I was reading Rothenberg's Suites in the Green Integer edition, which is not bilingual. It really gave me a chance to appreciate the translation for what it is, without the distraction of the original. Many of these poems read quite well. It's really a delightful translation in many ways. When I didn't like a particular line, which happened a few times, it was because I didn't like it, not because I was comparing it with Lorca's original. When I happened to remember the Spanish original for a particular line it was distracting. When JR quoted "skip to my Lou" it was fine, because I wasn't worried that this was an imposition on the text.

Usually I am an advocate for bilingual editions, but I already have this same translation of the Suites in Christopher Maurer's Collected Poems of Federico García Lorca. Reading a translation AGAINST the original is a completely different sort of reading, one that cannot withstand my irritating nitpicking.

Here's a list of Rothenberg's desiderata for "deep image" poetry:


"a heightened sense of the emotional contours of objects (their dark qualities, or shadows);

their free re-association in a manner that would be impossible to descriptive or logical thought, but is here almost unavoidable;

the sense of these objects (and the poem itself) being informed with a heightened relevance, a quickened sense of life;

the recognition of the poem as a natural structure arising at once from the act of emotive vision."

I had a look at White Sun Black Sun (Jerome Rothenberg) today in special collections here at Kansas. It is amazing how the whole discussion about the deep image hardly ever cites a line from one of the first books of deep image poetry (if not the first). One reason is that you have to go to the rare book room to read it. There's no collected poems of JR that includes this material.

I also re-read some of the early theoretical texts by Rothenberg and Kelly in Trobar on the deep image. It's not necessarily what you might expect it to be.

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I tried a new experiment with my scholarly writing yesterday. I was sick of all the chapters I was writing all at the same time so I opened up a blank microsoft document and just wrote down ideas for two hours without thinking necessarily of where these ideas would end up.