Cummings decided to become a poet when he was still a child. Between the ages of eight and twenty-two, he wrote a poem a day, exploring many traditional poetic forms. By the time he was in Harvard in 1916, modern poetry had caught his interest. He began to write avant-garde poems in which conventional punctuation and syntax were ignored in favor of a dynamic use of language.
Bialosky:
Cummings composed poetry as a child, writing a poem a day from the age of eight until twenty-two. He experimented with form and language to create his unique avant-garde style, sometimes employing invented words, turning nouns into verbs, and avoiding standard use of punctuation and capitalization.I would bet that this is one of Bialosky's (unattributed) sources. The language is changed enough so it doesn't seem like plagiarism of language, and the ideas are standard enough (everyone knows that about Cummings). Ironically, the biographical detail here is the most specific thing.
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All right. I just wrote an unoriginal paragraph, introduction to a translation, and because of your posts Googled the text to see if I had imitated anyone too much. It doesn't seem so, or too much so, but the googleazo sure turned up some interesting articles and a fascinating dissertation on the author.
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César Moro (1903-1956), the surrealist poet and painter, is widely considered the best modern Peruvian poet besides César Vallejo. Written in Mexico in 1938-1939 and published in Lima in 1957, La tortuga ecuestre is judged by most critics to be Moro's best collection of poetry. It consists of thirteen poems and another four Moro had written for it, but set aside for reasons having to do with the physical characteristics of the numbered edition he was planning at the time. The volume is an oblique chronicle of Moro's relationship with another man, Antonio Acosta, that took place in Mexico during the years in which it was written. The poems can be read as an extended love letter to Antonio, and one of their most interesting aspects is the way they work with the relationship between “I” and “you.” The 'equestrian turtle' of the collection's title is an erotic symbol, derived according to Moro's friend and editor André Coyné from the experience in Lima, in 1934-1935, of seeing two turtles copulating in a park. They resembled antediluvian monsters to him, and Moro acquired his own pet turtle, Cretina. Along with Moro and Antonio, Cretina becomes a character in the poems of La tortuga ecuestre.
Another unoriginal paragraph. Google searching it I find two Getty Institute publications that yes I did read, but I don't seem to have copied them. Yet I feel I have.
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Part of the Surrealist circle in Mexico, at the time La tortuga ecuestre was composed Moro was working with André Breton and the painter Wolfgang Paalen on the Fourth International Surrealist Exhibition (Mexico City, 1940). The poems of La tortuga ecuestre are painterly, working with visual textures, mobile perspectives and landscapes in movement. Sound matters in Moro and the poems make good use of assonance and syntax as rhythm, but it is the complexity of the images, the work with perspective, and the use of vocabulary and word-play that offer the sharpest challenges to both reader and translator. To read La tortuga ecuestre, as José Miguel Oviedo (1977) observes, is to dive with the speaker into a maritime and often undersea landscape populated by turtles, lichens and unusual fish, and emerge to frozen landscapes and moonlit wanderings. Moro, who stamped some of his notebooks from this period with the words 'Cesar Moro, sado-masoquiste,' fragments not only perspective but also body and voice in these land- and seascapes, these 'visions of violence and risk, dream and falling' (Oviedo) onto which are melded images of Antonio's phantasmagoric body. Love here is a transfiguration that brings self-loss, but at the same time reconstructs the lovers as nonhuman actors in a natural world that crowns and also subsumes them.
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