Buffalo Bill's

 My friend came back from Cody, Wyoming and we were talking about Buffalo Bill in the car. Her flight came in near midnight.  I thought of the poem, "Buffalo Bill's / defunct."  I have it memorized, not surprisingly.  I remember explaining the poem to my father when I was a teenager. He wanted to know why Cummings wrote out the word "Mister" rather than using "Mr." I explained this to him.  Now BB died in 1917. Tulips & Chimneys, where the Cummings poem appeared, came out in 1923. In 1917 EEC had published some poems in a volume called 8 Harvard Poets, with a mixture of late Victorian style poems and some modernist ones. He might have written the first draft of the poem in 1917, after Buffalo Bill's death.  I don't know the exact date of the poem, but it feels occasional.  Clearly he had begun the modernist style already, as evidenced by the Harvard poems. He was about 23 years old,  a bit younger than Williams, Pound, H.D, Marianne Moore, Eliot.  (The other modernist American poets.)  

I don't know poems that early that talk about the death of a pop culture celebrity in colloquial, even profane language (Jesus / he was a handsome man).  It's almost like a Frank O'Hara poem. Buffalo Bill was a showman, using his status as Western hero to put on spectacles for the public, "breaking onetwothreefourfive pigeons just like that." The poem is an homage, but with an ironic edge too.  

Cummings never became a better poet than he was with his first book. It is all there from the beginning, the humor and sentimentality, the typography. This poem is among his best.  

I get email

 Someone sent me their poems from Spain in an email, with a very flowery email message asking me to do something, I'm not sure what, exactly. There was some talk of my "magisterio" which made me laugh a bit. It was an odd combination of a very pretentious explanation of what the poet was trying to do (think the "dreaded artist statement") and poems that did not line up at all with what the dreaded artist statement would lead one to expect. I begged off as politely as I could, and put it in an email response that will be sent a bit later today. 

Everyone that know me knows I hate that kind of pretentiousness. Mediocre poetry bolstered by pretentious explanations is even worse, because it isn't allowed to be what it actually is, a modest display of one's own literary persona.  

A paradox

 I've referred to this paradox before, where a religious believer might have serious ambivalence about God existing at all, but be quite certain of more minute points of doctrine.  

We are all subject to that paradox, in that we need to argue the finer points and be right about them, without understanding what the big picture is. How could we? Yet we need something to argue about. 

Advantages of (almost) literal translation

 By literal translation I don't mean word by word, but translation that essentially follows the most obvious path, with most elements of the text except those that would sound too unnatural or stiff. You would say dream about not "dream with" to translate "soñar con..."  

1. It is easy to follow in a bilingual face-to-face edition, where the verso is the original and the recto of the next is the translation. Easy for both the monolingual reader and the reader with some knowledge of the source language. 

2. It is non-objectionable.  It is hard to formulate objections to it, because it seem like the most correct and natural version possible. 

3. It usually avoids amplification, or introducing more words that the original had. It won't be padded or over explanatory.  

4. It will often convey literary qualities of the original text because it won't rewrite in a way that eliminates the tropes. 

Disadvantages:

It won't be particular meta, calling attention to itself as a translation. (But this could be an advantage.)

It may not be musical or have a satisfactory prosody. (But the literary and free version might also not have a satisfactory prosody.).  

Broccoli Poem Written in the Car

 

There was a time I did not like broccoli, 

Other times when I was enthusiastic about it. 

I also passed through phases of neglect and indifference

When I did not think much about it at all.

These are fact about me, not about broccoli itself--

And not very interesting ones at that. 

Dream of parking space

 I was in the living room of a house. I heard a conversation very loud outside. One man was accusing the other of taking his parking space. The other said these were not assigned. The accuser was following the other, and I emerged to look. They starting fighting but were soon separated by another man. The street filled with a crowd of people; I thought they were 50 of them. The cat really wanted to get out so I opened the door. I assumed the cat would find its way back eventually. It got dark and I was a bit worried about the cat's safety.  

Dream of milk and watch

 I had a gallon of milk in a backpack that I was obliged to carry around. 

***

I was buying a watch, of an old-fashioned analog kind, for about $100.  I thought it was a good idea, somehow.