Anti-Climacus

SIGN ME UP: Back on Tuesday. Links of interest:

*Althouse: "I'm in the Fellini camp -- can we go to a place called Fellini Camp?" You can love her or hate her, but it's (artistically) satisfying how she responds to criticism in the most absurdist way possible (such as the run of Fellini-lolcatz, a phenomenon I generally don't understand).

*Tony Wilson, founder of Factory Records and the Haçienda (and so in-part responsible for Joy Division, New Order, the Happy Mondays, and early 90s British house), died Friday.

*More evidence that North Carolina is an odd place: the flower machine at RDU has a webpage, proof that absolutely everything is somewhere on the interweb now. (link: Julian Sanchez)

*Brian from mgoblog: Destroy Harbaugh; which contains an interesting discussion on why football players tend to do fairly well even if they get their degrees in 'easy' majors.

*On poetry and translation, from Moreover:

"If you ask me, Polish sure sounds good in English. It is perhaps a conceit of an English speaker, as well as a testament to the skill of the poets and translators, that I feel this way. I have not read a single poem by a Polish poet in Polish—or in any language other than English, for that matter. But I do know that a good translation makes the reader aware of what a poem means, and at the same time makes the reader aware that it is not English she is reading. In this way a successful translation is like walking through the streets of a foreign city and realizing that you can understand what everyone is saying around you, if only just barely."

Polish poetry has always struck me in exactly this way, but I'm not sure if I think it's true in general. If the poetry relies to a large extent on the words--the way the poet uses repetition or plays off repeated or mutated sounds and structures within the language--then these have a good chance of being lost in translation. If the poetry emphasizes the image or conceptual content more (as has been the case in the Polish poetry I've read, especially Milosz), then it should be easier to reproduce the style and effect on the poem in another language. The affinity between Polish poetry (and Russian literature, which has never appeared to lose much in translation as I've read it; or perhaps eastern European literature more generally, though I've only taken a few tentative steps here, so proceed cautiously) and English-speaking readership may simply be a reflection of a shared set of concerns: the poetry survives (or thrives) in translation because the content, or images, need no translation. Or perhaps this is just the measure of good poetry in any language.