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

[Mark Weiss]

In Spanish a noun can appear without el or la, in 
which case it's translated as "a." Un or uno is 
understood. Happens all the time. I've run this 
particular instance past several native speakers, 
because it's such an important quotation.

At 03:50 PM 7/4/2009, you wrote:
>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 
><<mailto:junction at earthlink.net>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<<mailto:junction at earthlink.net>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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