Also, I found I introduced something into the English translation that I hadn't written in the original. "Sálvese quien pueda" is an idiomatic translation. I couldn't very well say "it's every man for himself," so I wrote, "it's every flower for herself." I guess I could have translated "you're on your own now," or what I had first: "let anyone who can save himself do so."

Unrepeatable,
a lability
made for another's hands.
It's every flower for herself
in the diminutive
labyrinth of odors.

That's my try at reproducing the effects of Lola Velasco's poetry. The Spanish version is better, perhaps. I don't know that Lola would use a word like "labilidad"!

Friday's crossword gave itself up easily (20 minutes). Am I getting faster, or are the puzzles getting easier? Maximum enjoyment involves a level of difficulty exactly pitched between Blanchot's prose and Celan's poetry.

Hess and Gudding are reading tomorrow at the City Museum.

***

An interview with DeJohnette in the issue of Modern Drummer that came yesterday. He is suitably vague (abstract?) about most everything of importance. He doesn't play "licks" according to the interviewer. I could spend all day thinking about that.

On the jazz radio station: a version of Clifford Brown's "Joy Spring." It happens to be one of my favorite tunes, so I listen closely. The rhythm section sounds a little stiff, but that's ok, because the trumpet player has a nice warm, dark tone, not dissimilar to Clifford's. So he starts his solo, and . . . it's a note for note reproduction of Clifford's Brown's solo! I could have sung along if I hadn't been so shocked. It turned out it was Arturo Sandoval, and the name of the album implies that he is paying tribute to all the classic trumpet players. I'd hate to hear him try to play a Miles Davis solo note for note. Why not just go back to listen to the originals? I listen to that Clifford Brown solo everyday on my computer.

***

The crossword clue it took me all day to get: "Isn't just theoretical" -- and the answer is supposed to be "exists." I guess I just don't think of theory as something non-existent.

Then there's the possibility of getting stuck, as I did on the Northwest corner of today's crossword puzzle. A mental block, something within my own head. I'm sure the answers will seem obvious in retrospect. Air force Chief of Staff in the 1960s? It calls on more dictionary knowledge than encyclopeidia knowledge, to evoke Eco's distinction.

***

The degree to which Blanchot established one version of the canon of modernism, still influential in Spain. I notice that the translator of The Work of Fire (Charlotte Mandell) acknowledges her husband, "Robert Kelly." I'm wondering if this is THE Robert Kelly. I assume it is, because she also thanks Pierre Joris.

I do the New York Times crossword puzzles on line every day. They get progressively harder from Monday to Saturday. For me, the dividing line is between Wed. and Thurs. Wed. is transparently easy, whereas Thursday takes a little while. Friday and Saturday are becoming a little easier now I've been doing them religiously for more than a year. I can get Saturday's (usually) in 45 minutes to an hour. Part of the trick is to approach it with just the right amount of confidence. Too confident, and I become frustrated. Not confident enough, and I don't guess wildly enough. I don't fill in answers even if I *know* them at some level of consciousness. The next day's puzzle comes out at about 9:20 p.m. (central time). Here I go...

I'm trying to get into this Char (La parole en archipel). It's not that I don't like it; I'm just trying to cut through the hagiography of the translator's introduction, the dignified rhetoric of the poetry itself. There's always that *resistance* in me to reading anything new. That's what reading is, struggling with that resistance and suspicion. I have another academic book on Char that's written in a horrible style (this one in English). I can't get anything out of it.

Back from Chicago. I neglected my conference to take Julia to Shedd Aquarium, Field Museum, Art Institute. . . One of my boxes of books came back from Spain. I had Char (in bilingual French / Spanish edition), Valente, Varela, Riechmann, and others that I did not remember buying. I nice present for my future self.

I never let my students use the word "theme" in writing about poetry.

I'm going to Chicago tomorrow to give a talk at the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese convention. I'm trying to demonstrate ideological homology between official verse culture and Spanish poetry of experience.

I should continue to translate that Char poem:

"Here and there the memory of a force carressed the flight of the peasant grass. I governed myself without doctrines, with a serene vehemence. I was the equal of things whose secret might fit under the radius of a wing. For the majority, the essential has never been born, and those who do possess it cannot exchange it without doing damage to themselves. Noone consents to losing what he has gained at the cost of his own suffering! Otherwise it would mean that beauty and grace, source and delta, would have the same purity.

I found myself in one of those forests where the sun has no access, but where, at night, the stars penetrate for implacable hostilities."

I am working from a Spanish translation (by Jorge Riechmann) along with the original French.

"I found myself in one of those forests where the sun has no access but that, at night, the stars penetrate. That place had the permission to exist only because the Inquisition of the States had neglected it. The abandoned servitudes marked off their disdain for me. The obsession with punishment had been withdrawn from me."

R. Char

I love those surrealist forests. I have no idea what "abandoned servitudes" are. The translation is my own so I wouldn't trust it if I were you.

***

I'd love to retranslate some of Kenneth Koch's apochryphal "South American poets."

I just wrote these three sentences:

It is possible that the argument I am making here—that Velasco’s subtlety and purity make her stubbornly resistant to ideology-driven readings—might sound reactionary in the present academic climate. I do not mean to imply that that such readings are undesirable in principle, or that we should “just let poetry be poetry.” What is striking, though, is the muteness of criticism in the face of works that do not lend themselves to obvious USES.

But isn't what I'm doing a critical "use" also? How can I escape that aporia?

I came across this image on a Michaux website yesterday.

***

"Your superlatives are null and void." Well said, Jordan.

***

My word count on my wordprocessor keeps a running tab of how many words I have in a given document. I can't help looking at it constantly. I have 1000 words on my Lola Velasco paper. I'm still having a hard time figuring out what my point is. Can you write a critical paper without having an axe to grind? Is it enough just to like something, or do you have to make some *claim* that the work deconstructs Western metaphysics or shows the one true path to lyric freedom? Is there a way of making a claim without making a claim? In the academic context, the claim I am making--that this poetry doesn't allow for "leveraged" arguments--sounds reactionary. The poetry is of a lightness and grace that make such arguments seem excessive.