Words created by Poe
Feeling sad and wishing for words that answer.
Tagging this as “ezra pound cake” because, well, why not?
According to the OED, other words Poe added to the English language include: belaud, bemirror, bullyism, circumgyratory, disenchain, elocutionary, elocutionize, Macauleyism, markedness, melodramatism, mispunctuate, multicolour, mystific, normality, overscore, paragraphism, pesty, phaseless, quotability, scoriae, sentience, Shelleyan, spasmodist, spherify, tintinnabulation, unanswerability, unclassifiable, unindividualized, unmined, unmouldered…
via Edgar Allan Poe, by Kevin J. Hayes (Reaktion Books, 2009)
Human Condition
“…the practice of translation rests on two presuppositions. The first is that we are all different—we speak different tongues and see the world in ways that are deeply influenced by the particular features of the tongue that we speak. The second is that we are all the same—that we can share the same broad and narrow kinds of feelings, information, understandings, and so forth. Without both of these suppositions, translation could not exist.” - David Bellos, near the end of Is That a Fish in Your Ear?
poetry & translation & history
Dante, Joachim du Bellay, Alexander Pope, Ludwig Tieck, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ezra Pound, Jacques Roubaud, Robert Lowell, C.K. Williams — think of a great poet, and you’ve almost certainly thought of a translator, too. In the Western tradition there is no cutoff point between writing poems and writing translations or writing poems in translation. Poetic forms — the sonnet, the ballad, the rondeau, the pantoum, the ghazal — have migrated among languages as diverse as French, Italian, Russian, Persian, English, and Malay over the last eight hundred years. Poetic styles — Romantic, Symbolist, Futurist, Acmeist, Surrealist — are common European properties, as typical of German as of Polish poetry. Every so-called poetic tradition is made of other traditions. Against the dubious adage that poetry is what is lost in translation we have to set the more easily demonstrable fact that, from many points of view, the history of Western poetry is the history of poetry in translation. - David Bellos, Is that a Fish in Your Ear? (emphasis added by me)
On Dictionaries
“To try to capture ‘all the words of a language’ is as futile as trying to capture all the drops of water in a flowing river. If you managed to do it, it wouldn’t be a flowing river anymore. It would be a fish tank.” - David Bellows, Is That a Fish in your Ear?
Before history and politics, there’s language. And it’s language, the sheer pleasure of making it and bending it and seeing it form on the page and hearing it whistle in my head—this is the thing that makes my work go. And art can be exhilarating despite the darkness—and there’s certainly much darker material than mine—if the reader is sensitive to the music. What I try to do is create complex human beings, ordinary-extraordinary men and women who live in the particular skin of the late twentieth century. I try to record what I see and hear and sense around me—what I feel in the currents, the electric stuff of the culture. I think these are American forces and energies. And they belong to our time.
—Don DeLillo
(Source: theparisreview.org)
“This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially any kind of political writing.” — George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language”
OccupyLanguage is a working group that encourages the staging of readings in public spaces, and especially via public transportation.
What works/text would you wish a public to hear read aloud? Which may overturn or redistribute a common sense? Which may lead to argument, debate, provocation?
OccupyLanguage meetings are held Sunday evenings at 8pm at 60 Wall St., after the Poetry Assembly general meeting. Each week, a new project proposed by a member of the collective will be performed based on a set of guidelines.
We will reconvene weekly to consider the effectiveness of the texts read aloud, and the kinds of interactions the readings open up in different public spaces. Treat it like a workshop. What worked and what didn’t? What did people find interesting, and why? What led to dialogue, emotional response, enjoyment? We want to invite a certain kind of cooperation in “reading,” avoiding traditional styles of unidirectional address which lead to distracted listening and/or echolalia. We might also consider if the readings act as a kind of public service announcement. Not soapbox-style diatribe, but the limited broadcasting of texts that have been carefully considered in advance as something you would want a stranger to attend.
The committed citizens occupying Zuccotti have made us believe again that public space so-called is worth occupying: putting our bodies into it, holding conversation and symposia there. And that such gatherings in the spirit of commons—to be among one another in debate, discourse, and struggle—are a good unto themselves.
