Pound / Cummings / Lorca

“Is Lorca any good? I mean have you any of him. prefb. in orig?” (181). (Ezra to EE.)

Cummings dismissed Lorca in his reply by quoting his wife “M” (presumably his wife Marion?) to the effect that Lorca was a

“‘good kumrad’ & there the matter ends,for me who am(I trust)taking no plugged nickel with heads-snob slob-tails” (182).

[From the Pound / Cummings correspondence, edited by Barry Ahern]

Some Things I Don't Like

I don't like, in translation, the "domestic residue." That's the idea of putting in some references that only have meaning to the target audience, like a Lorca poem alluding to an American Blues tune.

I don't like translationese: the use of an unidiomatic construction that is the result of the translator reflecting the source language too directly.

I don't like stuff that's "stuffing" or explanatory. Don't say "full of wood" when the original says "of wood."

I don't particularly like archaism.

I don't like added punctuation that wants to clarify but ends up blocking rhythms.

I don't like inappropriate registers, either too high or low.

I don't like anything that makes the translation blander. If there's a pine don't make it "tree."

I don't like enjambments that are gratuitous: having nothing to do with anything in the original.

y así sucesivamente....


There's a lot I don't like that puts me sorely at odds with contemporary translation theories and practices. I think I can articulate why I don't like all this, and justify my own preferences. Some of it is "common sense." The rest is simply a fact about myself: I happen to like limpid purity. It is the same reason I like classic prose style rather than signposting my readers to death.

So my guilty pleasure is beauty itself, I guess. I think that's a word you won't find in all of Lawrence Venuti's translation theory. I give priority to poetics over translation theory, but then I must also say that my poetics is my own. It's pretty much "some don'ts for imagists." You know, direct treatment of the thing, the rhythm of the musical phrase, no "dim lands of peace."

Syn..

I disagree with Whorf almost completely, but this is great:

Our metaphorical system, by naming nonspatial experiences after spatial ones, imputes to sounds, smells, tastes, emotions, and thoughts qualities like the colors, luminosities, shapes, angles, textures, and motions of spatial experience. And to some extent the reverse transference occurs; for, after much talking about tones as high, low, sharp, dull, heavy, brilliant, slow, the talker finds it easy to think of some factors in spatial experience as like factors of tone. Thus we speak of "tones" of color, a gray "monotone," a "loud" necktie, a "taste" in dress: all spatial metaphor in reverse. Now European art is distinctive in the way it seeks deliberately to play with, synesthesia. Music tries to suggest scenes, color, movement, geometric design; painting and sculpture are often consciously guided by the analogies of music's rhythm; colors are conjoined with feeling for the analogy to concords and discords. The European theater and opera seek a synthesis of many arts. It may be that in this way our metaphorical language that is in some sense a confusion of thought is producing, through art, a result of far-reaching value--a deeper esthetic sense leading toward a more direct apprehension of underlying unity behind the phenomena so variously reported by our sense channels.

What I don't know is whether this is something in Western culture alone. In fact, the very idea of Western culture is perhaps a mistake, especially when contrasted to anything else. So I don't that other non-Western culture don't hear musical timbres as colors, as we do, bright and dark. I don't know that other cultures don't combine visually elaborate costumes with music and dance in rituals (in fact, this is obviously false.) And I don't know why he thinks of space as such a separate category from other sensory experience so that he needs to think of this as a "reversal" when it is all part of the same process. Other than than, brilliant.

Synesthesia is probably at the root of all metaphor, and metaphor is universal.

A note on the translations

My aim in these versions of Lorca’s poems, first of all, is to “do no harm.” I have sought to avoid mistranslations that stem from misconstruals of the originals, as well as forms of “translatese” that would not be acceptable in a poem written originally in English. Interesting ideas from translation theory sometimes lead to results that do not satisfy me aesthetically. Secondly, a respect for the integrity Lorca’s own poetics is fundamental: a translation should aim not only to be a good poem in English, but also to preserve the ethos of the original. If the early Lorca, for example, is exceptional for his concrete imagery, his concision, and his careful “engineering” of verse forms and syntactic parallelisms, it will not do to translate him by making him more abstract and verbose while ignoring the rigors of his art.

Benveniste

I was reading an article by Benveniste of the system of French verbs. The reason was because I found great material for my theoretical chapter in a few other articles of his so curiosity led me to see what else he had to say.

We all know from high school French that there are two ways of talking about a past event (what you would use the preterit for in Spanish.) The passé composé is a perfect tense using a compound form, like "Je suis allé." The passé simple is a simple tense. The former is used almost exclusively in speech, the latter almost exclusively in writing. But Benveniste says that this is not a distinction between speech and writing, but between two systems, which he calls histoire and discours.

Histoire is an impersonal mode, forbidding first and second person pronouns and verbal forms as well as deictics like here, now, tomorrow, there. The passé simple is used in this (largely written) mode. Discours is a largely spoken mode, but of course it can be written, as a written transcription or representation of speech. In this mode, the relation between the I and the you is primary. You never use the passé simple in this mode, only the passé composé.

So the French verb can be marked not just for aspect (perfective vs. imperfect), but also for its discursive mode. I read this very article in French very quickly but its lucidity was such that I grasped the point with no effort.

So the lyric is interesting, because it is a fictive representation of discours. Here, the relation between the speaker and the addressee is primary, and deictics are extremely important. Even the impersonal lyric is discours, I would think.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
petals on a wet, black bough.

The word these is key here. With the red wheelbarrow, even, with its absence of deictics? Or certain poems of Lorca that don't have a first or second person?

It would follow that the first and second persons are intimately linked, in opposition to the third. Perhaps the lyric is a third mode, one that seems to be discours but is really not.

Against Interpretation

Sontag's classic essay resonates with me, especially her critique of Freudian hermeneutics. I remember first reading this essay and being blown away, because it confirmed my own intuitions about what is important. I am not a great "interpreter" of literature. I am not adept at finding hidden meanings, and any meaning that is hidden seems to me to be a ridiculous imposition of the interpreter. I think I would always get A minuses in English classes as an undergraduate because I was looking for something else, something that I did not yet know how to articulate well.

This is my objection to biography as well. The biography of the artist becomes the source of his meaning. Sontag uses the word "content." This "shadow world" of "meanings" is much less interesting that the art itself.

Sontag interestingly ties the idea of interpretation to that of mimesis. Mimetic theories automatically set up art as an inferior copy of reality, whose value is to tell us something about reality itself.

***

"The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. The interpreter says, Look, don't you see that X is really -- or, really means -- A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C?"

"Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded. Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can't admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning. However far the interpreters alter the text (another notorious example is the Rabbinic and Christian "spiritual" interpretations of the clearly erotic Song of Songs), they must claim to be reading off a sense that is already there."

"The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs "behind" the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation. All observable phenomena are bracketed, in Freud's phrase, as manifest content. This manifest content must be probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning -- the latent content -- beneath."

"In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling."

"interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art."

"To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world -- in order to set up a shadow world of "meanings.""

The Poetic Yo[u]

The problem of the poetic I and the problem of the poetic subject might seem identical. I would argue, though, that they are closely related but not quite the same thing. Here is where a very technical, rigorous distinction in literary theory becomes relative.

We all know that the speaker of the poem is not the author, per se. The absence of a 1st person speaker, or the separation between this speaker and the author, though, does not mean that the poem does not express the subjectivity of the author on some level. I could express myself through a dramatic monologue, in which the speaker is someone quite different from me, or through a seemingly impersonal painting of a landscape in which there is no 1st-person pronoun.

By the same token, the poetic I itself can be very strange and stylized. The word I means something different in a poem than it does in other forms of discourse, as Carlos Piera has argued, because of the strange ways that deixis works in the lyric.

The you is even stranger: in many cases the you cannot receive the message of the poem (elegy / apostrophe). It is more normal, in fact, for the you not to be physically present at all in the scene of enunciation.

The Perfect Lyric

This is a guest post by my good friend, the French poet Jacques Restif:

Everyone is against the idea of the gem-like, perfect lyric poem. Everyone except me. That's all I really care about: the small, perfect, radiant lyric, like "Rose-cheekt Laura, come..." If my own poetry doesn't resemble that at all, it's because that is a rare thing. When I hit something close to that, I am happy, "like cellophane tape / on a schoolbook." Or the poems of Reverdy or Miguel Hernández.

People hate beauty, as though beauty would diminish them. It doesn't diminish you at all that someone else is more beautiful, or has created more beauty than you. As my friend Jonathan says, you must take beauty where you find it.

Flow

I was reading this book called Flow, that my daughter had when she was visiting me last week. Anyway, it made me realize that the best hobbies are those that produce active, creative experiences. My relatively new hobby of writing music is one such activity. I'm less interested in the purity of the flow experience than in the general mechanism.

The book explained why unstructured free time makes so many people unhappy, including academics. Having to schedule one's own days is very difficult. I have decided to optimize this by spending almost all my time writing, composing & playing music, cleaning & organizing, socializing, and exercising.

Down with random internet surfing. I will still do crossword puzzles. I will listen to music, but in more structured ways.

***

I am setting my own version of a Lorca poem to music. I took the images from a poem and wrote half of the lyric from that, using a melody I have already. I plan to do this with several poems and make that into a cd, recording piano and drums parts and singing.

My other cd will be a combination of Rodgers & Hart songs with my own originals.

My idea is to connect the impressionist side of Lorca (his interest in Debussy etc...) to a Bill Evans style harmonizations. This is a nuanced, graceful Lorca, where subject positions ebb and flow (the Suites). The music is related to an idea I am developing about the subject positions in his poetry, his use of pronouns and deixis. I think this Lorca should be approached chromatically, through a lot of shifting, nuanced, tight-knit harmonies.

***

The challenge is formidable. I have to develop keyboard skills to the point where I can play what I write. I have to teach myself some more harmony, and learn the other keys I don't know. I have to learn to sing better, figure out music notation (& music notation software), and recording technology. This all seems doable to me, once I put my ego aside. Contrary to popular belief, where ego most interferes most is when you are bad at something. The fear of being perceived as inept prevents further progress. Oddly enough, when I am composing music I have no such fear. Instead of thinking, "Why am I so bad at this," I think "why does that chord sound wrong there?" Or, "did I write that down right or not?" Or "how can I do something more interesting in these two measures?" Other people seem to like my songs, so there's that. The song seems to be exactly what it is whether other people like it or not. The challenges are what makes it fun. For example, I notice in the second half of the bridge I am always at a loss for good melodic ideas while trying to resolve back down to the final chord. I get stuck in a kind of harmonic "crunch" and as a result I repeat ideas from one song to the next. There are many other problems that I could describe to you quite cheerfully.

Riding / Piera

Carlos Piera suggests that that word "yo" in lyric poetry has little to do with the function of the word "yo" [I] in its "usos familiares." His example is a poem by Laura Riding:

First I was a woman, and I feigned.
Then I was yourselves, and I fooled.
Then I was a spirit, and I subtilized.


Now I am not, utterly am not.

Después de la muerte del autor

I propose that we read Lorca after the "death of the author," in the wake of the "postmodern crisis of the subject." You can take this either as a thought-experiment or as a proposal that we seriously read Lorca like this, from now on. It's almost better to see this as a thought-experiment, first. Only if it works then we can start seeing him like this seriously, not as a clever boutâde.

Objection 1: This reading is anachronistic, since this is a postmodern reading of a modernist author. Here I have to call in the heavy guns, all the modernists who call into question the unitary subject, like Borges and Pessoa. This will be very fun and amusing. I will show how all (most) modernist criticism is wrong.

Objection 2: Lorca criticism is heavily based on biographical constructions. So what? When it is biographical it is either trivial, or not based on good biography. Luckily for me another critic more than twenty years ago destroyed Gibson for all of us (Luis Fernández Cifuentes).

Advantages: the best criticism takes something somewhat obvious and runs with it. What should be obvious but is not until you point it out. It isn't based on cleverness, or stretching out in a pseudo-creative way. Creativity is seeing what's there in front of you, not in abstruse over-complication. My proposal works in this way. Why not treat Lorca as modernist poet, tout court? (This book needs to be in French!) Stated like this, the objections fade away.

The proof will be in the success of the ideas, their productivity in explaining Lorca.

(One danger is in eclipsing the book I have just finished writing. No matter. I think that book makes its own contribution.)

I have a whole list of writers who are my points of comparison. Carlos Piera wrote of the problematics of the subject and used a poem by Laura Riding. Another trick of the trade is to use other, smarter people to make your points for you. The idea that the lyric subject is never simple, even when it is found in its simplest form, as in anonymous poetry, is one I owe to Piera, who also points out that the postmodern death of the subject is already present in modernism. (Curiously, I misplaced this book for a few months and finally found it right on my shelf where it should have been all along. I couldn't even remember why I needed this book so badly.) My list, in any case, goes from Whitman and Borges to Celan & Beckett.

Eliotic ideas about impersonality & the dramatic in lyric poetry will be key. It is interesting how Lorca is never permitted to be the author of dramatic monologues, even though he is one of the century's greatest dramatists. We always assume Lorca is talking about himself, but what if he isn't, even when he seems to be.

We can locate this new way of thinking about subjectivity quite precisely, say, in Beckett writing about Proust. There doesn't need to be any vagueness here. Anyone who thinks postmodernism (poststructuralism) leads to a fuzzier way of thinking will have to contend with me. Isn't it precisely the opposite, to see things in their proper degree of complexity, no more, no less? Even the idea of the indeterminacy of meaning is simply the precise upshot of a factual situation: we don't, in fact, agree about what texts mean. There doesn't seem to be any way out of this situation other than admitting that we don't agree. The texts about which we don't agree are significant ones (in both sense of the word). They are culturally central, canonical, and they signify. Of course, we could not study the humanities at all, or we could study the humanities in a way that does justice to the complexity of the hermeneutical complications that arise.

***


There is a vulgar culture of "gotcha" politics afoot. The idea is to score points against someone for being racist or sexist, or of contravening some other taboo or not toeing the line. Somebody says something outrageous and we react to that, or are supposed to. Even when I, too, am among the outraged I think this is not the most productive politics. It usually follows the logic of scape-goating, in which one individual (usually not even the worst offender) stands in for a much larger problem.

***

But back to thinking about Lorca. Shouldn't our goal be to think? That is, the quality of our thought should be the measure. Once again, the problem is a very simple one of being up to the task, of performing the basics of literary criticism in a competent way. It sounds like it should be easy but it ends up not being so easy, for most people.

Early Poetry

The first person singular in Lorca's four first major works (P del Cante condo, Canciones, Suites, Romancero gitano) is

minimal in quantity: In many of these works are just not that many 1st person poems.

formulaic or quasi-anonymous. "Oye, hijo mío, el silencio..." The 1st person is there, but the poem is not about that person, or the person has few distinctive qualities.

dramatic / dialogic: the first person is often part of a dialogue

non-autobiogrqphical. There are few details that trace back to a narratively defined, autobiographical subject.

non-psychological. There isn't much psychology, or psychological complexity.

non-salient. For all these reasons, the 1st person singular is not particular salient in this body of work taken as a whole. The poems with a 1st person singular are not particularly more significant or important within this body of work.

Why is this important? An autobiographical approach to the poetry does not depend entirely on the subject position within the poems themselves, but there is certainly nothing that requires us to take this approach. The fact that Lorca wanted to write in a less subjective mode is significant in and of itself.

Lorquian Self-Fashioning

There. That's a title I could use. I don't know quite all it entails yet. I guess the question is how Lorca becomes Lorca, how he forms himself, his Bildung. I propose to study this not as biography (though that enters too) but as poetic self-shaping. It is a miracle, of a sort. How he became as good as he was in a very short space of time.

Different kinds of fractured subjects

It might be that the idea of the "death of the subject" is really two or three different ideas, maybe six.

We can talk about a sort of blank writing, neutral in tone and de-personalized, arising out of Blanchot and the early Barthes. It no longer matters who is speaking or enunciating.

We can talk about skepticism about the unity of the self (Borges, Pessoa). The self is fragmented, doubled. This gives rise to a plural and hence indeterminate self.

We can talk about subjectivity reduced to its bare-bones. One is conscious and that is all. The immediate situation is what needs to be addressed. Say a character in Beckett who is trying to use his cane to pick up an object otherwise inaccessible to him.

There may be others too. An extreme catatonia: "la cosas la están mirando / y ella no pueda mirarlas." (FGL)

I've mentioned the biographical skepticism of Proust and James.

It would seem to me that if I could analyze all these possibilities and associate them with particular writers, creating a taxonomy of some sort...

Proust

L'oeuvre de Sainte-Beuve n'est pas une oeuvre profonde. La fameuse méthode, qui en fait, selon Taine, selon Paul Bourget et tant d'autres, le maître inégalable de la critique du XIXe, cette méthode, qui consiste à ne pas séparer l'homme et l'oeuvre, à considérer qu'il n'est pas indifférent pour juger l'auteur d'un livre, si ce livre n'est pas un « traité de géométrie pure », d'avoir d'abord répondu aux questions qui paraissaient les plus étrangères à son oeuvre (comment se comportait-il, etc. ), à s'entourer de tous les renseignements possibles sur un écrivain, à collationner ses correspondances, à interroger les hommes qui l'ont connu, en causant avec eux s'ils vivent encore, en lisant ce qu'ils ont pu écrire sur lui s'ils sont morts, cette méthode méconnaît ce qu'une fréquentation un peu profonde avec nous-mêmes nous apprend : qu'un livre est le produit d'un autre moi que celui que nous manifestons dans nos habitudes, dans la société, dans nos vices. Ce moi-là, si nous voulons essayer de le comprendre, c'est au fond de nous-mêmes, en essayant de le recréer en nous, que nous pouvons y parvenir.

Cazador

El mar
sonríe a lo lejos.
Dientes de espuma,
labios de cielo.

--¿Qué vendes, oh joven turbia
con los senos al aire?
--Vendo, señor, el agua
de los mares.

--¿Qué llevas, oh negro joven,
mezclado con tu sangre?
--Llevo, señor, el agua
de los mares.

--Esas lágrimas salobres
¿de dónde vienen, madre?
--Lloro, señor, el agua
de los mares.

--Corazón, y esta amargura
seria, ¿de dónde nace?
--¡Amarga mucho el agua
de los mares!

El mar
sonríe a lo lejos.
Dientes de espuma,
labios de cielo.

Dumb Postmodernism / Smart Postmodernism

In wanting to study Lorca through the prism of the postmodern "death of the subject" I have to distinguish between dumb postmodernism and the smart kind. Essentially, the dumb kind just sort of asserts the death of the author, the intelligent kind works through the entire process, showing exactly how biographical constructions oversimplify, and how a more complex reading works.

We have to distinguish between plural subjects and ones that are diminished, fractured, and reduced in other ways. In Vallejo, for example, it is the presence of pain, an emotional pain felt almost physically, among other things...

Quevedo's "Presentes sucesiones de difuntos." Being alive means being a different, soon-to-be-dead person every day. I think Borges must have been a very astute reader of Quevedo, despite his suspicion of writers who are primarily stylists.

Recipe for success

Success in academic research will come about when three things line up perfectly:

Your passion: what you care deeply about.
Your abilities.
What other people care about.

If you can find something that you really care about, that others care about as well, and if your talents match up well with what you want to do with this thing, then you are likely to be successful. I can give examples from my own work where I was passionate and had the ability to do what I wanted to, but where the third factor was missing. It is hard if nobody else cares.

If you care, and your audience does to, then you still need the means to get it done. If the task at hand is ill-suited to your particular package of talents and abilities, you won't get far.

If don't care about what you're doing, then nothing else matters. Why do scholarship on something you don't give a hoot about?

***

I also like to say that the recipe involves pointing out something that should have been obvious to everyone, but is not. You point out the obvious, and other people will ask themselves why they didn't think of it first. My third book on Lorca, for example, will approach him through the idea of the "death of the subject." This is super obvious to me (though I didn't think of it before now). The reason why it hasn't been done is that the biographical subject reigns supreme in Lorca studies.

Chapter 1: Introduction: The Dissolution of the Subject

Both Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch and What Lorca Knew: Fragments of a Late Modernity are studies of Lorca’s influence and reception. The first is narrowly focused on poetry in the US; the second contains more varied material, including extended close readings of “Play and Theory of the Duende” and “Ode to Walt Whitman,” a study of American plays that feature Lorca as a character, and an examination of his influence on José Ángel Valente and Antonio Gamoneda. My third book in this Lorquian trilogy, Federico García Lorca: The Shattered Subject, attempts to define the distinctiveness of his own work through a more direct and sustained encounter with his own work. The focus throughout will be on the variegated models of subjectivity presented in Lorca’s poems and plays. My method will be largely comparative: other major modern figures, including Whitman, Cavafy, Rilke, Jiménez, Pessoa, Borges, Neruda, Vallejo, Lezama Lima, and Beckett, offer complementary and contrasting approaches that frame the distintiveness of Lorca’s poetics.

The central idea of this book is that Lorca is best approached through the perspective of the postmodern trope of “the death of the subject.”

Deathbed

They say nobody wishes they had spent more time in the office and less time with family, or on the lake. But does a painter wish she had painted fewer paintings? Does the composer wish he had written fewer string quartets? The poet on her deathbed might ask "Did I do it?" [though that might be more of a male attitude?] In any case, the deathbed regrets are kind of beside the point. What do you want to do now? You have to bumble through life the best way you can.

Both Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch and What Lorca Knew: Fragments of a Late Modernity are studies of Lorca’s influence and reception. The first is narrowly focused on American poetry; the second contains more varied material, including extended close readings of “Play and Theory of the Duende” and “Ode to Walt Whitman.” My third book in this trilogy, Lorca: The Shattered Subject, is an attempt to define the distinctiveness of his own work through a more direct encounter with his poems and plays. I continue to believe that the study of Lorca must be comparative...

Personae

1st persons: I / We

Subject positions. Pluralities & collectivities. Autobiography.

2nd persons: You / You plural

Interpellations, invectives, apostrophes, doublings of the 2nd person. Addresses to the audience.

3rd persons: he / it / she / they

Objectifications, escapes from subjectivity (diffused subjectivity). Alienations.


***


Dialogues. Dramatic monologues. Masks.