Detail of a handful of the 22 chapbooks that comprise Float
by Anne Carson.
---
"I myself have increasingly found myself being visited by similarly uncanny moments of convergence, bizarre associations, eerie rhymes, whispered recollections—sometimes in the weirdest places."
—from the introduction of
Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences by Lawrence Weschler
I have placed this quote on the worktable
prior, and have referred to Weschler and his book
many times. There is something that deeply resonates not only in the book, but in the kernel idea of this very quote and how it informs everything in the book!
---
And the quote resonates more and more for me these days. I'm seeing things that have been there all along and I simply didn't notice before. Or, I am being drawn to things that create patterns, but I don't quite understand why the attraction was there in the first place.
---
For example: Rilke.
I've been reading Rainer Maria Rilke's "Eighth Elegy" (from the Duino Elegies) for a year and am just now starting to see more and more "eerie rhymes, whispered recollections" of Rilke around. In fact, there is a Rilke quote used as an epigraph to
Everything That Rises.
And in the recent death of William H. Gass, I learned that Gass had written multiple essays on Rilke and translated Rilke's
Duino Elegies, something I had somehow overlooked. And in Gass's translations, I was reminded of those of Edward Snow, which I believe speak strongest to me.
---
For example: Hölderlin.
In Gass, I "discovered" Hölderlin as an influence on Rilke. Yet Hölderlin was always there. He was a large part of Heidegger's essay on Rilke's poetry and, specifically, Rilke's "Eighth Elegy."
And then I realized I had read a translation of a fragment from one of Hölderlin's fragments—from "
In Lovely Blue (In Lieblicher Bläue)," translated by George Kalogeris. In fact, I own the issue of
Poetry magazine in which it resides.
---
For example:
Float.
I fell in love with Anne Carson many times—
Eros the Bittersweet;
The Autobiography of Red;
Men in the Off Hours;
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho;
Decreation. And then I was confused by her—
NOX. And then I was not only confused, but also angered by her—
Red Doc>. Which meant that I avoided
Float when it was initially released.
But I was intrigued by the format—twenty-two chapbooks that can be read in any order.
So I eventually gave in and fell in love with Carson again.
---
Tonight, reading through "Variations on the Right to Remain Silent," amongst Carson's ruminations on the untranslatable in the poetry of Homer, the "heretical" statements of Joan of Arc, the paintings of Francis Bacon, was the work of Hölderlin and his untranslatable term
Pallaksch.
And not only was I given the gift of more Hölderlin, but there were echoes here on translation that I've been encountering in various translators of Rilke into English (Gary Miranda, Stephen Mitchell, Edward Snow), in Gass on Rilke, and in Sarah Ruden on the Hebrew and Christian scriptures (Old and New Testaments).
And then Anne Carson went "full on" crazy and pressed the issue of the untranslatable and the act of translation by translating a fragmentary poem by 6th century BC poet Ibykos through the words and work of John Donne, Bertolt Brecht's FBI file, Samuel Beckett, Gustav Janouch, the London Underground signs and stops, and a microwave's owner's manual.
And, as I said, I fell in love with Anne Carson again.
And I dug back into some of the essays of Weschler.
And I heard some echoes.
And I heard some echoes.
And I heard some echoes.
