(no subject)

[proximoception]

Halfway through Crowley's The Translator, at a section where there's lots of Russian words and phrases dropped, and the language is flooding back into my memory from shelves and forest shadows. What I'm finding is that all the words I can't remember are replaced by French, which I've dabbled with since. Seriously, they're written right over the Russian words, and not just for cognates. What a strange phenomenon, like my mind has a single English to Foreign dictionary. With a lot of blind spots, I'm basically thinking trilingually, in an Ada-esque grotesquerie. Thankfully Latin is long gone.

Great book by the way. Very Crowley, but successfully invades what you'd think of as Roth territory, nostalgia and Eastern Europe. Unwrapping all kinds of packets of both inside me as well.

I need to pick up Resurrection again. And The Idiot. And reread Akhmatova.

The volume of Elizabeth Bishop fragments and discards has been pushed to February, looks like. There's a new Joseph and His Brothers translation out. I like Lowe-Porter but the new guy's a clearer and faster read, probably indispensable for a book so long and dense.

I'm officially engaged.

Comments

[bluerosesgirl.livejournal.com]

Mazal tov!

Re-reading Akhmatova is cyclical.

An as it's going often at love's breaking,
The ghost of first days came again to us,
The silver willow through window then stretched in,
The silver beauty of her gentle branches.
The bird began to sing the song of light and pleasure
To us, who fears to lift looks from the earth,
Who are so lofty, bitter and intense,
About days when we were saved together.
-- 1907

(Translated by Yevgeny Bonver, December, 2000)

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

1907! She must have been a teenager.

[bluerosesgirl.livejournal.com]

Yes -- eighteen. Married two years later, published two years after that. Makes me feel like I'm behind schedule.

[princenarcissus.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on the engagement!!!

I adore all things Akhmatova. (Including Anne Carson's insertion of her into the Socrates-Sappho-Tolstoy-Artaud sequence of "TV Men".)

And I've finally found a used bookstore with books by John Crowley, which were almost purchased until I was lured away by a 1928 first-edition (one of 750 copies) of an out-of-print novel by my beloved H.D., her only work of extended prose set in ancient Greece, and for which I've been searching for the last seven years. But I *will* be buying Little, Big on the next visit . . .

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Thanks man, and congratulations on your own leap, what an astonishing moment/day of coming into your own! Read that HD then clone yourself and save the young, Crowley will come by and by.

I'm reading Carson too, the earlier pieces. The opacities are maddening but she's so much the real thing that you wonder whether anyone else is.

[princenarcissus.livejournal.com]

I completely agree with you on Anne Carson. It really is quite staggering to realize how poorly other living poets fare in comparison. And her translation of Sappho, indebted as it is to Guy Davenport (who, like everyone from Harold Bloom to Susan Sontag, showered Carson with nothing but praise) is absolutely unrivalled, in my opinion. Currently reading the classic philosophy and romantic phantasmagoria comprising her Eros, Bittersweet . . . has ancient Greek etymology ever been so scintillating?