Team Iberia asks:
If there are any, what are the relationships between geographic and political situations, and poetic language? Does poetry "naturally" change because of the location in which, and circumstances from which, it's written?
Lewis adds:
That's a cool question to ask right at the beginning of our reading an entire anthology of EuroPoetry(TM). Over time I guess it must, necessarily, if only because poets of a later generation often will be cognizant of the changes of prior generations. They inherit the categories. A protest poem we might compose is likely to be in some way informed by the protest poetry of the prior generation, maybe? The language might change over time because we inherit, or at least cannot escape, their language?
And it gets me thinking about just how many irresolvable troubles we're going to have if we try to make any generalizations about what we're reading as we move through this anthology. Think about all our impediments!
- The poems are in translation so we're not really hearing or understanding what the authors sound like or mean.
- Each country and/or language is represented by poets and poems selected by the editors from amongst many others, so we can't really know how "representative" the selected poets and poems are.
- Each poet, country, and language has its own peculiar literary, cultural, political, social history which yes, must of course have some effect on the poems, or at least must provide contexts at least helpful and perhaps even crucial to understanding the poems, and we simply aren't capable of assimilating all that contextual information.
- Inevitably, when we read these poets, we have a tendency to assign them to categories familiar to us, but those categories may not be remotely applicable to these poems and poets.
And so on! I'm getting panicky! It's a bit early in our journey to raise such a dangerous question, but what exactly is the point of reading these poems at all, when it seems pretty clear that there's no chance we'll understand them as their authors intended for them to be understood?
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To your last question, about why we should read these poets at all when we can't fully understand their poems as they intended, I've heard some smart persons say that there is something intrinsically enriching (if not soul sustaining) about exactly what you describe: the plight to understand the poems as fully as possible. If anything, the argument goes, it gets us, as poets, to be even more attentive to what we're already hyper-attentive to by our nature--syntax, word choice, word play, etc. I guess it's not so much because someone will translate our poems, necessarily, but that it's just a sort of by-product of reading poems in translation.
ReplyDeleteAlso, it's funny how all our impediments Joel lists are increased exponentially since we're going to read translations from many different languages, from several poets within each language, and from almost as many translators.
Random thought: I would think that translating poetry is, like, you know, the most difficult, and perhaps beautiful genre that translators get to translate. Some nice, well-written prose is probably a happy task for translators. But I would guess there's something (many things I should say) about translating poetry that sets it off from other genres/texts. Since I've never translated, I don't know. But I would think verse translating would be like climbing Everest. While translating the assembly instructions of a Sonicare electric toothbrush would be somewhat less rewarding.
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ReplyDeleteOn a slightly off-topic-but-not-sufficiently-so-as-to-create-a-whole-new-post note: Reading the poets from France, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, I'm thinking again of something that's already been brought up: I'm thinking of immigration and cultural identity.
ReplyDeleteA lot of times I'm reading these poets and wondering which, if any, are ethnic minorities within their country, the way Virgil Suarez, say, in our country is an American poet but also an ethnic minority who also draws some of his identity, poetic and otherwise, from his Hispanic ethnic background as well as from his experience as an American. Poets like this often have the immigrant experience, or at consciousness, too (especially, with many younger poets, when their parents were immigrants).
Sometimes the bios in the back don't help with knowing this. I'm reading ahead in the anthology a lot, and I always wonder if I'm reading a poet who is "Dutch Dutch" or, perhaps, "Arab Dutch" or "Korean Dutch." Such poets may or may not have more complicated relationships to the aesthetics of their country--not to mention the language. It's been a long time since I've been to Europe, and it's so easy to forget that lots of these countries have some good diversity, too. And I'm wondering to what extent such diversity has made its way into our anthology?
I think it's fair to say that although hyphenated American poets may certainly retain important and influential ties to other languages, the fact that English is a global lingua franca must mean that those poets don't find English as weird/foreign as a hyphenated Icelandic poet would find Icelandic, no? Take Zehra Cirak as an example. Born Istanbul 1961, but grows up in Germany. Turks have been emigrating to Germany to work since the 19th century, but Germany has always made it very difficult for these people (or their children or their childrens' children) to become German citizens. I'm tempted to argue that Cirak's relationship to both the German language and the German literary tradition is probably more ambivalent (and weird) than Suarez's to American literary history and the English language. Yes? No?
ReplyDeleteI think yes, for the reasons you offered. Especially, as you point out, the English language is all over.
ReplyDeleteThe television show, "Friends," for example, is super popular with teenagers in India, from what I understand. And to Joel's point, I'm not sure how many Icelandic TV programs are beloved in Mumbai.
What's really significant too is the issue you bring up of how immigrants how treated by the host country, how they've been historically treated, and citizenship (versus, say, a sense of citizenship/belonging/identity).
It's amazing how much these matter vary from country to country, let alone writer to writer. It's embarrassing how little I really know about some of the countries we'll be covering, especially with respect to this whole matter of cultural identity/immigration/aesthetic temperament.
I was reading ahead in our book and felt weirdly guilty: here I am flipping back and forth through the anthology, comparing the apparent aesthetics of the Macedonian poets to that of the Latvian poets--without any real understanding or knowledge of either society, or the poet's relationship to it. (Which is why I was relieved that we're supplementing our reading/analysis of the anthology with the groups providing a crash course in each country's background and poetic tradition. Actually though, the most common question I've had so far reading these poets is, "I wonder what poets Poet-X reads/has been influenced by?")
OK, now having swung the conversation toward a sense that hyphenated European poets might feel more antagonistic toward their adopted languages than hyphenated Americans, I have to swing it back by pointing out that much of Europe, these days, is EU and more unified than ever. Lewis might feel guilty -- I think "arbitrary" or "ignorant" might be more what he means -- comparing Latvians to Macedonians, but should he? Aren't they all just Europeans now? No, of course they're not, and that's why you shouldn't order lasagna in Ireland or beer in Italy. But the idea of being not Irish or Italian but European is certainly closer to hand today than it ever has been before. Fifty years ago there wouldn't have been a restaurant in Dublin that served lasagna or a pub in Rome with Guiness on tap.
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