In a recent article in The Wordsworth Circle,1 I argued It echoes a line which Milton added to th... more In a recent article in The Wordsworth Circle,1 I argued It echoes a line which Milton added to the Biblical text in that an adequate interpretation of the politics of Tintem Abhis translation of the 84th Psalm: bey needs to take its Miltonic allusions into account, that the allusion, for example, to Book VII of Paradise Lost is not Happy whose strength in thee doth bide, only poetic but also political: And in their hearts thy ways! They pass through Baca's thirsty Vale, [Nature] can so inform That dry and barren ground The mind that is within us, so impress As through a fruitful wat'ry Dale With quietness and beauty, and so feed Where Springs and Show'rs abound. With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, They journey on from strength to strength Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, With joy and gladsome cheer Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all (19-26; Milton italicized his additions) The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb "Chearful faith" also recreates a presentation of Milton Our chearful faith that all which we behold that was favored in the 18th-century. As Dustin Griffin Is full of blessings. (TA, 126-135) suggests, "one of the biographers' favorite and recurring images" is the portrait Milton provides of himself "as I sing with mortal voice, unchang'd courageous and cheerful even in adversity" (Regaining To hoarse or mute, though fall'n on evil days, Paradise, p. 23-24).2 On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues; In darkness, and with dangers compast round, The lines from Book VII of Paradise Lost to which And solitude (PL, VII, 25-28) Tintem Abbey alludes were repeatedly quoted by 18th century biographers as an example of Milton's "cheerful I would like to develop that argument by considering a pardetermination" (Griffin, p. 26). Milton's response to his ticular allusion that I was unaware of at the time. When blindness, the "cheerful magnanimity" with which he Wordsworth affirms his "chearful faith," he also affirms a "supported it" (William Hayley [1796], p. 115), his particular revision of Milton's political stance. "equal and chearful temper" (Thomas Newton [1749], quoted by Griffin, p. 25), served as a metonymy for his "Chearful faith" recalls the "paradise within" that political and moral courage. "[H]e us'd frequently to tell Michael described at the end of Paradise Lost: those about him, the intire Satisfaction of his Mind," John Toland reports (1698), "that he had constantly imploy'd in one Faith unanimous though sad, his Strength and Faculties in the defence of Liberty" (Early With cause for evils past, yet much more cheer'd Lives, p. 194). During his lifetime and thereafter, those With meditation on the happy end. (XII, 604-606) who attacked Milton liked to interpret his blindness as a
In depicting the growth of Wordsworth's mind, The Prelude also Loth to believe what we so gri... more In depicting the growth of Wordsworth's mind, The Prelude also Loth to believe what we so grieved to hear, depicts Wordsworth's self-composition. The poet does not say with For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds, Montaigne that he has fashioned and composed an author consubstanWe questioned him again, and yet again; tial with his text. The poet of The Prelude appears in the poem as a But every word that from the peasant's lips creation of the history it narrates. Vet The Prelude fashions a past Came in reply, translated by our feelings, consubstantial with the poet who composes it. To examine manuscript Ended in this,-rfaar we had crossed the Alps. versions of the poem is to observe the labors of a revisionary imagina tion. From revision to revision, Wordsworth recomposes his past and Imagination-here the Power so called therefore himself. Each revision involves recollecting anew, a revision Through sad incompetence of human speech, and re-establishment of continuity between past events and the present. That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss At the same time, however, each revision loses what it revises, creating Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps, a discontinuity between versions of the poem. Sometimes the changes At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost; are minor and the discontinuity barely visible. At times the revisions Halted without an effort to break through; are radical. Revisions of the Apostrophe to Imagination in Book Six But to my conscious soul I now can say involve an instance of the latter, and the evident discontinuity between 'I recognise thy glory': in such strength versions raises fundamental questions about the character of WordsOf usurpation, when the li^it of sense worth's poem as a whole—in particular, about the process of self-cornGoes out, but with a flash that has revealed position and the temporal relations which that process entails.2 The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
Rather than "Tintern Abbey," "Above Tintern of imaginative power (pp. 9-13), then ... more Rather than "Tintern Abbey," "Above Tintern of imaginative power (pp. 9-13), then vagrant and hermit Abbey" might have been a more appropriate short title are alternative figures for this power (Wordsworth has im for the "Lines" Wordsworth wrote on "revisiting the Banks agined both). What the imagination seems to displace is of the Wye." Kenneth Johnston notes that in Wordsworth's a potential engagement with a social reality — even as the day the Abbey provided "the focus of all . . . tours up the hermit displaces the vagrants. Johnston notes how aes Wye,"1 but in "Tintern Abbey" itself the focus has been thetic distance idealizes the landscape, transforming a altered. The poem was "written a few miles above Tintroubling fact into "a conventional picturesque detail": tern," the title of "Tintern Abbey" says, and as a focal point Wordsworth "recast[s] . . . beggars as 'vagrant dwellers in in the landscape, the ruined abbey has been replaced by the houseless woods,' and [then] further distance[es] them "wreathes of smoke" from the "houseless woods," "uncerinto the Hermit at home in his cave, where he belongs, tain notice, as might seem / of vagrant dwellers" "Or of sitting by his fire" (p. 9). Or, as Jerome McGann writes some hermit's cave." In "Tintern Abbey," neither vagrant of the poem in general: "We are left only with the simplest nor hermit actually appear in the landscape. Each constinatural forms . . . Everything else has been erased — the tutes a possibility that the poet imagines, an imaginative abbey, the beggars and displaced vargrants" (p. 88). From surmise, indexed by the "smoke / Sent up in silence," by the first twenty-three lines, a reader might recreate the its "uncertain notice" of an unseen human presence. socio-historical context which the poem has rendered "ob lique" (the juxtaposition of "pastoral farms" and "vagrant The landscape itself may in some respects be an dwellers" "contains a startling, even shocking contrast of imaginative surmise. Since it is unlikely that the poem was social conditions" [McGann, p. 86]), but at the moment written at Tintern or above it (on the date of composition, that the hermit appears, the poet turns away from the July 13, 1798, the Wordsworths were below the abbey — political text upon which he might have meditated. All that on a boat bound for Bristol), the scene of composition that Wordsworth is willing to see are "forms of beauty," a the title names is apparently an imaginary one.2 The land"landscape of his own emotional needs" (McGann, 87), scape may be a requirement of the particular genre in and if they have not been to him as "a landscape to a blind which Wordsworth is writing: as in any topographical man's eye," they nevertheless exhibit a certain blindness, elegy, the poet revisits a cherished spot. In revisiting this Like the Hermit who displaces the vagrants, these forms spot, does the poem obscure a political reality? A toporeplace and idealize a landscape that might otherwise have graphical elegy does not require any architectural landbecome disquieting, mark to make the setting memorable, but in locating the abbey outside the text, "Tintern Abbey" may well evade By depicting the ruined abbey that "Tintern Abbey" political issues that a description of the abbey would have locates itself above, Johnston and McGann can mark the raised. Johnston, in "The Politics of'Tintern Abbey,' " and poem's blindspot: the poem "removes possibly unsettling Jerome McGann, in The Romantic Ideology, argue this associations" (Johnston, p. 8) and evades "a certain nexus forcefully.3 As we know from William Gilpin and other of historical relations" (McGann, p. 82); "[I]t may well contemporary observers, Tintern Abbey could present a be . . . one of the most powerfully depoliticized poems in reality far grimmer than the landscape Wordsworth's poem the language — and, by that token, a uniquely political revisits. If the abbey were a picturesque ruin, it also proone" (Johnston, p. 13). Since "Tintern Abbey" involves a vided shelter for homeless vagrants whose "poverty and political stance, the question remains how Wordsworth wretchedness were . . . remarkable." "I never saw so loathwould have interpreted it in the idealized landscape of the some a dwelling," Gilpin writes in Observations on the poem. If "Tintern Abbey" is, as McGann suggests, "nor River Wye (1781) of the "mansion" "between two ruined mative and in every sense exemplary" of Romantic ideol walls" that a poor crippled woman showed him: "she ogy (p. 82) ("the poetry of Romanticism is everywhere meant to tell us the story of her own wretchedness; and marked by extreme forms of displacement and poetic con all she had to shew us, was her own miserable habitation" ceptualization whereby actual human issues . . . are re (pp. 35-37; cited by Johnston, p. 8). When Wordsworth situated in a variety of idealized localities" [McGann, p. located his poem "above Tintern Abbey," he distanced it 1]), would Wordsworth…
Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 1996
It is often said that the Shoah cannot be represented. But viewers can learn from Claude Lanzmann... more It is often said that the Shoah cannot be represented. But viewers can learn from Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah how the events referred to as the Shoah produce a reference to themselves. The film presents a montage of encounters, of unanticipated details discovered in filming, of instances selected and arranged as openings to other encounters not included in Shoah. Through careful choreography, the film invites the return of signs from the past. Shoah offers a way of seeing and invites encounters that—like the filmmaker's arrangements—are open to the force of evidence as that evidence constrains interpretative response. Lanzmann's stance, an openness to significance that precedes interpretation, provides a model for a viewer's relationship to Shoah and its material, to the otherness that addresses the audience through the film. In tracing what can be traced and in filming what can be witnessed, Shoah can turn spectators into producers in the work of bearing witness.
of all guests" — lurking beneath any unitary reading (p. 226). Hélène Cixous, "Fiction ... more of all guests" — lurking beneath any unitary reading (p. 226). Hélène Cixous, "Fiction and its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche (The 'Uncanny'), New Literary History, 7 (1976), explores the uncanny doubling in both Hoffmann's "The Sand-Man" and Freud's own doubling in his retelling of Hoffmann. Freud employs his narrative prerogative in selecting "these libidinous regions where the light of law does not yet cast its logic and where description, plural hypotheses, and all the pretheoretical games are given free reign" (p. 538). Neil Hertz, "Freud and the Sandeman," Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué Harari (1979), p. 313, use fully draws upon Derrida to define the terrain of the uncanny, "its shifting between the registers of the psychological/daemonic and the literary, thereby dramatizing the differences as well as the complicities between the two." Later in this essay I shall explore the narrative consequences of this geography.
In the earliest version (Bodleian MS Shelley adds e. Shelley dated Mont Blanc, "July 23, 181... more In the earliest version (Bodleian MS Shelley adds e. Shelley dated Mont Blanc, "July 23, 1816." While compo 16, pp. 3-13), the draft in the notebook that Shelley carried sition may have begun on that day, it is unlikely that lines with him to Chamonix in July, 1816, Mont Blanc has the 63 and following could have been written before the 25th appearance of a palimpsest. A layering of passages—some in since 63-71 recreate impressions of the Mer de Glace that pencil, others in ink; some ordered consecutively, others suShelley recorded on that day in his journal-letter to Peacock, perimposed—the text seems to be structured by frequent breaks The ink version of 1-11 may well date from more than a in composition. As a literary theorist, Shelley tended to unyear later.1 dervalue his experience as a writer: "[W]hen composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline. . . . The toil and Given this sequence of composition, the first break in delay recommended by critics can be justly interpreted to mean the writing occurs in what would become the second verse no more than a careful observation of the inspired moments" paragraph (in e. 16 this paragraphing does not yet exist): (A Defence of Poetry, p. 504). On the other hand, the Bodleian notebook provides repeated indications that much of Mont . .. awful scene Blanc was inspired as it was composed—by intervals of Where Power, in likeness of the Arve comes down thwarted writing and Shelley's subsequent interpretations of From the ice-gulphs that gird his secret throne "that verge where words abandon us" (On Life, p. 478). One Bursting thro these dark mountains like the flame might regard the breaks in composition as signs of uncertainty, Of lightning thro the tempest, thou dost lie concrete expressions of Shelley's skepticism. At the same time, Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging they tend to punctuate a texture of allusions and revisions. [ ] to the Arve Arve sound can tame (12-20; 31) What I would like to consider with you here are connections between allusion and revision—thus between reading and Not all of the writing is recoverable here, but composition writing—during the process of composition. In particular, I breaks off with "the loud lone sound" of the river, and when would like to consider the uncertainty involved. If 'the mind Shelley returns to the text, rewriting and extending the pas in creation is as a fading coal" (Defence, pp. 503-04), then it sage, composition will again break off with essentially the is this uncertainty which lives in the embers. same image:
A 2012 Demographic study of Maine Franco-Americans facilitated by the Franco-American Centre, spo... more A 2012 Demographic study of Maine Franco-Americans facilitated by the Franco-American Centre, sponsored by a State of Maine Legislative Task Force, yielded 25,000 data points that has been studied for trends, patterns and surprises. From the data, insights and questions arise concerning Maine Franco-Americans perceived relations to language, to culture, to education, to commerce, to politics, and to heritage. Highlights from an initial report, further findings and work concerning a proposed 2016 follow-up demographic study will be presented.
L'A. developpe, a partir d'une image fixe tiree du film «Shoah» de C. Lanzmann, une refle... more L'A. developpe, a partir d'une image fixe tiree du film «Shoah» de C. Lanzmann, une reflexion sur l'esthetique de la force et la memoire homerique de la guerre. L'horreur des camps de concentration apparait dans cette dialectique a l'arret qui rend impossible toute negation de l'histoire et toute actualisation du reve
... At the same time, as Robert Dyer and Earl Nelson argue, what these exempla recreate are Vergi... more ... At the same time, as Robert Dyer and Earl Nelson argue, what these exempla recreate are Vergilian ... For, as Spenser has just told us in an Ovidian story of his own creation, the butterfly ... an explorer of a metamorphic world, who encounters parodies but is not recreated as one of ...
In a recent article in The Wordsworth Circle,1 I argued It echoes a line which Milton added to th... more In a recent article in The Wordsworth Circle,1 I argued It echoes a line which Milton added to the Biblical text in that an adequate interpretation of the politics of Tintem Abhis translation of the 84th Psalm: bey needs to take its Miltonic allusions into account, that the allusion, for example, to Book VII of Paradise Lost is not Happy whose strength in thee doth bide, only poetic but also political: And in their hearts thy ways! They pass through Baca's thirsty Vale, [Nature] can so inform That dry and barren ground The mind that is within us, so impress As through a fruitful wat'ry Dale With quietness and beauty, and so feed Where Springs and Show'rs abound. With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, They journey on from strength to strength Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, With joy and gladsome cheer Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all (19-26; Milton italicized his additions) The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb "Chearful faith" also recreates a presentation of Milton Our chearful faith that all which we behold that was favored in the 18th-century. As Dustin Griffin Is full of blessings. (TA, 126-135) suggests, "one of the biographers' favorite and recurring images" is the portrait Milton provides of himself "as I sing with mortal voice, unchang'd courageous and cheerful even in adversity" (Regaining To hoarse or mute, though fall'n on evil days, Paradise, p. 23-24).2 On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues; In darkness, and with dangers compast round, The lines from Book VII of Paradise Lost to which And solitude (PL, VII, 25-28) Tintem Abbey alludes were repeatedly quoted by 18th century biographers as an example of Milton's "cheerful I would like to develop that argument by considering a pardetermination" (Griffin, p. 26). Milton's response to his ticular allusion that I was unaware of at the time. When blindness, the "cheerful magnanimity" with which he Wordsworth affirms his "chearful faith," he also affirms a "supported it" (William Hayley [1796], p. 115), his particular revision of Milton's political stance. "equal and chearful temper" (Thomas Newton [1749], quoted by Griffin, p. 25), served as a metonymy for his "Chearful faith" recalls the "paradise within" that political and moral courage. "[H]e us'd frequently to tell Michael described at the end of Paradise Lost: those about him, the intire Satisfaction of his Mind," John Toland reports (1698), "that he had constantly imploy'd in one Faith unanimous though sad, his Strength and Faculties in the defence of Liberty" (Early With cause for evils past, yet much more cheer'd Lives, p. 194). During his lifetime and thereafter, those With meditation on the happy end. (XII, 604-606) who attacked Milton liked to interpret his blindness as a
In depicting the growth of Wordsworth's mind, The Prelude also Loth to believe what we so gri... more In depicting the growth of Wordsworth's mind, The Prelude also Loth to believe what we so grieved to hear, depicts Wordsworth's self-composition. The poet does not say with For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds, Montaigne that he has fashioned and composed an author consubstanWe questioned him again, and yet again; tial with his text. The poet of The Prelude appears in the poem as a But every word that from the peasant's lips creation of the history it narrates. Vet The Prelude fashions a past Came in reply, translated by our feelings, consubstantial with the poet who composes it. To examine manuscript Ended in this,-rfaar we had crossed the Alps. versions of the poem is to observe the labors of a revisionary imagina tion. From revision to revision, Wordsworth recomposes his past and Imagination-here the Power so called therefore himself. Each revision involves recollecting anew, a revision Through sad incompetence of human speech, and re-establishment of continuity between past events and the present. That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss At the same time, however, each revision loses what it revises, creating Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps, a discontinuity between versions of the poem. Sometimes the changes At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost; are minor and the discontinuity barely visible. At times the revisions Halted without an effort to break through; are radical. Revisions of the Apostrophe to Imagination in Book Six But to my conscious soul I now can say involve an instance of the latter, and the evident discontinuity between 'I recognise thy glory': in such strength versions raises fundamental questions about the character of WordsOf usurpation, when the li^it of sense worth's poem as a whole—in particular, about the process of self-cornGoes out, but with a flash that has revealed position and the temporal relations which that process entails.2 The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
Rather than "Tintern Abbey," "Above Tintern of imaginative power (pp. 9-13), then ... more Rather than "Tintern Abbey," "Above Tintern of imaginative power (pp. 9-13), then vagrant and hermit Abbey" might have been a more appropriate short title are alternative figures for this power (Wordsworth has im for the "Lines" Wordsworth wrote on "revisiting the Banks agined both). What the imagination seems to displace is of the Wye." Kenneth Johnston notes that in Wordsworth's a potential engagement with a social reality — even as the day the Abbey provided "the focus of all . . . tours up the hermit displaces the vagrants. Johnston notes how aes Wye,"1 but in "Tintern Abbey" itself the focus has been thetic distance idealizes the landscape, transforming a altered. The poem was "written a few miles above Tintroubling fact into "a conventional picturesque detail": tern," the title of "Tintern Abbey" says, and as a focal point Wordsworth "recast[s] . . . beggars as 'vagrant dwellers in in the landscape, the ruined abbey has been replaced by the houseless woods,' and [then] further distance[es] them "wreathes of smoke" from the "houseless woods," "uncerinto the Hermit at home in his cave, where he belongs, tain notice, as might seem / of vagrant dwellers" "Or of sitting by his fire" (p. 9). Or, as Jerome McGann writes some hermit's cave." In "Tintern Abbey," neither vagrant of the poem in general: "We are left only with the simplest nor hermit actually appear in the landscape. Each constinatural forms . . . Everything else has been erased — the tutes a possibility that the poet imagines, an imaginative abbey, the beggars and displaced vargrants" (p. 88). From surmise, indexed by the "smoke / Sent up in silence," by the first twenty-three lines, a reader might recreate the its "uncertain notice" of an unseen human presence. socio-historical context which the poem has rendered "ob lique" (the juxtaposition of "pastoral farms" and "vagrant The landscape itself may in some respects be an dwellers" "contains a startling, even shocking contrast of imaginative surmise. Since it is unlikely that the poem was social conditions" [McGann, p. 86]), but at the moment written at Tintern or above it (on the date of composition, that the hermit appears, the poet turns away from the July 13, 1798, the Wordsworths were below the abbey — political text upon which he might have meditated. All that on a boat bound for Bristol), the scene of composition that Wordsworth is willing to see are "forms of beauty," a the title names is apparently an imaginary one.2 The land"landscape of his own emotional needs" (McGann, 87), scape may be a requirement of the particular genre in and if they have not been to him as "a landscape to a blind which Wordsworth is writing: as in any topographical man's eye," they nevertheless exhibit a certain blindness, elegy, the poet revisits a cherished spot. In revisiting this Like the Hermit who displaces the vagrants, these forms spot, does the poem obscure a political reality? A toporeplace and idealize a landscape that might otherwise have graphical elegy does not require any architectural landbecome disquieting, mark to make the setting memorable, but in locating the abbey outside the text, "Tintern Abbey" may well evade By depicting the ruined abbey that "Tintern Abbey" political issues that a description of the abbey would have locates itself above, Johnston and McGann can mark the raised. Johnston, in "The Politics of'Tintern Abbey,' " and poem's blindspot: the poem "removes possibly unsettling Jerome McGann, in The Romantic Ideology, argue this associations" (Johnston, p. 8) and evades "a certain nexus forcefully.3 As we know from William Gilpin and other of historical relations" (McGann, p. 82); "[I]t may well contemporary observers, Tintern Abbey could present a be . . . one of the most powerfully depoliticized poems in reality far grimmer than the landscape Wordsworth's poem the language — and, by that token, a uniquely political revisits. If the abbey were a picturesque ruin, it also proone" (Johnston, p. 13). Since "Tintern Abbey" involves a vided shelter for homeless vagrants whose "poverty and political stance, the question remains how Wordsworth wretchedness were . . . remarkable." "I never saw so loathwould have interpreted it in the idealized landscape of the some a dwelling," Gilpin writes in Observations on the poem. If "Tintern Abbey" is, as McGann suggests, "nor River Wye (1781) of the "mansion" "between two ruined mative and in every sense exemplary" of Romantic ideol walls" that a poor crippled woman showed him: "she ogy (p. 82) ("the poetry of Romanticism is everywhere meant to tell us the story of her own wretchedness; and marked by extreme forms of displacement and poetic con all she had to shew us, was her own miserable habitation" ceptualization whereby actual human issues . . . are re (pp. 35-37; cited by Johnston, p. 8). When Wordsworth situated in a variety of idealized localities" [McGann, p. located his poem "above Tintern Abbey," he distanced it 1]), would Wordsworth…
Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 1996
It is often said that the Shoah cannot be represented. But viewers can learn from Claude Lanzmann... more It is often said that the Shoah cannot be represented. But viewers can learn from Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah how the events referred to as the Shoah produce a reference to themselves. The film presents a montage of encounters, of unanticipated details discovered in filming, of instances selected and arranged as openings to other encounters not included in Shoah. Through careful choreography, the film invites the return of signs from the past. Shoah offers a way of seeing and invites encounters that—like the filmmaker's arrangements—are open to the force of evidence as that evidence constrains interpretative response. Lanzmann's stance, an openness to significance that precedes interpretation, provides a model for a viewer's relationship to Shoah and its material, to the otherness that addresses the audience through the film. In tracing what can be traced and in filming what can be witnessed, Shoah can turn spectators into producers in the work of bearing witness.
of all guests" — lurking beneath any unitary reading (p. 226). Hélène Cixous, "Fiction ... more of all guests" — lurking beneath any unitary reading (p. 226). Hélène Cixous, "Fiction and its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche (The 'Uncanny'), New Literary History, 7 (1976), explores the uncanny doubling in both Hoffmann's "The Sand-Man" and Freud's own doubling in his retelling of Hoffmann. Freud employs his narrative prerogative in selecting "these libidinous regions where the light of law does not yet cast its logic and where description, plural hypotheses, and all the pretheoretical games are given free reign" (p. 538). Neil Hertz, "Freud and the Sandeman," Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué Harari (1979), p. 313, use fully draws upon Derrida to define the terrain of the uncanny, "its shifting between the registers of the psychological/daemonic and the literary, thereby dramatizing the differences as well as the complicities between the two." Later in this essay I shall explore the narrative consequences of this geography.
In the earliest version (Bodleian MS Shelley adds e. Shelley dated Mont Blanc, "July 23, 181... more In the earliest version (Bodleian MS Shelley adds e. Shelley dated Mont Blanc, "July 23, 1816." While compo 16, pp. 3-13), the draft in the notebook that Shelley carried sition may have begun on that day, it is unlikely that lines with him to Chamonix in July, 1816, Mont Blanc has the 63 and following could have been written before the 25th appearance of a palimpsest. A layering of passages—some in since 63-71 recreate impressions of the Mer de Glace that pencil, others in ink; some ordered consecutively, others suShelley recorded on that day in his journal-letter to Peacock, perimposed—the text seems to be structured by frequent breaks The ink version of 1-11 may well date from more than a in composition. As a literary theorist, Shelley tended to unyear later.1 dervalue his experience as a writer: "[W]hen composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline. . . . The toil and Given this sequence of composition, the first break in delay recommended by critics can be justly interpreted to mean the writing occurs in what would become the second verse no more than a careful observation of the inspired moments" paragraph (in e. 16 this paragraphing does not yet exist): (A Defence of Poetry, p. 504). On the other hand, the Bodleian notebook provides repeated indications that much of Mont . .. awful scene Blanc was inspired as it was composed—by intervals of Where Power, in likeness of the Arve comes down thwarted writing and Shelley's subsequent interpretations of From the ice-gulphs that gird his secret throne "that verge where words abandon us" (On Life, p. 478). One Bursting thro these dark mountains like the flame might regard the breaks in composition as signs of uncertainty, Of lightning thro the tempest, thou dost lie concrete expressions of Shelley's skepticism. At the same time, Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging they tend to punctuate a texture of allusions and revisions. [ ] to the Arve Arve sound can tame (12-20; 31) What I would like to consider with you here are connections between allusion and revision—thus between reading and Not all of the writing is recoverable here, but composition writing—during the process of composition. In particular, I breaks off with "the loud lone sound" of the river, and when would like to consider the uncertainty involved. If 'the mind Shelley returns to the text, rewriting and extending the pas in creation is as a fading coal" (Defence, pp. 503-04), then it sage, composition will again break off with essentially the is this uncertainty which lives in the embers. same image:
A 2012 Demographic study of Maine Franco-Americans facilitated by the Franco-American Centre, spo... more A 2012 Demographic study of Maine Franco-Americans facilitated by the Franco-American Centre, sponsored by a State of Maine Legislative Task Force, yielded 25,000 data points that has been studied for trends, patterns and surprises. From the data, insights and questions arise concerning Maine Franco-Americans perceived relations to language, to culture, to education, to commerce, to politics, and to heritage. Highlights from an initial report, further findings and work concerning a proposed 2016 follow-up demographic study will be presented.
L'A. developpe, a partir d'une image fixe tiree du film «Shoah» de C. Lanzmann, une refle... more L'A. developpe, a partir d'une image fixe tiree du film «Shoah» de C. Lanzmann, une reflexion sur l'esthetique de la force et la memoire homerique de la guerre. L'horreur des camps de concentration apparait dans cette dialectique a l'arret qui rend impossible toute negation de l'histoire et toute actualisation du reve
... At the same time, as Robert Dyer and Earl Nelson argue, what these exempla recreate are Vergi... more ... At the same time, as Robert Dyer and Earl Nelson argue, what these exempla recreate are Vergilian ... For, as Spenser has just told us in an Ovidian story of his own creation, the butterfly ... an explorer of a metamorphic world, who encounters parodies but is not recreated as one of ...
The latest in a series I have been posting that I am calling "Poet without Words." The series thr... more The latest in a series I have been posting that I am calling "Poet without Words." The series throughout is a response, directly or indirectly, to Putin's War. Each poem in the sequence might also be thought of as an icon, as a likeness for an energy for which it is the leading wave.
A third sequence in response to Putin's War. I think of these icons, poems without words, as list... more A third sequence in response to Putin's War. I think of these icons, poems without words, as listeners.
Part 2 of a sequence that I have posted earlier on Academia. A work in progress. In response to P... more Part 2 of a sequence that I have posted earlier on Academia. A work in progress. In response to Putin's War, the cruelties, violences, and desolations. An Iconostasis.
In response to Putin's War. Updated.
I think of these as silent poems and as icons of which Pave... more In response to Putin's War. Updated.
I think of these as silent poems and as icons of which Pavel Florinsky says that the are likeness of the spiritual energy for which they are the leading wave.
A sequence of icons. A work in progress in response to Putin's war. Pavel Florinsky says that an ... more A sequence of icons. A work in progress in response to Putin's war. Pavel Florinsky says that an icon is an image for a spiritual energy for which the image is the leading wave. It approaches and as you receive it the icon becomes impulse, wave, spirit (порнвь or νοέμα), no longer as seen but as felt and as a way of knowing.
Your eye claws tear my hand because / I reach to touch what you are seeing— /// from the skin my ... more Your eye claws tear my hand because / I reach to touch what you are seeing— /// from the skin my fluid senses / in your hands a way of reading.
At first with diffidence / and then insistence / a slight hunger for the food / you offer, and... more At first with diffidence / and then insistence / a slight hunger for the food / you offer, and a reticence / of taste still satisfied / with thirst and wonder— //// longing for water but at peace /
with thirst, with a pleasure / that the taste of water moistening / desolations will displace— //// the three guests resting—pausing, intent, / waiting for the meal their host prepares, / delaying destitutions. I am //// at a loss. We pause. I think of salt. / I wonder. Later gold is turned into a powder. //// Then Gomorrah bursts the temples.
For me “Gomorrah” began with Andrei Roublev’s 13th Century Russian icon, The Old Testament Trinity, in which the three angels who visited Abraham at Mamre are seated in a semi-circle around a table that bears a sacrament. In the background are bare indications of a tree (the terebinth or oak of Mamre) and a human dwelling (not a tent but a columned house, its window and door opening out into the bright sunlight from an interior that houses darkness). Roublev’s Trinity can be inexpressibly comforting. As the Russian philosopher Pavel Florensky writes: “amid the restless conditions of his time, amid the strife and internal dissension, universal savagery and Tartar raids, amid the deep peacelessness that ravaged Russia, an infinite, imperturbable peace… was revealed to Roublev’s sight,” the “inexpressible graciousness of the mutually inclined figures.” And yet for all this radiance, this incontestable grace, it is still possible to be shocked by an unwilled memory the icon does not picture — like a prefiguration of the savagery in Roublev’s day and every day, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah for which the miracle at Mamre was the prelude. The name “Gomorrah” means “hidden” or “submerged,” and of Gomorrah’s history almost everything is submerged. Of Sodom we know a little, of Gomorrah almost nothing. Abraham is justly celebrated because he bargained with God for the survival of Sodom: if there were ten just men in Sodom, the city would not be destroyed. Was Gomorrah included in the negotiation? By any reckoning, God did not keep his bargain. When two of the three angels arrived in Sodom and were attacked by a mob, they responded by destroying both Sodom and Gomorrah. Only Lot and his daughters were saved. Lot’s wife was lost because she looked behind her and was turned into a pillar of salt. The just were never numbered. The angels never visited Gomorrah. Later “Gomorrah” became a name for other catastrophes — in World War II, the 1943 fire-bombing of Hamburg was code-named “Operation Gomorrah” — but in Genesis, Gomorrah is never more than an afterthought. How to hold the eternity at Mamre and the destruction of Gomorrah in a single thought? I wrote “Gomorrah” because I was unable to hold eternity and the destruction in one thought, and because paradoxically this inability conferred a surprising freedom. I no longer knew what to think. For me, “Gomorrah” has become a name for this freedom that compels me not to know what to think.
I’ll start this way—just a wish— / with a cat, a moon, and a blue jay: / the cat finds the moon /... more I’ll start this way—just a wish— / with a cat, a moon, and a blue jay: / the cat finds the moon / in the pattern of a dress and later //// the cat jumps the pattern—a cat and / the moon in the pattern of a dress //// at some point attract a lover— / your designs—mine—as armed— / at times fulfill some desire . . . anger / is not a given today, but / feelings closer to morning— / the sun arrives and scallops / a hem—I step out, //// then sleep / in an empty room / the way one day we / played mountains . . . the cat / loves the moon in my empty bed.
Hichas de Poesia 11 (December 2013). http://www.hinchasdepoesia.com/
Listen—my piano—fingered in / the cruelties—rest notes with your / last breath—pleased with all m... more Listen—my piano—fingered in / the cruelties—rest notes with your / last breath—pleased with all my life— //// a little crazy, maybe, but though / obviously a little, second person / intimates gone solo from ascending //// —the law stutters—in my mouth / its stumble gives more time to / improvise along the lines I draw, //// the borders between the and an, / where here—à l’article de la mort— / death sentences are very close to love.
In the dark / you say no //// but someone / has sharpened /
the words //// —the pains in / the f... more In the dark / you say no //// but someone / has sharpened /
the words //// —the pains in / the feet occur / in the head— //// the dark in / the darkness / is not a little dark //// bit by bit / your eyes / teethe their / lids.
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In Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls how her husband, Osip Mandelstam, was arrested in May 1934 for writing a poem in which he compared Stalin’s mustache to a cockroach. Mandelstam had recited the poem for a small group of friends, and someone reported him to the police. Because of the intervention of Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, and Nikolai Bukharin, Mandelstam was initially saved. After a number of weeks in prison, he was sent into internal exile, first in Cherdyn, then in Voronezh. He was permitted to return to Moscow toward the end of 1937, but only to be rearrested in 1938 and sent to the Far East where he died of typhus in a transit camp. Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls that when her husband was released from prison in 1934, the voices of Stalin’s interrogators inhabited the spaces from which his poetry came and that they spoke in the place of his poetry. During his initial months of exile, Mandelstam tried to commit suicide by jumping from a hospital window. It was also at this time that he imagined that Anna Akhmatova had been killed and that her body had been thrown into a neighboring ravine. I began writing “Mandelstam’s Ravines” with this image in mind, with this sense of landscape, and with the experience of Stalinist voices as they speak out of places from which poetry is written. As a young man, Stalin was also a poet of some promise. In 1907, Ilya Chavchavadze published one of Stalin’s poems in A Collection of the Finest Examples of Georgian Poetry. As I imagine him, Stalin fully understood the spaces where what Blake calls “poetic genius” lives. As I imagine Stalin, he worked to terrorize those spaces as deeply as possible so that his voice would speak from them. The historical record suggests that he was often successful in a way that went far beyond the work of individual poets, but what are the effects of the poetry he inhabits, of its spaces, on his voice (or voices)?
Over the course of a year of writing, “Mandelstam’s Ravines” became the first of three sequences of poems which try, as experiments, to engage this history. At times it has seemed to me in writing these poems that Stalin has become a little like Blake’s Urizen and that Mandelstam has become a little like Blake’s Los. At one moment in The Book of Urizen, Los experiences Urizen as if he has been “rent” from his own side. Los waits for “the wrenching apart” to be “healed . . . but the wrenching of Urizen heal’d not.”
A gray squirrel like / an exposed heart. / Cold among sun- / flowers. Desolate //// children clim... more A gray squirrel like / an exposed heart. / Cold among sun- / flowers. Desolate //// children climbing in the / laundry-flowering hills— / floating, the wind lifting /
the particulates of cloth //// like fluttering colors—and /
the valley where the angels / are at work with iron brooms— /
harrowing the ground— //// calling the children down / like swallows into burning / houses on the sudden / clarities of air.
For me “Gomorrah” began with Andrei Roublev’s 13th Century Russian icon, The Old Testament Trinity, in which the three angels who visited Abraham at Mamre are seated in a semi-circle around a table that bears a sacrament. In the background are bare indications of a tree (the terebinth or oak of Mamre) and a human dwelling (not a tent but a columned house, its window and door opening out into the bright sunlight from an interior that houses darkness). Roublev’s Trinity can be inexpressibly comforting. As the Russian philosopher Pavel Florensky writes: “amid the restless conditions of his time, amid the strife and internal dissension, universal savagery and Tartar raids, amid the deep peacelessness that ravaged Russia, an infinite, imperturbable peace… was revealed to Roublev’s sight,” the “inexpressible graciousness of the mutually inclined figures.” And yet for all this radiance, this incontestable grace, it is still possible to be shocked by an unwilled memory the icon does not picture — like a prefiguration of the savagery in Roublev’s day and every day, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah for which the miracle at Mamre was the prelude. The name “Gomorrah” means “hidden” or “submerged,” and of Gomorrah’s history almost everything is submerged. Of Sodom we know a little, of Gomorrah almost nothing. Abraham is justly celebrated because he bargained with God for the survival of Sodom: if there were ten just men in Sodom, the city would not be destroyed. Was Gomorrah included in the negotiation? By any reckoning, God did not keep his bargain. When two of the three angels arrived in Sodom and were attacked by a mob, they responded by destroying both Sodom and Gomorrah. Only Lot and his daughters were saved. Lot’s wife was lost because she looked behind her and was turned into a pillar of salt. The just were never numbered. The angels never visited Gomorrah. Later “Gomorrah” became a name for other catastrophes — in World War II, the 1943 fire-bombing of Hamburg was code-named “Operation Gomorrah” — but in Genesis, Gomorrah is never more than an afterthought. How to hold the eternity at Mamre and the destruction of Gomorrah in a single thought? I wrote “Gomorrah” because I was unable to hold eternity and the destruction in one thought, and because paradoxically this inability conferred a surprising freedom. I no longer knew what to think. For me, “Gomorrah” has become a name for this freedom that compels me not to know what to think.
Aristide Blank, the fictional character, is not Aristide Blank, my Grandfather’s cousin, the Jewi... more Aristide Blank, the fictional character, is not Aristide Blank, my Grandfather’s cousin, the Jewish-Rumanian banker, who died in Paris in 1960; I have only borrowed his name and occasional details from his biography including the name of a casual lover, the actress Leni Caler.
Blank’s namesake, the banker, was the President of the Banca Marmarosch, Blank & Co. He came from a family of court-jews who funded Rumanian royalty and aristocracy. His father, the bank founder, was the first Jewish citizen of Rumania. These connections probably saved Blank’s life during World War II, when his intimacy with the Rumanian Conducator, the dictator Ion Antonesceau, placed him in a position to pay exorbitant bribes. Before the war, Blank was a founder of the airline that became Air France. During the 20s and 30s Blank’s generosity helped support innumerable artists like Leni Caler and the dramatist Michael Sebastian. In return they paid him court. Some rumors speak of a liaison between Blank and Queen Marie of Rumania butthis is far-fetched.
An April 14, 1924 article in Time magazine reports an incident that no one in my family recalls: “Aristide Blank, the most prominent banker in Rumania, was discussing the monetary policy of Rumania at the King Carol Economic Institute when the lecture-hall was invaded by a band of fifty anti-Jewish student terrorists, armed with clubs. They beat the Jewish banker unmercifully until he was rescued by M. Titulesco, Rumanian minister to London. The incident inaugurated an anti-Semitic reign of terror that lasted in Bucharest until several regiments of troops had been called out to get the situation in hand. The outbreak was openly encouraged by the Bratiano Cabinet, following the opening of the trial of six students at the Bucharest University on the charge of attempting to murder M. Rosenthal, prominent Hebrew editor, and of plotting to kill
Aristide Blank, his father, the editors of all the Jewish newspapers and several Cabinet Ministers suspected of having ‘sold themselves to the Jews.’”
In 1932, in retaliation for a close working relationship between the Banca Marmarosch-Blank and Italy’s Mussolini, France’s Laval government (at the time, anti-Fascist) forced the bankruptcy of Blank’s bank. The bank was reorganized, however, and survived under the same name until 1948, when it was nationalized by the new Communist government. Blank was arrested. After some years in a re-education camp, he was allowed to emigrate to Paris. I met him once—an elderly man in a luminescently white hospital room, who emerged from under a white sheet, raised his right arm, and said something that pleased my mother but that I did not understand.
My balance is precarious —/ edged here on a line of sight // that you define as I look out / to, ... more My balance is precarious —/ edged here on a line of sight // that you define as I look out / to, you look back from, // I step forward, you step toward / me, paused to greet me — I was //
Joseph, you were Mirjam —/ the beginnings that we came // to — all the others we saw / clouding from the wash of // steam that each of us appeared / to breathe out for the morning //
Metamorphoses: A Journal of Literary Translation, 2017
In the 1861 edition of "Les Fleurs du Mals," Baudelaire dedicated 3 poems to Victor Hugo, "The Sw... more In the 1861 edition of "Les Fleurs du Mals," Baudelaire dedicated 3 poems to Victor Hugo, "The Swan," "Seven Old Men," and "The Little Old Women."
Rilke discovered Valéry’s poetry in the aftermath of World War I and its traumas when work on the... more Rilke discovered Valéry’s poetry in the aftermath of World War I and its traumas when work on the “Duino Elegies” felt blocked. Valéry had abandoned poetry at the turn of the century but in 1917, in the midst of the war, he published “La Jeune Parque,” and in 1921, “Le Cimetière Marin.” For Rilke, Valéry's work was revelatory: “I was alone, I was waiting, all of my work was waiting. One day I read Valéry, and I knew that my waiting had come to an end.” Rilke translated “Le Cimetière Marin,” then returned to the “Dunio Elegies” which he completed—together with a new sequence of poems, the “Sonnets for Orpheus”—in 1922. Of his translation of “Le Cimetière Marin” he recalled that he was able to find an “equivalence” between French and German that he had “not deemed possible between the two languages.” That feeling of equivalence seems to have been essential for the poetry that followed. Between 1922 and Rilke’s death in 1926, he translated all of Valéry’s “Charmes,” in many ways Rilke’s last major work as a poet. In translating Rilke’s “Der Friedhof am Meer” into English, we have worked for an equivalence as well that we hope will honor Rilke’s achievement.
In 1940 while trying to survive in Moscow, Tsvetaeva translated Baudelaire's "Le Voyage." It is s... more In 1940 while trying to survive in Moscow, Tsvetaeva translated Baudelaire's "Le Voyage." It is still his poem but it is also her poem, perhaps her last major poem.
Translation. With translator's note. With translations of Rimbaud's "Drunken Boat" and Valéry's "... more Translation. With translator's note. With translations of Rimbaud's "Drunken Boat" and Valéry's "Cemetery," I like to think of this translation as part of a trytic.
Drunken Boat 20 http://issues.drunkenboat.com/db20/translation/tony-brinkley-translating-arthur-rimbaud, Dec 28, 2014
If I must sail in European waters, let them be / night-black, a frigid pool on fragrant evenings ... more If I must sail in European waters, let them be / night-black, a frigid pool on fragrant evenings / where a grieving child beside the water kneels and frees a frail boat like a late-May butterfly.
----------------------------
In translating Rimbaud’s Le Bateau Ivre, I found it helpful to listen to Bud Powell’s jazz. In the past I have also found Powell helpful when I tried to translate poems from Mandelshtam’s Voronezh Notebooks. Perhaps that is because, as Harold Bloom has suggested, in Powell as in Hart Crane “the bells break down their tower; / And swing I know not where” (Bloom was thinking in particular of Un Poco Loco). This has seemed true to me for Mandelshtam, and it also seems true for Rimbaud. When the tower is broken, the bells continue to swing, but where? Powell is helpful to me as a translator because I am looking for an American idiom (John Coltrane’s Ascension has also been helpful. Valéry, by contrast, seems to require a different American idiom, one I associate more with
Powell’s friend Thelonious Monk). While a translation needs to be true to words of the original—I try to translate as literally as possible—it is more important, perhaps, to translate the original’s impulse (a kind of energetic wave that moves through the words), to discover, for example, how the impulse in Rimbaud’s poems can shape words in an American English. For me the impulse emerges as a rhythm or rhythms—not those of the original—but those to be discovered as the English poem that emerges, in Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat as it “swing[s] I know not where.” I don’t try to understand the original. I do try to discover the translation—or a translation—it offers, perhaps as another of its blessings.
I am posting this arbitration report for those whose scholarship studies the politics of higher e... more I am posting this arbitration report for those whose scholarship studies the politics of higher education, specifically present conflicts that involve administrators, faculty, and students. The arbitration judgement is a public document. There are over 800 pages of documents related to the case as well. I would be happy to share many of them with anyone whose research addresses the issues involved. Specifically at issue is that way in which Title 9 complaints can be used without substantiating evidence to break tenure. It is imperative that complaints be honoured and fully investigated. It is also imperative that a university conduct a fair and impartial investigation, rigorously respects due process, and comes to a judgement based on evidence. Otherwise the result is—as the arbitrator determined in this case—an "academic lynching."
I am adding to this file, written testimony for the Maine State Legislature.
Playing with impossibility, perhaps, since I don't know that the poem--particularly the first sta... more Playing with impossibility, perhaps, since I don't know that the poem--particularly the first stanza--can be translated.
To supplement "Academic Lynching," I am uploading testimony to the Maine State Legislature about ... more To supplement "Academic Lynching," I am uploading testimony to the Maine State Legislature about the Constitutional Rights of Public Employees.
Uploads
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An Iconostasis.
I think of these as silent poems and as icons of which Pavel Florinsky says that the are likeness of the spiritual energy for which they are the leading wave.
with thirst, with a pleasure / that the taste of water moistening / desolations will displace— //// the three guests resting—pausing, intent, / waiting for the meal their host prepares, / delaying destitutions. I am //// at a loss. We pause. I think of salt. / I wonder. Later gold is turned into a powder. //// Then Gomorrah bursts the temples.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For me “Gomorrah” began with Andrei Roublev’s 13th Century Russian icon, The Old Testament Trinity, in which the three angels who visited Abraham at Mamre are seated in a semi-circle around a table that bears a sacrament. In the background are bare indications of a tree (the terebinth or oak of Mamre) and a human dwelling (not a tent but a columned house, its window and door opening out into the bright sunlight from an interior that houses darkness). Roublev’s Trinity can be inexpressibly comforting. As the Russian philosopher Pavel Florensky writes: “amid the restless conditions of his time, amid the strife and internal dissension, universal savagery and Tartar raids, amid the deep peacelessness that ravaged Russia, an infinite, imperturbable peace… was revealed to Roublev’s sight,” the “inexpressible graciousness of the mutually inclined figures.” And yet for all this radiance, this incontestable grace, it is still possible to be shocked by an unwilled memory the icon does not picture — like a prefiguration of the savagery in Roublev’s day and every day, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah for which the miracle at Mamre was the prelude. The name “Gomorrah” means “hidden” or “submerged,” and of Gomorrah’s history almost everything is submerged. Of Sodom we know a little, of Gomorrah almost nothing. Abraham is justly celebrated because he bargained with God for the survival of Sodom: if there were ten just men in Sodom, the city would not be destroyed. Was Gomorrah included in the negotiation? By any reckoning, God did not keep his bargain. When two of the three angels arrived in Sodom and were attacked by a mob, they responded by destroying both Sodom and Gomorrah. Only Lot and his daughters were saved. Lot’s wife was lost because she looked behind her and was turned into a pillar of salt. The just were never numbered. The angels never visited Gomorrah. Later “Gomorrah” became a name for other catastrophes — in World War II, the 1943 fire-bombing of Hamburg was code-named “Operation Gomorrah” — but in Genesis, Gomorrah is never more than an afterthought. How to hold the eternity at Mamre and the destruction of Gomorrah in a single thought? I wrote “Gomorrah” because I was unable to hold eternity and the destruction in one thought, and because paradoxically this inability conferred a surprising freedom. I no longer knew what to think. For me, “Gomorrah” has become a name for this freedom that compels me not to know what to think.
the words //// —the pains in / the feet occur / in the head— //// the dark in / the darkness / is not a little dark //// bit by bit / your eyes / teethe their / lids.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls how her husband, Osip Mandelstam, was arrested in May 1934 for writing a poem in which he compared Stalin’s mustache to a cockroach. Mandelstam had recited the poem for a small group of friends, and someone reported him to the police. Because of the intervention of Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, and Nikolai Bukharin, Mandelstam was initially saved. After a number of weeks in prison, he was sent into internal exile, first in Cherdyn, then in Voronezh. He was permitted to return to Moscow toward the end of 1937, but only to be rearrested in 1938 and sent to the Far East where he died of typhus in a transit camp. Nadezhda Mandelstam recalls that when her husband was released from prison in 1934, the voices of Stalin’s interrogators inhabited the spaces from which his poetry came and that they spoke in the place of his poetry. During his initial months of exile, Mandelstam tried to commit suicide by jumping from a hospital window. It was also at this time that he imagined that Anna Akhmatova had been killed and that her body had been thrown into a neighboring ravine. I began writing “Mandelstam’s Ravines” with this image in mind, with this sense of landscape, and with the experience of Stalinist voices as they speak out of places from which poetry is written. As a young man, Stalin was also a poet of some promise. In 1907, Ilya Chavchavadze published one of Stalin’s poems in A Collection of the Finest Examples of Georgian Poetry. As I imagine him, Stalin fully understood the spaces where what Blake calls “poetic genius” lives. As I imagine Stalin, he worked to terrorize those spaces as deeply as possible so that his voice would speak from them. The historical record suggests that he was often successful in a way that went far beyond the work of individual poets, but what are the effects of the poetry he inhabits, of its spaces, on his voice (or voices)?
Over the course of a year of writing, “Mandelstam’s Ravines” became the first of three sequences of poems which try, as experiments, to engage this history. At times it has seemed to me in writing these poems that Stalin has become a little like Blake’s Urizen and that Mandelstam has become a little like Blake’s Los. At one moment in The Book of Urizen, Los experiences Urizen as if he has been “rent” from his own side. Los waits for “the wrenching apart” to be “healed . . . but the wrenching of Urizen heal’d not.”
the particulates of cloth //// like fluttering colors—and /
the valley where the angels / are at work with iron brooms— /
harrowing the ground— //// calling the children down / like swallows into burning / houses on the sudden / clarities of air.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For me “Gomorrah” began with Andrei Roublev’s 13th Century Russian icon, The Old Testament Trinity, in which the three angels who visited Abraham at Mamre are seated in a semi-circle around a table that bears a sacrament. In the background are bare indications of a tree (the terebinth or oak of Mamre) and a human dwelling (not a tent but a columned house, its window and door opening out into the bright sunlight from an interior that houses darkness). Roublev’s Trinity can be inexpressibly comforting. As the Russian philosopher Pavel Florensky writes: “amid the restless conditions of his time, amid the strife and internal dissension, universal savagery and Tartar raids, amid the deep peacelessness that ravaged Russia, an infinite, imperturbable peace… was revealed to Roublev’s sight,” the “inexpressible graciousness of the mutually inclined figures.” And yet for all this radiance, this incontestable grace, it is still possible to be shocked by an unwilled memory the icon does not picture — like a prefiguration of the savagery in Roublev’s day and every day, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah for which the miracle at Mamre was the prelude. The name “Gomorrah” means “hidden” or “submerged,” and of Gomorrah’s history almost everything is submerged. Of Sodom we know a little, of Gomorrah almost nothing. Abraham is justly celebrated because he bargained with God for the survival of Sodom: if there were ten just men in Sodom, the city would not be destroyed. Was Gomorrah included in the negotiation? By any reckoning, God did not keep his bargain. When two of the three angels arrived in Sodom and were attacked by a mob, they responded by destroying both Sodom and Gomorrah. Only Lot and his daughters were saved. Lot’s wife was lost because she looked behind her and was turned into a pillar of salt. The just were never numbered. The angels never visited Gomorrah. Later “Gomorrah” became a name for other catastrophes — in World War II, the 1943 fire-bombing of Hamburg was code-named “Operation Gomorrah” — but in Genesis, Gomorrah is never more than an afterthought. How to hold the eternity at Mamre and the destruction of Gomorrah in a single thought? I wrote “Gomorrah” because I was unable to hold eternity and the destruction in one thought, and because paradoxically this inability conferred a surprising freedom. I no longer knew what to think. For me, “Gomorrah” has become a name for this freedom that compels me not to know what to think.
Blank’s namesake, the banker, was the President of the Banca Marmarosch, Blank & Co. He came from a family of court-jews who funded Rumanian royalty and aristocracy. His father, the bank founder, was the first Jewish citizen of Rumania. These connections probably saved Blank’s life during World War II, when his intimacy with the Rumanian Conducator, the dictator Ion Antonesceau, placed him in a position to pay exorbitant bribes. Before the war, Blank was a founder of the airline that became Air France. During the 20s and 30s Blank’s generosity helped support innumerable artists like Leni Caler and the dramatist Michael Sebastian. In return they paid him court. Some rumors speak of a liaison between Blank and Queen Marie of Rumania butthis is far-fetched.
An April 14, 1924 article in Time magazine reports an incident that no one in my family recalls: “Aristide Blank, the most prominent banker in Rumania, was discussing the monetary policy of Rumania at the King Carol Economic Institute when the lecture-hall was invaded by a band of fifty anti-Jewish student terrorists, armed with clubs. They beat the Jewish banker unmercifully until he was rescued by M. Titulesco, Rumanian minister to London. The incident inaugurated an anti-Semitic reign of terror that lasted in Bucharest until several regiments of troops had been called out to get the situation in hand. The outbreak was openly encouraged by the Bratiano Cabinet, following the opening of the trial of six students at the Bucharest University on the charge of attempting to murder M. Rosenthal, prominent Hebrew editor, and of plotting to kill
Aristide Blank, his father, the editors of all the Jewish newspapers and several Cabinet Ministers suspected of having ‘sold themselves to the Jews.’”
In 1932, in retaliation for a close working relationship between the Banca Marmarosch-Blank and Italy’s Mussolini, France’s Laval government (at the time, anti-Fascist) forced the bankruptcy of Blank’s bank. The bank was reorganized, however, and survived under the same name until 1948, when it was nationalized by the new Communist government. Blank was arrested. After some years in a re-education camp, he was allowed to emigrate to Paris. I met him once—an elderly man in a luminescently white hospital room, who emerged from under a white sheet, raised his right arm, and said something that pleased my mother but that I did not understand.
Joseph, you were Mirjam —/ the beginnings that we came // to — all the others we saw / clouding from the wash of // steam that each of us appeared / to breathe out for the morning //
----------------------------
In translating Rimbaud’s Le Bateau Ivre, I found it helpful to listen to Bud Powell’s jazz. In the past I have also found Powell helpful when I tried to translate poems from Mandelshtam’s Voronezh Notebooks. Perhaps that is because, as Harold Bloom has suggested, in Powell as in Hart Crane “the bells break down their tower; / And swing I know not where” (Bloom was thinking in particular of Un Poco Loco). This has seemed true to me for Mandelshtam, and it also seems true for Rimbaud. When the tower is broken, the bells continue to swing, but where? Powell is helpful to me as a translator because I am looking for an American idiom (John Coltrane’s Ascension has also been helpful. Valéry, by contrast, seems to require a different American idiom, one I associate more with
Powell’s friend Thelonious Monk). While a translation needs to be true to words of the original—I try to translate as literally as possible—it is more important, perhaps, to translate the original’s impulse (a kind of energetic wave that moves through the words), to discover, for example, how the impulse in Rimbaud’s poems can shape words in an American English. For me the impulse emerges as a rhythm or rhythms—not those of the original—but those to be discovered as the English poem that emerges, in Rimbaud’s Drunken Boat as it “swing[s] I know not where.” I don’t try to understand the original. I do try to discover the translation—or a translation—it offers, perhaps as another of its blessings.
I am adding to this file, written testimony for the Maine State Legislature.