Public Group active 8 months ago

Poets Together!

tuesdays 215 to 4

And permanent Zoom link:
https://gc-cuny.zoom.us/j/5406553898?pwd=TTlZK3FLTUQ2MkxYUmRJS0dxTmdxdz09

Admins:

  • Tuesday at 430-6

    Posted by Mary Ann Caws (she/her) on September 27, 2020 at 4:58 pm

    hello dear friends all,

    since monday sept 28 is Yom Kippur, and no classes are held at the GC, we are meeting (those who can and feel like it)

    on Tuesday the 29, and in principle, we will hover around Roland Barthes and Samuel Beckett and John Berger, with many having sent around texts to think upon (If you don’t get to some, as I often don’t, no worry, we are a RELAXED group, wherever we might be zooming from) as in our Elasticity discussion via Boccioni and not as in RELACHE as in the darkened theatre, although these days, it feels somewhat like an ongoing darkening

    Many fascinating things leap to my mind when rereading Mark Polizzotti’s Sympathy for the Traitor: a Translation Manifesto, for one example, the reason some translators of the Bible said Eve ate an apple was the similarity of Malus= apple and Mal = evil, thus sin, etc.

    another fascinating detail: in Ezra Pound’s great translations of the Chinese poems he couldn’t read in the original, and got there through Fenollosa’s scholarship, for his 1915 CATHAY volume, he somehow captured the spirit of Li Po and Confucius, and “intuitively corrected mistakes in the Fenollosa manuscript” (p.226)

    And I very much salute his quoting the poet W.S. Merwin: “I have to feel that I have a sense of what makes that poem exciting in the original…I want it to be a poem that has that same kind of ==I don’t know — drama that same kind of urgency. …if it’s flat, it doesn’t matter whether it rhymes or has meter or anything. You’ve lost the poem.”

    Maddie and Patrica and the other poets with us know that about translation… the point isn’t so much always the meaning, but that urgency.

    anyway, I personally cannot translate fiction well, because I can’t get the urgency: so I stick mostly to poetry!

    warmly to each, see you on Tuesday, and bring whatever you’d like to discuss, relevant or slightly so or even not…

    Mary Ann

    Mary Ann Caws

8 replies
    • Patricia Laurence
      Participant
      September 27, 2020 at 10:41 pm

      Read Polizotti: some translators (I can’t find it in Jerome), 17c. European dramatists (who wrote in Latin and influenced Milton) consciously read and used the word “mala/malum” for “apple/evil” as a pun, liking the associative meanings, as Polizotti claims.  But Milton  pointedly with no scriptural foundation only allows the description “apple”  to come out of the mouth of Satan, the tempter (2X), in referring to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. He talks to Eve of his desire of “tasting those fair apples” and addressing his legions after the Fall, “man by fraud I have seduc’d/From his Creator with an apple.”  His success in tempting Eve is dependent upon her forgetting that it is “forbidden” fruit and an apple and its sensuous qualities (color, taste, smell, hunger—a large part of Milton’s temptation) is attractive and a distraction.  Eve only refers to the fruit as “forbidden” in Milton given the prohibition. Genesis is bare of detail and refers only to a “fruit” and has, as noted, different literary and visual translations in non-European countries (Middle East, fig, pomegranate; Africa, bananas). The evil pun only works in Latin for European writers as apple has different meanings in other cultures: a gift, a cure, a union. Maddie, pitch in.

    • Mary Ann Caws (she/her)
      Participant
      September 28, 2020 at 12:34 am

      right enough, dear Pat, and I was replying and it got scraped, but Jerome was I think responding to Latin and Europe, to be sure,

      and wanted to think of word play and the mal/malle (evil/suitcase) and also the apple comes in, a Breton poem, will try to share it on Tuesday, thanks and what a delight to worry about words in this difficult Age of Anxiety and will try to remember to share an important hinge of a word:

      “after and afterward” caught by a detective clue to a crime….. and on and on,

      warmly to each, m.a.

    • Patricia Laurence
      Participant
      September 28, 2020 at 2:32 pm

      So saying, her rash hand in evil hour

      Forth reaching to the Fruit, she pluck’d, she eat:

      Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat

      Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe,

      That all was lost.

    • Patricia Laurence
      Participant
      September 28, 2020 at 2:51 pm

      Sistine Chapel image, Michelangelo, fig tree; Blake; Lucas Cranach

      [image: A Detail You May Not Have Noticed in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel
      Fresco – Atlas Obscura]
      [image: William Blake ~ Projeto C.O.V.A. – Blog | William blake, Bible
      illustrations, Adam and eve]

      [image: Apple logo | Logok]

    • Patricia Laurence
      Participant
      September 28, 2020 at 3:38 pm

      Need instruction on how to add images.

      Pat

      • Joshua Wilner
        Participant
        September 28, 2020 at 5:44 pm

        Click “Library”

        Click “Add New Item” (at top)

        Drop down “Choose a type” menu

        Click “Upload a file”; choose your file and click “open” to attach it

        Click “Upload” at the bottom of the page

        done

    • Patricia Brody
      Participant
      September 28, 2020 at 4:43 pm

      Wow! Theres at least 1000 poems in this!

      On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 11:13 PM Patricia Laurence (Poets Together!) <
      [email protected]> wrote:

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    • Patricia Brody
      Participant
      September 28, 2020 at 4:51 pm

      Hi is this Milton?

      On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 3:04 PM Patricia Laurence (Poets Together!) <
      [email protected]> wrote:

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8 replies

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