/lit/ - Literature

>It takes knowledge of a good dozen languages and their respective poetic canons to make a good contemporary poet.
Debate.

How did he translate poetry from language's he doesn't understand? Especially considering all the praise he was receiving from Chinese scholars amidst the hate he was getting from anglo circles.

Is studying a language for many years necessary to translate poetry compared to novels?

Ité by Ezra Pound
Go, my songs, seek your praise from the young
and from the intolerant,
Move among the lovers of perfection alone.
Seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light
And take you wounds from it gladly.

>“I believe in some parts of Nietzsche, I prefer to read him in sections; In my heart of hearts I suspect him of being the one modern christian; Take notice I never have read him except in English selections.”
Hmmm...

What does /lit/ think of my poetry?

Not with God, but with Antioch we begin,
Sail past Dikti on high,
Back up Ἀθήναζε.
These, I tell you, are all the fruits of this,
Of pangs and bones uncovered,
Of bastardized nature and her indolent servants;
Uneven temperaments and tongues
whet in the blood of next-love,
Of long ire whose name outlives the patience of true thoughts shared.
I tell you,
Phoenician Harlot,
Physic suffers not the drunken slip of thy tongue,
Drinking the tears of thy kith and kin.
She suffers not the unwitnessed word of dreams, but yields to milder yarns,
of hands together on their looms.
Aye, I concede: ire is long,
longer than the harvest of years unsullied
Ire is long,
longer than thy girdles and memory,
Enough to kill thrice and thrice again,
Phoenician Harlot —
Come to us,
Lay now down thy ire and rest.
Come to us,
Lay now down and rest.
Not of my own accord do I leave your shore
And give my sails to the windy isthmus which too yearns for you.
I tell you,
Infelicitous Virgin, all-shining child of man’s insolence,
Physic suffers not thy insular madness,
The errant and horny head of Lasithia.
She suffers not to close the holt of nymphs, but yeans the bullock
For our votive slaughter.
Aye, I concede: thy passion is great,
greater than the wails of starved throngs,
thy passion is great,
greater than thy Aonian chants and dances,
Enough to mount the Hill of War,
Infelicitous Virgin, —
You’ve won us.
Lay now down thy passion and rest.
You’ve won us,
Lay down and rest.
...I tell you,
You Bitch, half a man and child of his want,
What you already know:
Nature suffers your words, seeming those of a wise man.
Though Joy be peculiar to a woman’s heart,
how you deny the dyed bronze that ruined you;
how you seek out the dread voice of fame;
how you cry out in false censure! —
But so it is, all things moving towards their end.
These gifts you mustn’t give, these names, sanctify; words of honour must fall from other lips,
But I, idle satrap, was more a woman than you:
Forced me victory to compare with what I’d slain,
That my victory turn to rot again!
Aye, I concede: I was more a woman than you.

>>17555370
Much of the canon is rambling stupidity and should be removed, e.g., most 19th century realist Anglo novels (Dickens, Austen, Bronte...) etc.

Leave only the good stuff, like Ezra Pound's Paideuma, which consisted of some 50 or so authors. The rest he either threw into the trash can or simply did not care enough to recommend.

Also, not all the world is the U.S. The French won't stop reading Flaubert, nor will the Italians stop reading Dante, nor will the Argentinians stop reading Borges. Countries like Germany don't even have enough black authors to shill, so it won't make a difference to them.

>>17365849
Input, input, input (reading and listening hours daily).

>>17220763
Most translators are garbage. Ignore the question of whether or not translation is effective (it's at best a sort of "gesturing towards"). The serious problem is that most translators fucking SUCK. You'll learn that if you'd learn a foreign language and compare several translations to the original- literally none of them will quite be right.

There are some untranslatable things as well. Such as poetry. Learning foreign languages is about:
1. Avoiding translators like the plague.
2. Being able to read untranslatable stuff.

That said, if your goal is just to read philosophy, don't bother. Most good philosophy editions will explain linguistic nuance a bit. If your goal is to read poetry (the only literature that actually matters in my opinion apart from spiritual texts), then yeah, language learning is a must. You can't really translate poetry. You have to go to the source.

>>17162379
sage

What does lit think of poemata?

Infelicitous Virgin, all-shining child of man’s insolence,
Physic suffers not thy insular madness,
The errant and horny head of Lasithia.
She suffers not to close the holt of nymphs, but yeans the bullock
For our votive slaughter.
Aye, I concede: thy passion is great,
greater than the wails of starved throngs,
thy passion is great,
greater than thy Aonian chants and dances,
Enough to mount the Hill of War,
Infelicitous Virgin, —
You’ve won us.
Lay now down thy passion and rest.
You’ve won us,
Lay down and rest.
(...)
I tell you,
You Bitch, half a man and child of his want,
What you already know:
Nature suffers your words, seeming those of a wise man.
Though Joy be peculiar to a woman’s heart,
how you deny the dyed bronze that ruined you;
how you seek out the dread voice of fame;
how you cry out in false censure! —
But so it is, all things moving towards their end.
These gifts you mustn’t give, these names, sanctify; words of honour must fall from other lips,
But I, idle satrap, was more a woman than you:
Forced me victory to compare with what I’d slain,
That my victory turn to rot again!
Aye, I concede: I was more a woman than you.

>>17087037
>all those translations
NGMI.

>>16965386
>>16965393
>>16965416
>>16965430
>he isn't actively inducing schizophrenia by learning and mastering a dozen languages and consuming the entire literary canons of those languages
NGMI.

Pound said the most important literary languages for a Western man to study are:
>Latin
>Classical Chinese
>Greek
And for an Oriental man to study:
>English
>French
>Italian
He never gives any reasons for this. What the hell did he have in mind?

>>16185849
>I shdn’t. try to teach a duck to swim. I assume the English reader has already to his sorrow or whatever (usually muddle) a ‘‘mind” unformed in the English manner, hereditarily unformed, and that the blithering pea-soup of russianness wd. worsen it. NO form ever yet having come out of Russia that hadn’t first been taken in there from elsewhere.
Russians are unoriginal hacks, all their books are long, ugly moralizing tomes; knock-offs of the French, except the French were actually good; furthermore, the language is ugly and gross, sounds like someone is ejecting phlegm from his throat, and that's exactly what's happening, and that someone is a peasant Mongoloid with a deformed and vulgar mind, a gopnik of the spirit. The only people who care about Russian literature are amerifatt losers. Europe has always been antagonistic to Russian literature in her history. Russia is a yokel nation of illiterate losers and the country's best writers were failed francophiles.
>>16185851
t. too stupid to learn Greek.

>>16185849
>I shdn’t. try to teach a duck to swim. I assume the English reader has already to his sorrow or whatever (usually muddle) a ‘‘mind” unformed in the English manner, hereditarily unformed, and that the blithering pea-soup of russianness wd. worsen it. NO form ever yet having come out of Russia that
hadn’t first been taken in there from elsewhere.
Russians are unoriginal hacks, all their books are long, ugly moralizing tomes; knock-offs of the French, except the French were actually good; furthermore, the language is ugly and gross, sounds like someone is ejecting phlegm from his throat, and that's exactly what's happening, and that someone is a peasant Mongoloid with a deformed and vulgar mind, a gopnik of the spirit. The only people who care about Russian literature are amerifatt losers. Europe has always been antagonistic to Russian literature in her history. Russia is a yokel nation of illiterate losers and the country's best writers were failed francophiles.
>>16185851
t. too stupid to learn Greek.

>>16185849
>I shdn’t. try to teach a duck to swim. I assume the
English reader has already to his sorrow or whatever (usually muddle) a ‘‘mind” unformed in the English manner, hereditarily unformed, and that the blithering pea-soup of russianness wd. worsen it. NO form ever yet having come out of Russia that
hadn’t first been taken in there from elsewhere.
Russians are unoriginal hacks, all their books are long, ugly moralizing tomes; knock-offs of the French, except the French were actually good; furthermore, the language is ugly and gross, sounds like someone is ejecting phlegm from his throat, and that's exactly what's happening, and that someone is a peasant Mongoloid with a deformed and vulgar mind, a gopnik of the spirit. The only people who care about Russian literature are amerifatt losers. Europe has always been antagonistic to Russian literature in her history. Russia is a yokel nation of illiterate losers and the country's best writers were failed francophiles.
>>16185851
t. too stupid to learn Greek.

Who is best fascist poet? Is Yeats or maybe Ezra Pound?