Hearing music sets time free in the ear: the ear produces free time. This insight is the basis of lease-an-ear, a thriving service branch. The free time generated with the help of leased ears can be stored, for instance on tape, which constantly augments the sum of free time because nothing is ever lost. Last year alone, on a world scale, free time reserves of the magnitude of 350,000 music-years were stored — just imagine! The most difficult problems of free time occur when leased free time does not find an ear because the ear that could produce it has already been leased out and is setting free time free elsewhere. Lease your ear to music!
All the talk about anagrams sent me back to one of the two OULIPO poets I truly love, Oscar Pastior. Translations of his work by Harry Mathews (the other OULIPO poet I love), Rosmarie Waldrop, John Yau and Christopher Middleton appear in Many Glove Compartments (Burning Deck). His Anagrammgedichte, alas, is untranslatable, as are many of his palindromes. He says (quoted in the introduction): “[Translation] is the wrong word for a process that does not exist. In a different language you think differently, speak differently, act differently, are different.”
What the translators have assembled is delightful, though there are no notes explaining the methodology used to arrive at the final product. The nonsense communicates its own special brand of cunning:
OF SCIENCE AND RESEARCH
Symmetry, with me, consists in an axis
which, erect, runs sometimes here and
sometimes there. Then everything grows
double from my side: the leg, the skin, the
tearduct, right hand, chin, varieties of
hair. Promptly a second eye bulges from
the head — which, like a lettuce leaf, grows
first two, then twice two, then twice twice two
and yet more icicles. Sufficient unto naked
existence are sixty-four fields. True, one hip
by now sits in mid-belly — the other belly is,
in compensation, held as a knife to
the throat. Then Wednesday in profile: through
holes that, it is true, are no such thing and vanish
fast — they’re flight cocks, air corridors in-
verted — I owe it to the world that much in it
occurs at the same time. And, when the mail
arrives, the moment of rotation. Holidays
spread hypotheses: one rag here, one rag on
top, sandwich style — two antedated green
branches on head. It’s true we need to add
an appendix, disheveling of the earth’s shadow,
da Vinci’s scrotumnal tilt, Minerva’s rainbow-
udder — symmetry so often is sublime.
I simply adore that final stanza, those images, the “autumnal” in “scrotumnal,” the “vertigo” in “Minerva’s rainbow.” The poem kaleidoscopes the world as blastocyst, crystal, chimera: this is the post-Enlightenment Genesis.
Isn’t it remarkable that poetry composed primarily for the ear is finally the most untranslatable?
Adding deterministic methods to the poet’s toolbox seems to have done nothing to make the response to poems less personal. Pastior’s charisma vaults him beyond most work of this ilk, and as with all art, one feels one is responding to it as a singularity, not as a technical innovation (as one might admire a new app). It has elan.
“Isn’t it remarkable that poetry composed primarily for the ear is finally the most untranslatable?”
I guess that’s what I would expect.
You could argue that even an admirable effort like Zukofsky’s Catullus only partially succeeds, which is to say, fails. Music is processed partially by different (and “older”) parts of the brain than communicating through words. No studies that I know of, but I wouldn’t be suprised if poetry, in whatever way it is like music, reaches those same areas of the brain. If you had a sensitive enough instrument you could use it as a test of poetry (maybe poets do). No surprise that it does not carry across then.
On another note, you should check out librivox.org, which has audio files of multilingual poetry that you can download for free. Since everything on the site is in the public domain, the poems are probably old chesnuts, but still very interesting for the sound.