18 October 2017

Considering Translation and Cultural Appropriation because of my class on Plagiarism

Brings us to Nietzsche in The Gay Science: 

One can gauge the degree of the historical sense an age possesses by the manner in which it translates texts and by the manner in which it seeks to incorporate past epochs and books into its own being. Corneille’s Frenchmen — and even those of the Revolution — took hold of Roman antiquity in a manner that we — thanks to our more refined sense of history — would no longer have the courage to employ. And then Roman antiquity itself: how violently, and at the same time how naively, it pressed its hand upon everything good and sublime in the older periods of ancient Greece! Consider how the Romans translated this material to suit their own age … Horace, off and on, translated Alcaeus or Archilochus; Propertius translated Callimachus and Philetas …. How little concern these translators had for this or that experience by the actual creator who had imbued his poems with symbols of such experiences! As poets, they were averse to the antiquarian inquisitive spirit that precedes the historical sense. As poets they did not recognize the existence of the purely personal images and names of anything that served as the national costume or mask of a city … and therefore immediately replaced all this by present realities and by things Roman. … These poet translators did not know the pleasure of the historical sense; anything past and alien was an irritant to them, and as Romans they considered it to be nothing but a stimulus for yet another Roman conquest. In those days, indeed, to translate meant to conquer….”

Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Problem of Translation” in Theories of Translation, 68–69. Quoted in this essay by V. Joshua Adams on NonSite.org

15 September 2017

And "Dear Ivanka" (or #dearIvanka) -- written when I was wondering why anyone considered the first daughter as a possible progressive in the cavern of our ugly ugly present administration


Super cool Rise Up Review published my "Dear Ivanka" poem, which begins with a quotation from Albert Woodfox and the lines:

How long and deeply I dreamed of being
a white lady. How distinctly I wanted 
to be tall and blonde like a pageant winner....


Another poem from April made it into Matter

(Oh the implications of this title.)Here is something from poem-a-day 2017, revised and in the world -- about family, politics, and family politics. It's called "Some Curses."


On summer barbecue nights, family nights

when the grandfather raised his voice
called damnation, was he saying damn nation?....

18 April 2017

One of last year's NaPoWriMo pieces published.

Did you know there were many nudist resorts in Palm Springs? Now you do.

If I could, I would change the second two lines of this poem pretty specifically.

But since it's on the fabulous Juked, I must have done something right. Here is "Palm Springs."