"T. S. Eliot Saw All This Coming"
"The Waste Land was written by a very disturbed man, a fastidious man possessed by visions of squalor, a man unable to distinguish the fall of civilization from the fall of his own psyche. It was written in the after-roar of one war, with another boiling up on the horizon. It was marginal testimony—imagine its fate without the encouragement of Pound—that became instantly central. Why? Because it couldn’t be denied."
via THE ATLANTIC |
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What Sparks Poetry:
James Shea on Yam Gong's "Startling Hair"
"My co-translator Dorothy Tse and I, however, took a small gamble by shifting to present tense for the speaker’s memories. We felt there was an opportunity to signal the fluid sense of past and present in the Chinese, so we used an em dash to prepare the reader for a shift in temporal perspective. Tense cannot be avoided in English, so by mixing verb tenses in the translation, we tried to dislodge the reader from being fixed in a single tense." |
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