Re: [New-Poetry] An Era of DÃ(c)tente for Creative- Wri ting Programs

Sat Jul 4 15:50:01 EDT 2009

Poor Mark. But here I am.
I understand your passion for the poet you are translating, which is what
keeps poor souls like me stuck to the page to connect one word in a language
to a similar word into another language. But if "Estimulante" is to be used
as a noun, then you need the article. Since in your quotation there is no
article, I can take it for granted that it is an adjective and within the
context a predicate nominal.

On Sat, Jul 4, 2009 at 6:30 PM, Mark Weiss <junction at earthlink.net> wrote:

> I have a feeling we're talking past each other here. I'm not proposing that
> "the mere fact that something isn't accepted is no
> guarantee it will continue to have value."
>
> A species of the difficult is poetry written in a foreign language.  I'm a
> translator. My Spanish is way too weak for what I undertake, but translators
> who are profoundly fluent report very much the same thing. All romance
> languages sound pretty to Germanic ears, but once one gets past that, in
> reading a poem in Spanish, even if one barely grasps its easiest layer of
> meaning, one senses the honesty of the effort and that there's something to
> be gained from going further. One falls in love, as with another human
> being, on the basis of what would appear to be insufficient evidence. As it
> happens, one gets fooled, but only occasionally. The poem, as one begins to
> translate, may turn out not even to be "about" what one thought it was. One
> discovers layers of meaning and artifice, one acquires the cultural
> knowledge that the poet demands of us. And eventually not so much an
> intellectual construct but a picture of the poem's structure and process
> emerge. This is a profoundly moving experience, and to the extent possible
> it's what one wants to convey to the reader.
>
> Some of the poems one falls in love with are exceptionally difficult even
> for native speakers. Virtually every lover of poetry in Latin America
> reveres Jose Lezama Lima's work, but very few would pretend to follow his
> drift through his complex patterning. But read it aloud and one finds all
> the richness of the language, and a hallucinatory world of half-glimpsed
> understandings. The poem demands of you that you come back to it again and
> again. It's a very long commitment. James Irby, without doubt the
> profoundest student and translator of Lezama's work (an incredible amount
> gets lost in translation nonetheless), has written 25 pages of notes on just
> the first four stanzas of one of the poems, Pensamientos en La Habana. And
> it changes one's life.
>
> I had an extraordinary experience with a short poem of Eliseo Diego, a
> perfect lyric. I fell in love with it because of its beauty of language and
> its strangeness. It wasn't until well after I translated it that I
> understood that in a very brief compass Eliseo was giving us the history of
> black people in Cuba. The cultural information involved kept thickening. I
> did an ok job, probably as good as can be done, but hey, it's not the
> original.
>
> Lezama, referring to this process (I use the word advisedly) of discovery,
> posited that "sólo lo difícil es estimulante." Estimulante is a much more
> serious word in Spanish than its English cognate. It can be both adjective
> and noun, and can mean, for instance, the force that though the green fuse
> drives the flower. "The only true stimulant to growth is that which is
> difficult," or "only the difficult stimulates growth." Not difficulty for
> its own sake, but for the sake of growth, which is a process that occurs
> through the process of discovery.
>
> It goes without saying that not everything that appears difficult is
> stimulating. Difficulty can be worn as a mannerism, and some things turn out
> to be hollow. The mystery is what it is about a particular poem that makes
> us persist in the effort, what it is that makes us trust it, even if we have
> no idea what's going on.
>
> Mark
>
>
>
> At 04:40 AM 7/4/2009, you wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 9:17 PM, Mark Weiss<junction at earthlink.net> wrote:
>> > I was really talking about "difficult" poetry, the kind that doesn't
>> yield
>> > easily to understanding, that makes you search for how to read it.
>>
>> But why is that difference significant if, in the end, you are relying
>> on a feeling that you can't explain? Regardless of the difficulty, you
>> are pointing to a subjective, aesthetic opinion and saying it's
>> sufficient. I agree. I just wonder why people want to pick and choose
>> *when* it's sufficient.
>>
>> > To put this in perspective, my mother told me that when she was in
>> college,
>> > circa 1939, the class read a poem by Wallace Stevens to universal
>> confusion,
>> > and the professor admitted that he didn't get it either and almost
>> nobody
>> > did. Yesterday's difficult art is often today's staple. It's clearer,
>> maybe,
>> > in the visual arts or music. Pollock doesn't present particular
>> challenges
>> > any more, and a great deal of once-unplayable music is now taught to
>> > teenagers in conservatories. The culture simply no longer finds the work
>> > off-puttingly strange.
>>
>> Sure, I use various modern artists and free jazz as analogies all the
>> time. You won't see me arguing with that. I just made this same kind
>> of case on my blog, referencing bop and free jazz and how they were
>> seen as non-musical, unplayable, unlistenable, etc. Now much of that
>> is part of the mainstream scene.
>>
>> On the other hand, the mere fact that something isn't accepted is no
>> guarantee it will continue to have value. Some things don't get
>> absorbed, but just fade away.
>>
>> It does trouble me that I've been able to find my way inside of other
>> kinds of new art far more readily than poetry.
>>
>> > The effort of learning how to read the poem can be what's most
>> compelling.
>>
>> Maybe this is the most significant difference, because I'm not sure I
>> agree. In the end, it's the reading of the poem that matters most to
>> me, not how hard I worked to get to the point I could, or how hard I
>> worked to create sufficient meaning given writing that is more the
>> stuff of poems than actually being a poem.
>>
>> c
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