[Brian Watson]

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[This message has been edited by Brian Watson (edited July 03, 2008).]

[Mark Allinson]

Thank you for that clarification, David.

I must say that I most emphatically disagree with you.

This bracketing-off of the “ancient masters” from “modern poetry” seems absolutely artificial and unnecessary to me. It seems to say that nothing today or in the future can ever compare with the great works of the past, which I think is just plain wrong. “All literature is of one mind”, says Virginia W, and I agree with her. The past and the present constitute an unbroken continuum, and to set the past apart from the present and future is absurd.

More than absurd, I feel it is downright dangerous to the art, all this fencing-off of the untouchable great ones, like they are fixed behind glass in a museum, not to be enjoyed as still-living works of art, but embalmed and venerated like stuffed fossils.

And what constitutes the religious (or “semi-religious”) element in the works of the ancient masters? An attentive and loving contemplation of the world? Why should that poetry of today which does precisely the same thing NOT be considered equally “religious”.

And I believe that Pound would have agreed with me – I am sure he did not feel he was in another world from Li Po and Lao Tzu, but part of the one living stream of art, which I define as essentially religious.

[David Landrum]

Originally posted by Mark Allinson:
all this fencing-off of the untouchable great ones, like they are fixed behind glass in a museum, not to be enjoyed as still-living works of art, but embalmed and venerated like stuffed fossils.

Yes, Mark, you're mostly right,though I am do not see these poets as fixed in a museum and most certainly enjoy them as works of art. I'm reading through Sam Hamill's new translations of Zen poets right now. Put it down to sentimentality, perhaps--but it seems that the poetry was produced by such a different culture and by a culture that was so much more contemplative than our own that there is some incompatability.

Venerating poetry? I guess I do. Someone like Dante or Milton is venerated to such a degree that we do not usually select their poems for comparison to modern poetry. We would not, at least I think, take verses from Milton, Dante, Homer, Sappho, and use them as comparative texts. To a certain extent these poets are recognized as having produced their poetry in such a different milleau that they are not comparable to anything modern. So we generally do not use them as touchstones for contemporary poetry. This is what I mean when I say the ancient Asian poets are in a separate class from moderns like Pound.

So Li Po, Wang Wei, Tu Fu, Basho, Izumi Shikibu ... I could go on and on ... are not relics. Yet to a degree they belong to their own time. They are not irrelevant to our age yet not so immediately akin to the poetry we write today they can be used as comparative texts.

[Mark Allinson]

Ah, I see - the pomo-ism of the incompatibility of relative cultures.

Now, this theory (if true to reality) should make the translation of texts from such a disparate culture as the ancient world, a laughable joke - their assumptions are SO different from our conceptions of reality that translation to our culture and language must be essentially impossible.

But if this incompatibility of cultures theory is valid, this would have made the translation of Aristotle’s ancient Greek philosophy first into Arabic and Hebrew texts, and then into Latin and the European languages a complete waste of time, no?

So the modern translations of ancient texts which came down to us in this way probably (according to the pomo orthodoxy you follow) would mean that these texts are at best fanciful approximations of the original Greek texts, and thus a joke.

Is this correct – do you believe this?

If no, then the translatability of ancient texts to modern languages and cultures proves that there is no significant loss in meaning when moving between the past and the present. Essential human ideas, concepts and emotions are NOT locked away in unknowable cultural islands.

To cut ourselves off from the past and other cultures in that way seems to me utterly inhuman and soulless – which for me pretty well describes the current state of rampant cultural ego-centricity in our universities.




[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited February 15, 2008).]

[David Landrum]

Originally posted by Mark Allinson:
Now, this theory (if true to reality) should make the translation of texts from such a disparate culture as the ancient world, a laughable joke - their assumptions are SO different from our conceptions of reality that translation to our culture and language must be essentially impossible.

Who said anything about translation? I'm reading translations by Hamill and others! I've done translations and published them--a couple of translations of Li Po and one of Lady Night (psuedonymn for a Japanese poet from the 1700s who wrote soft porn). That is not the same as saying I have my doubts about the direct comparison of them to many modern poets because the genre and the milleau are so very different. That's not saying by any means they are irrelevant. The Greek and Roman poets, the ancient Chinese poets . . . if more poeple studied Homer, Virgil, David the Psalmist, Li Po and Han Shan we would produce a lot better poetry .

I have my doubts, though, about ripping a poem by Sappho or Wang Wei and using it as a comparative text. To compare Li Po's poem about starting on a thousand-mile journey with Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" doesn't work and comparisons of the ancient poets to modern ones generally do not work.

You mentioned Postmodernism. I think the incompatability of culture phase of Postmodernism is very sinister. To say that understanding of other cultures is impossible is chilling to me. Once in an academic seminar I suggested that, contrary to the conversation of the group, if moderns met an ancient Greek, or Paul the Apostle, we would still share a certain humanity and common human-ness with such persons. They all said, disapprovingly, "That's a very modern idea"--modern as opposed to postmodern, which meant it was an irrelevant idea. That convinced me I was not a Postmodernist. So I reject that aspect of their thinking entirely.

Still, while we can understand, emphathize, enjoy ancient poetry, it is not always useful as a comparative tool because it is so different and the intellectual and religious conditions under which it was written so entirley different from our own.

[Orwn Acra]

Has anyone read Pound's "And the days are not full enough..."? I think I posted it on one of the threads a while back.

To me, it beats "Station" in every way possible and has haunted me since I first read it, unlike "Station."

since I can't format it correctly on here, just take a look: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/123.html

[Mark Allinson]

(one last off-topic response to David)

David, please excuse me for mistaking your position as postmodern - it looked like you were going down that path, but I am glad to hear that the inhuman and soulless egocentricity of the pomo academy chills you as much as it does me.

As I have mentioned on this forum before, Oz literary studies lost a great opportunity some years back when my daughter (now doing her doctorate in history at Oxford on a scholarship) was informed in a lecture on Shakespeare that the modern preoccupation with his works was merely a class identification thing, and the suggestion that the any content in his works was “universal” was howled down as hopelessly naïve – Shakespeare’s unique time and place, and the social forces which expressed themselves in his works, meant that the content of his work was locked into 16th/17th century and could never hope to travel in time or space. And anyone how said it could were merely attempting to prove their credentials in belonging to a social elite.

The implication of this theory is truly shocking, for it reveals the follower of it as one who has never, never, never, never, never, been affected by a Shakespeare play. Now, to me, this lack of insight into art should only be possible in two types of human being – the emotionless psychotic and the imbecile, and yet these people are actually running university English departments, teaching such stuff. It’s something in the same order of unbelievability as all the Jewish holocaust memorial centres of the world being run and staffed by ex-members of the SS. And if it wasn’t such a cultural tragedy for the nation, I would never stop laughing.

Now back to Pound's Metro pome.




[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited February 16, 2008).]

[Frank Hubeny]

Originally posted by Orwn Acra:
Has anyone read Pound's "And the days are not full enough..."?

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/123.html

Both the Station, and the one Orwn references, strike me as sentimental.

For the Station, you have the "bough" and "petals" images that the reader will use to get some mushy fantasy started since the author is not clear enough about the meaning intended. For the other one, there is the "not full enough" days and nights and then the incongruous "field mouse". The reader will likely see this mouse as cute and then try to make sense out of the nonsense relation between this mouse's motion and the not-fullness of the days and nights that is not in the poem.

The reader has to add too much content to these poems. Because the images imply happy, rural thoughts, the reader is encouraged to drift off into a sentimental fantasy.

[Gail White]

Well, cut off my head and call me a Philistine, but I agree with Kate about this.

I've always thought that those wet petals and that red wheelbarrow survived only because they were easily memorized, and most free verse isn't.

[David Landrum]

I would be interested in finding out why people think this about the Pound poem. The objectors are people I admire very much as poets and editors. Why, gang, do you think this is a poor poem?

DWL