His poem “The Descent of Winter,” written after his 1927 trip to Paris, was an experiment with automatic writing that opened him temporarily to this surrealist technique. The close observation of the dream state resulting in formless poetic forays into the unconscious, though, did not interest him. Williams was attracted to the poetics of renewal he found in surrealism: “In surrealism the distortion of the emotion, the object, the condition, makes the words (the true material of writing) real again” ( The Embodiment of Knowledge). Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, to name a couple, were part of his circle of friends then. As for surrealism, his interest in surrealist art and verse was pre-dated by his attraction to the work of French Dadaist painters appearing in New York around the years of the First World War. For most of his translations, Williams relied on varying degrees of help from someone fluent in the source language. He knew French well enough to read it with help from a dictionary. There he met writers like Valery Larbaud and Philippe Soupault, whose novel Les dernières nuits de Paris (1928 Last Nights of Paris) he translated with his mother and published in 1929. The French avant-garde literary scene appealed to him ever since the 1920s and his visits to Paris.
He was, in fact, as cosmopolitan as he was true-blue American. Despite his commitment to the prosody of the American language and his general disdain for imported European aesthetics, Williams translated a good deal of modern French and Spanish poetry during the course of his career. He translated foreign poets he felt should be read in the United States and whose work offered him an opportunity to advance his own poetry. Translation for William Carlos Williams was an especially rewarding way to experiment with poetics.
William Carlos Williams to Nicolas Calas (1940) (There are several other theories concerning the route, signalling its uncertain identification.) Our selection ends with his mention of a great sea to the east.There must be a new formalism, invention. In it, we read of the geography and peoples of Scandinavia, and of an apparent (?) half-circumnavigation of the British Isles, heading west and north from Wessex, where Ohthere is presumably located while narrating this story, past Ireland on the way around Scotland to Norway and a port in the south thereof. (1959), Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse, 14th edition, Oxford: Clarendon. Our selection includes lines 63-97, found on pp. Not all the places and peoples mentioned in the Voyages can be identified with certainty, but what can be pinned down fits very well with geography and a ninth-century setting. While their factual bases cannot be verified, both of these stories contain far less fanciful narrative and much more apparent fact than is normally found in popular medieval travelers' tales. Orosius' History did not include Ohthere's tale, nor that of Wulfstan rather, these stories were composed or copied from an unknown source and inserted into the Anglo-Saxon translation of the History. Ohthere was a Norwegian hunter, whaler, and trader who tells among other things of his voyages north and east of the Scandinavian peninsula, round the Kola peninsula to the White Sea (all of these terms being modern). The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan relates certain travels attributed to Ohthere, whose story along with that of one Wulfstan was included in King Alfred's translation from Latin of the Compendious History of the World by Paulus Orosius (d. Old English Online Lesson 4 Jonathan SlocumĪ map depicting Europe for King Alfred’s translation of Orosius.
Linguistics Research Center Social Mediaįor comments and inquiries, or to report issues, please contact the Web Master at Menu.
0 kommentar(er)
