick dijo...: Thanks for these recommendations. I read a book of his stories in translation, and was powerfully impressed by the prose -- but the theme of doubling/mirroring characters was repeated compulsively.; 11:03 p. m.
Professor Zero dijo...: I'll see the movie. I taught Rayuela recently and it was an interesting experience -- I hadn't read it in a long time. It seemed really, really dated and I came to the conclusion that the fun way to teach it, now, would be as the ONE book read in a term. You'd read it and the intertexts, and get fascinated. I discovered that S. Colas at Michigan had actually taught such a course and had a website for it. I'm not interested in him enough to make him a research subject but I did write a couple of short stories as a result of teaching that class. Cortazar always seems to do that for me and it is always broadening somehow.; 10:28 p. m.
Jonathan dijo...: I had the same experience with Rayuela. When I taught it it seemed very dated and the grad students were not enthralled with it or with C's misogyny.; 2:13 a. m.
Professor Zero dijo...: @Spanishprof, I haven't gotten hold of the movie yet but none of the (few) reviews I've looked at mention Cortazar as a source ... warum nicht, ich frage mir.; 12:43 p. m.
Spanish prof dijo...: @Z: By her biography, I know that when she began as a filmmaker, she did short films based on Cortazar's short stories. So I don't know if htere is a specific acknowledgement of the story in the movie, but it certainly was an influence.

Sorry, besides English and Spanish, I only read French and Portuguese. I forgot my German.; 6:12 p. m.
Professor Zero dijo...: I've seen it now, gorgeous. I had lost track of her, and I didn't know the Cortazar connection.; 9:22 p. 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!

8 jul 2011

Cortázar

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