09-28-2011, 07:23 PM
You are wanting to follow up the world of non-communication? TS Eliot really did set a bench-mark, along with Ezra Pound. You must go back, disregard Leanne, if you dare, and be non-communicated with whenever you are finding it difficult to sleep.
I doubt that Todd's non-communicating man meant to rule out Coleridge and his 'Ancient Mariner', or 'Kubla Khan', even though they are straight narratives, if you exclude the language and rhythms. I wonder if Keats' 'Ode to Autumn' or (and I have a vested interest here) 'Ode to a Nightingale'. These have the double disadvantage of not being new, and not being American. Many Australian writers must hang their deceased heads in shame also: they go along in fine fashion, only to realise, too late, that they were comprehensible all along! Imagine how humiliating it must have been to come to London, and bump into a fully paid-up member of the Bloomsbury Set -- Eliot himself perhaps! 'Why you must be that Australian chappie, who writes such nice children's verse. Good day,Sir!'
I have a minor problem with Neruda and Rilke. I think Neruda appeals to women, and makes for a good present. But he wrote in Spanish, and Imost people only access Rilke through translation. That can work wonders. The Latvian Golden Age consisted og a man called Reinis, and one day, in a pretty little town outside Riga, I saw a sign to his house. I had never heard of him, but the two elderly custodian ladies assumed I knew all about him, and produced various versions of a poem called, in English, 'Broken Pines'. It was nothing special. Then I read the Russian version: the tone was all different, because of the language, and the image those vast forests where witches live etc. Then I looked at the French version of this Balto-Slavonic masterpiece. 'Pins Brises' it was, and so light, and evocative, it might have been knocked by any one of a hundred fine writers of the fin de siecle, or early twentieth century. Of course, we have what we have. We don't need to worry about other versions, or the original. But I find Rilke's French poems, quite different from translations from German. In brief, I don't count foreigners.
I doubt that Todd's non-communicating man meant to rule out Coleridge and his 'Ancient Mariner', or 'Kubla Khan', even though they are straight narratives, if you exclude the language and rhythms. I wonder if Keats' 'Ode to Autumn' or (and I have a vested interest here) 'Ode to a Nightingale'. These have the double disadvantage of not being new, and not being American. Many Australian writers must hang their deceased heads in shame also: they go along in fine fashion, only to realise, too late, that they were comprehensible all along! Imagine how humiliating it must have been to come to London, and bump into a fully paid-up member of the Bloomsbury Set -- Eliot himself perhaps! 'Why you must be that Australian chappie, who writes such nice children's verse. Good day,Sir!'
I have a minor problem with Neruda and Rilke. I think Neruda appeals to women, and makes for a good present. But he wrote in Spanish, and Imost people only access Rilke through translation. That can work wonders. The Latvian Golden Age consisted og a man called Reinis, and one day, in a pretty little town outside Riga, I saw a sign to his house. I had never heard of him, but the two elderly custodian ladies assumed I knew all about him, and produced various versions of a poem called, in English, 'Broken Pines'. It was nothing special. Then I read the Russian version: the tone was all different, because of the language, and the image those vast forests where witches live etc. Then I looked at the French version of this Balto-Slavonic masterpiece. 'Pins Brises' it was, and so light, and evocative, it might have been knocked by any one of a hundred fine writers of the fin de siecle, or early twentieth century. Of course, we have what we have. We don't need to worry about other versions, or the original. But I find Rilke's French poems, quite different from translations from German. In brief, I don't count foreigners.