Welcome back!

Who knew that Harriet was such a funhouse?

Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Just don’t. Don’t do it. You can’t plant me in your penthouse. You can’t. You just can’t.
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excellent, thank you john
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http://books.google.com/books?id=s3mw-IZom4sC&pg=PA337&lpg=PA337&dq=pound+%22minor+satirist%22&source=bl&ots=u9FkiBxeRb&sig=HELRrTFKTyi9mbGdyWjOGdAnN1U&hl=en&ei=0i1uS_DUDYXAsQOV7-SxDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CAkQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=pound%20%22minor%20satirist%22&f=false
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Michael
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maybe you can participate in the *Ezra Pound: Towards a Minor Literature* collaboration I wanna start?

hoping to post something abt this later on. stay tuned!

oh yeah, and love the Oppen quote! it is SO true…

philosophies of happiness, philosophies of joy, aristocracies of emotion (to paraphrase Pound!)
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Confusing, I know.
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I don’t have a problem with people having no interest in the canon. Maybe it’s because I’m a musician, and tons of good musicians I’ve met don’t know squat about their own musical traditions; for instance, a touring punk rock musician who had never heard of Patti Smith. Why get all sniffy and say that, because Louis Armstrong influenced Louis Jordan, who influenced Chuck Berry, you really have to listen to the Hot 5 recordings before calling yourself an American musician?

(I would recommend the Hot 5 recordings to ANYBODY, btw.)

But I guess it’s not unusual to dismiss people who approach their artform in a way that differs vastly from yours.

By the way, “a political philosophy must be a philosophy of happiness if it is not to be a monstrosity” (quoted above) is from Oppen’s Daybooks.
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Once you start drawing lines in the sand it’s hard to know where/when to stop. Pound loved Browning, who loved Shelley, who loved Milton, who loved Spenser, who loved Chaucer, who loved Petrarch . . . If you need Pound to write now, don’t you need Browning to properly read Pound, and so on?

People don’t need to master the Canon before writing.

Besides, the Canon misses all sorts of knowledge, and writing, and ways of knowing. I happen to wish that Frances Densmore (since we’re talking about translation) were among the famous names of American poetry (and music). Here’s one of her translations that bears on a lot of this discussion (I haven’t read the music):
http://ufdcweb1.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc/?m=hd236J&i=161013
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“from ‘the task of the translator’ (tr., from the german, by h. zohn):

[benjamin has just posited that languages are interrelated in their purposeful manifestations (i.e., core human expression)]–
‘with this attempt at an explication our study appears to rejoin, after futile detours, the trad. theory of translation. if the kinship of languages is to be demonstrated by translations, how else can this be done but by conveying the form and meaning of the original as accurately as possible.’
and we can actually look at his translations to see that the process he is concerning himself with is what we would normally recognize as translation, and assume then that the utter strangeness of language and its manipulations as he discusses them are taking place in such a kind of translation. that is, benjamin is finding out for us strangeness, not manufacturing it.

translating, of course, is not ‘for’ the reader, as benjamin emphatically agrees. it seems to me that since the whole deal is: where do we waste our energies as translators? the answer, it seems to me, is not ‘on theory,’ but ‘on reading.’
reading is the thing we can never do well enough, and i’ll just say in terms of psychology there is a very powerful kind of automatic translation that starts when you become a good reader of an ‘other’ text. it begs to be understood in native terms. a reading of a poem not only changes from time to time, but it has a force which actively transforms it into self-defined meaning.”
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here we go again. and what exactly is wrong with pennsound (he asked, against his better judgment)?

honestly, of all things to shit-talk, you’re picking a site that’s basically one of the best, vastest (most vast?) and valuable troves of poetry audio on the internet?

i’m anxious to see how you manage to spin that into a bad thing. this should be entertaining.
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http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2009/07/david-larsens-names-of-lion.html
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“There ought to be a Sherman Antitrust Act applicable to poetry cartels.”

Had to share that…
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Yeah. & I’m one of the ancient ancients.
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But then, this ends up being one of those logical boxes-in-a-box, since you yourself are projecting a polemical “fiction” – a particular spin – on the nature of faithful translation.

I would think that, in addition to the obvious fact that languages are subtle & multivalent, and that a single text can be translated in many ways, the “good translator” – especially of poetry – would keep in mind that the poet has labored to shape an utterly unique distinct work of art, an inimitable, crystallized statement; and that translation, as an act of philological love & affection, will strive to the utmost to form as close an equivalent, in the new language, to what was formed in the original.
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Nobody’s requiring you to read Pound, though. We’re all free to read him or not and in however manner we wish. My own favorite book of his — and it joyously shouts “minor!” from its own back porch — is the anthology he edited, “Confucius to Cummings,” which includes such deathless gems as “The Sum of Life” by Ben King [NOT the singer of "Stand By Me," but a 19th century white guy], with its charming lines . . .

Nothing to do but work,
Nothing to eat but food,
Nothing to wear but clothes,
To keep one from going nude.

. . . Talking about the body!

It’s funny that you mention “maintaining/policing the boundaries between cultural locations, discourses, and fields of production,” since that’s precisely what was at issue with the Segue scandal.
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I meant,

That’s a pretty big “imperialist complicity,” I’d say.
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No way, no way. We’re early! Our oldest traditions can be traced back . . . 40,000 years? The cave paintings? 40 millennia, give or take. With a little luck and if we don’t blow it, we have hundreds, maybe thousands of millennia to go as a species.

We’re the ancients.
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This might have some relation, thought I’d offer it. From Jacket, a magazine that will be–for those who haven’t heard–taken over, starting in 2011, by PennSound (to be called Jacket2). Itself a turn of events that might have some relation to issues we’ve been discussing here…
http://jacketmagazine.com/32/k-kent.shtml
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I would email the publisher Michael Cross who may have a PDF or be able to put you in touch with Larsen. I think he’s all sold out of hardcopies unfortunately…

here’s his contact:
http://www.atticusfinch.org/contact.htm

cheers!
Thom
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>…maintaining/policing the boundaries between cultural locations, discourses, and fields of production which a 20th century avant garde helped to erode…

Does anyone else ever feel like it’s more or less all over, that there is just nothing, in the end, to really do, except maybe watch C.O.P.S on Fox?
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Can you excerpt a little bit from Names of the Lion, or point me to where I can see it? It sounds great–an act of appropriation, scholarship, translation, and conception. How did he read from it?

Thanks.

-Mark
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The second is to make an observation about conceptual translation as practiced by Brandon and me, which takes very different forms but is motivated by similar discontents. Brandon’s project as I understand it is in open defiance of the positivist fiction of accuracy, i.e. the fantasy of a unified standard. Good translators know there is no single accuracy but a multitude of accuracies, none of which is achieved without cost to others. Or have you not considered how many aspects of expressive behavior the translator has to confront? And what decisions go into privileging one over another? Brandon has. His work dramatizes them explicitly, and if it’s not your cup of tea then fine but that’s not because he’s a fraudulent or uninformed translator.

If you’ve seen my translation work, you know how different it is from Brandon’s. My method is to dramatize the fiction of accuracy by performing it according to the most rigorously positivist standards imaginable — precisely because they’re outmoded standards — and branding the results as “experimental poetry.” In my case the procedural spirit may be harder to recognize, because the product winds up looking like a polished sheet of Orientalist scholarship in the vein of D. S. Margoliouth. In spirit, however, I flatter myself to think it’s closer to what Brandon’s doing — staging translation in all its positivist delusion and imperialist complicity. Contrary to the proverb, the emperor wears a lot of clothes, and we think you ought to see them.
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>I am just perversely interested in what your notes here bring forward; though they seem more of an exchange with Kent rather than a public address[...]

Sorry, not sure I get this. After all, I was the one, at the top of this thread, who entered a clear reservation with James’s dismissive view of investigatory modes of translation!

Now, true, the strong disagreement does not seem to have led me, or him, to conflate, in regards to each other, the “life/person and the work” (to quote from Thom’s little proto-Zhdanovian dehiscence). So maybe James (and Henry?) and I might as well be, so far as the most advanced sector of the Harriet Poetariat is concerned, in sub-rosa cahoots now, or something. :~)

I admit it: I’d sure love James to teach me (and the rest of you) some stuff about Russian poetry. And for all I know, the darn kulak would be a great guy to go fishing with, too!

Onward!
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re: Jay Z & Zukofsky. some day Jay Z and rap at large (and hopefully Zukofsky) will be read as border ballads are today. as language, a la Bhanu’s sentence, at a threshold/defining thresholds. only the border in rap music is not a physical one, that is, not one separating international territory. but a cultural one. culture as intensity. intensity as mark of disjunctive synthesis…

then again, it would be nice to–in my lifetime–be able to take up Pound as a minor literature rather than required reading. the contradiction in many of the Harriet comments I’ve encountered so far is incredibly amusing to me. that there is this insistent, if not dire, call for institutional critique and for ruthless criticality a la avant garde modernisms while maintaining/policing the boundaries between cultural locations, discourses, and fields of production which a 20th century avant garde helped to erode…
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Not sure, but regardless — he’s such a resent-nik!
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Wow. I left England for a reason. Please don’t make me have to go back! Now, that really WOULD be putting the shit back into the mother’s body….
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