"Lighten up!", or "zenlightenment, 7; zeitgeist, 0"
Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Fri, 15 Oct 1999 15:31:49 -0500
Bruce writes:
> Not sure if some of the rocks were aimed at my cabin here in San Francisco
Very possibly, Bruce, but you post with such vigor, such a manic
disregard for the slow, bored, plodding reader that I can't help but
admire you.
> Intrigued by your reference to translators of Rilke. I assume you are
> blasting them out of the water.
Like so many limping swans. Walter Arndt has committed crimes in his
translations, and it doesn't take more than a semester in German to
see it.
It's the larger spirit of the haiku I disagree with. Most translated
poems do grave injustices to their originals, but a translated haiku
is like the reanimated corpse of a beloved grandmother made to speak
in grunts and moans. Or so I imagine. At least poems tranlsated from
German to English remain in the same empire. The east and the west
may be closer than ever before, but their roots still come out on
different ends of the planet, and there's no easy transference of
worldview or cultural saturation back and forth. The east isn't just
other or unknown, because other and unkown always work in a dialogue
with what's familiar. The east, relative to the west, is a different
structure altogether, unknowable from the outside (here). Consider
the difference between Zen, whatever it is, and poststructuralism.
One is real, and the other is the intellectual construction of what's
real turned inside out and dismantled. Deleuze and Guattari's
_Anti-Oedipus_ is probably the closest thing we have to enlightenment
in the west, and it sure doesn't look anything like monks and frogs
and lakes.
--
Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu