- Opening
- News and Jabber
- Our book
I think we should wait until April. This will bring us to
National Poetry Month and give us the time we need now that we have had such a
slow ramp up this Fall.
- The big news is that Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature (and hasn't responded yet). The following article from The New York Review of books is interesting: (link at the bottom of the article) I have inserted my notes in red.
Bob
Dylan: The Music Travels, the Poetry Stays Home
No one has been a fiercer critic of
the Nobel Prize in Literature than I. It’s not the choices that are made,
though some (Elfriede Jelinek, Dario Fo) have been truly bewildering; it’s just
the silliness of the idea that a group of Swedish judges, always the same,
could ever get their minds round literature coming from scores of different
cultures and languages, or that anyone could ever sensibly pronounce on the
best writers of our time. The best for whom? Where? Does every work cater to
everybody? The Nobel for literature is an accident of history, dependent on the
vast endowment that fuels its million-dollar award. What it reveals more than
anything else is the collective desire, at least here in the West, that there
be winners and losers, at the global level, that a story be constructed about
who are the greats of our era, regardless of the impossibility of doing this in
any convincing way.
I find this interesting just as a tought about the prize
that is new to me.
At times I have even thought the prize has had a
perverse influence. The mere thought that there are writers who actually write
towards it, fashioning their work, and their networking, in the hope of one day
wearing the laurels, is genuinely disturbing. And everyone is aware of
course of that sad figure, the literary great who in older age eats his or her
heart out because, on top of all the other accolades, the Swedish Academy has
never called. They would be better off if the prize did not exist. As for the
journalists, one might say that the more they are interested in the prize, the
less they are interested in literature.
This is interesting since I read an article, I think from
The Village Voice, reporting that one of Dylan's advocates, it not a manager,
has been trying to get Dylan this award for about 15 years.
All that said, this year I have to admit that the
judges have done something remarkable. And you have to say, chapeau! For they have thrown the cat among
the pigeons in a most delightful manner. First they have given the prize to
someone who wasn’t courting it in any way, and that in itself is cheering.
Second, in provoking the backlash of the purists who demand that the Nobel go
to a novelist or poet, and the diehard fans who feel their literary hero has
been short changed, they have revealed the pettiness, and boundary drawing that
infests literary discourse. Why can’t these people understand? Art is simply
not about a solemn attachment to this or that form. The judge’s decision to
celebrate a greatness that also involves
writing is a welcome invitation to move away from wearisome rivalries and
simply take pleasure in contemplating one man’s awesome achievement.
But the most striking thing about the choice of Dylan
has little to do with his primary status as a musician rather than novelist or
poet. Far more interesting, at least from my point of view, as a long-term
resident in Italy, translator, and teacher of translation, is that this prize
divides the world, geographically and linguistically, in a way no other Nobel
has done. Which is quite something when you think that the Nobel was invented
precisely to establish an international consensus on literary greatness.
Why? Because while Dylan’s greatness seems evident in
English-speaking countries, even to those scandalized that he has been given
the Nobel, this is simply not the case in all those places where Dylan’s music
is regularly heard, but his language only partially understood. Which is to
say, in most of the world.
When the prize is given to a foreign poet—Tomas
Tranströmer,
Transtromer is worth
checking out:
After
a Death
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Once
there was a shock
that
left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It
keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It
settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.
One
can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
through
brush where a few leaves hang on.
They
resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names
swallowed by the cold.
It
is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but
often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The
samurai looks insignificant
beside
his armor of black dragon scales.
This was written on the occasion of the death of John
Kennedy.
I would suggest that this illustrates the difficulty of
translation that this article speaks of. Similar too in the following poem. BTW
these people are all Nobelists.
Wisława
Szymborska,
Hatred
- Poem by Wislawa Szymborska
See
how efficient it still is,
how
it keeps itself in shape—
our
century's hatred.
How
easily it vaults the tallest obstacles.
How
rapidly it pounces, tracks us down.
It's
not like other feelings.
At
once both older and younger.
It
gives birth itself to the reasons
that
give it life.
When
it sleeps, it's never eternal rest.
And
sleeplessness won't sap its strength; it feeds it.
One
religion or another -
whatever
gets it ready, in position.
One
fatherland or another -
whatever
helps it get a running start.
Justice
also works well at the outset
until
hate gets its own momentum going.
Hatred.
Hatred.
Its
face twisted in a grimace
of
erotic ecstasy…
Hatred
is a master of contrast-
between
explosions and dead quiet,
red
blood and white snow.
Above
all, it never tires
of
its leitmotif - the impeccable executioner
towering
over its soiled victim.
It's
always ready for new challenges.
If
it has to wait awhile, it will.
They
say it's blind. Blind?
It
has a sniper's keen sight
and
gazes unflinchingly at the future
as
only it can.
Wislawa
Szymborska
Octavio
Paz—whose work one perhaps has not read, or is not even available in English,
one takes it on trust that the judges know a thing or two. For however
arbitrary and absurd the prize might be, the judges themselves no doubt take it
seriously and do their best. Even in those cases where there are translations,
those few people who read and think about poetry are usually sophisticated
enough to realize that a poem in translation is not, or only rarely, the real thing.
More a shadow, a pointer, a savoring of impossibility.
But everyone has heard Dylan, everyone who has a
radio or watches television, worldwide. In this sense the jury has exposed
itself as never before. And they have heard him in the pop culture mix
alongside other musicians and bands whose lyrics are perhaps banal and
irrelevant. Outside the English-speaking world people are entirely used to
hearing popular songs in English and having only the vaguest notions of what
they might be about. They do not even ask themselves whether these are fine
lyrics or clichés, just as we wouldn’t if we heard a song in Polish or Chinese.
Even those who do speak English to a certain level and have heard “Mr.
Tambourine Man” a thousand times, will very likely not react to it in the same
way that a native English speaker would.
Though you might hear laughing, spinning, swinging
madly across the sun
It’s not aimed at anyone
It’s just escaping on the run
And but for the sky there are no fences facing
And if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of
rhyme
To your tambourine in time
It’s just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn’t pay it any mind
It’s just a shadow you’re seeing that he’s chasing.
Referring to the simply poetic nature of language, I like
his Isis:
Isis
I married Isis on the fifth day of May
But I could not hold on to her very long
So I cut off my hair and I rode straight
away
For the wild unknown country where I
could not go wrong
I came to a high place of darkness and
light
Dividing line ran through the center of
town
I hitched up my pony to a post on the
right
Went in to a laundry to wash my clothes
down
A man in the corner approached me for a
match
I knew right away he was not ordinary
He said, are you lookin' for somethin'
easy to catch
Said, I got no money, he said, that ain't
necessary
Dylan sings the words clearly enough. But for the
foreign listener this is hard work. He doesn’t see them written down. He can’t
linger over them. He doesn’t know if they exhibit great facility or are merely
nonsense. In particular, when he gets three verbs in a row ending in
“ing”—laughing, spinning, swinging—it isn’t clear to him whether they are
gerunds or participles. How to parse this phrase? And how to understand the
charm of “But for the sky there are no fences facing,” if you don’t immediately
grasp that in English we can say that fences “face” each other.
Let’s not even begin to imagine the difficulties with
“Subterranean Homesick Blues.”
When we read poetry on the page we take time over it.
We puzzle over it. We relish it. When we hear poetry sung, and sung intensely
as Dylan sings, drivingly, with a snarl and a drawl, which is also a
sophisticated form of irony, how can we, if we are not native speakers, be
expected to appreciate it?
So we have this fantastic paradox. Of all Nobel
winners, Dylan is surely and by far the best known worldwide. Hurrah. But only
known in the sense that people have heard the songs, not understood, not
relished the words. So, barely an hour after the Swedish Academy made its
announcement., I was receiving messages and mails from Italian friends, of the
variety, “I’ve always loved Dylan, but what on earth has he got to do with
literature?” And these are people who know English fairly well. Until finally
someone wrote, “I’ve always suspected Dylan’s words were something special.”
And in this message there was an element of pride, in knowing English well
enough to recognize this.
Needless to say, there are some translated versions
of Dylan in Italy. In 2015 the excellent singer-songwriter Francesco De Gregori
came out with an album Amore e furto,
(Love and Theft), which has some fine renderings of Dylan, or “stolen” from
Dylan, in Italian. He calls “Subterannean Homesick Blues” Acido Seminterrato and does his best to
keep up with Dylan’s mad rhymes:
ragazzino cosa fai
guarda che è sicuro
che lo rifarai
scappa nel
vicolo,
scansa il
pericolo
nel parco uno con un
cappello ridicolo
ti dà la mano
vuole qualcosa di
strano
But this kind of virtuosity is the exception that
proves the rule, and even then, one is mainly marveling at De Gregori’s getting
so near, while remaining so far away. For the most part cover translations are
just a trite dumbing down of the original, entirely at the whim of the music’s
rhythm and the need for rhyme. I would argue that they actually undermine
rather than enhance the singer’s reputation.
We should hardly be surprised then if outside the
English-speaking world the controversy over this Nobel is even fiercer than
within it. For the award has laid bare a fact that international literary
prizes usually ignore, or were perhaps designed to overcome: that a work of art
is intimately bound up to the cultural setting in which it was created. And
language is a crucial part of that. Quite simply Dylan’s work meansmore and more intensely in the world that
produced Dylan. To differing degrees, and in the teeth of internationalism and
globalization, this will be true of every literary work.
October
16, 2016, 9:15 pm
- Current Assignment
- Who did it?
- Next Assignment
- Write a poem about yourself in which nothing is true.
- Next Meeting
- November 3, 2016
- Final Note
- For those who doubt, I really do have a copy of The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo. It's a good book for those wanting to read a respected take on poetry and writing.
