Re: "Lighten up!", or "zenlightenment, 7; zeitgeist, 0"
citycabn (citycabn@gateway.net)
Fri, 15 Oct 1999 14:06:16 -0700
Bruce attempts to reply to Matt who replied to Bruce who replied to Matt
after Matt . . .
>
>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.
>
I need all the admiration I can get at this time. Thanks. Toss more rocks.
:)
>> 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.
>
Never considered Arndt one of the best. But who am I to say which are.
Are you fluent in German? Which I guess to mean something along the lines
of: while Rilke's poems are seducing you, is your mind turning over the
German into the sluttish hiss of English? (Though perhaps you prefer other
lovers, so to speak: the Big G., Holderlin, Trakl, Celan ...)
>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.
Nice image!
At least poems tranlsated from
>German to English remain in the same empire.
Yes, agree.
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).
Yes. I think in one of your ancient posts hiding in Tim's Archives you
speak along these lines re JDS's futile attempts to get outside of the west
*to* the east. That he is of NYC, 1940s, grew up reading western classics.
That Seymour is of the west (Eliot, Rilke) and not the east (the haiku &
Chinese poets). I think the 184 poems if ever published would be failures.
But S.'s fascination transcends his poems. I think JDS did make a "mistake"
casting them into double haikus. I do think we of the west can get *a tiny
bit* closer to India than the far east. A great novel to read is Raja Rao's
"The Serpent and the Rope," written in English but with a Vendantic mind
which has soaked up the millennia of Sanscrit. (Whatever the hell that's
suppose to mean...)
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.
>
I finished grad school in '74 so missed out on Deleuze & Guattari, et al.,
though have no idea when they appeared in English. Have copied down
"Anti-Oedipus" for future reference. Thanks.
--Bruce
>--
>Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu
>