I like it when a critic pulls some philological razzle dazzle out of his pocket and makes me see a poem I think I know in a whole new light. David Wilbern, in an essay on a poem by Robert Duncan (Murther: the hypocrite and the poet) does this with a famous bit from Baudelaire:
It is of course the ending two lines of Baudelaire’s To the Reader, which begins the Flowers of Evil. Wilbern begins his essay by asking a good question: what is the literary critic for? And he pulls out of this poem the word that catches the eye – hypocrite – to answer, provisionally (and how could it be other than provisionally?) his question.
“Yes, I know this reader (c’est moi meme) and my question is, what sort of literary critic does he make? In answer, I’ve derived what I might call the art of hypocriticism. That is the practice of getting a poem under my skin, like a hypodermic injection which magically transforms me into a likeness of the poet: a monstre délicat, a double who lies somewhere between a perfect clone and Mr. Hyde. I become a temporary semblable, or facsimile: “making like” the poem as I read it, re-presenting its words in my own style, pretending that my voice resembles, reassembles, the voice of the poem. As I read the poets written words in my own speech, and feel the poet’s recorded emotions through my own feelings, I become a reader simulating the other: that is, a hypocrite. Yet not solely a usurper of dissembler. The Greek hypokrites was an actor, but more specifically he was an answerer, that other reciprocal voice which created a dialogue…”
Of course, we find such mimetism suspect. This is a game of pretend, and like pretend, it takes us back to the human basis, which is the play ground. Every child discovers, at some point, that answering and mocking are closely associated. Use, for instance, the words that are said to you: say them back. Do this often enough and you will definitely upset the first speaker. Say them back with a comic intonation, or an insulting one. Or, you can just infinitely respond with a non-response. Why is good. Just repeat why to every sentence. This, too, can create a “magical” irritation in the first speaker.
What I am saying here is that the philological dozens played with hypokrites opens a field; it does not provide one particular routine, so that we can say, this is what the literary critic does.
Myself, I often play the translator. And here the hypodermic injection of the poem does not operate as a magic cause, but a very specific linguistic one. A matching, in as much as one can match, of poem to its (dis)semblable, the poem in another language.
So it is with the poem that begins Du Bellay’s Regrets. It must be said that Du Bellay, being a Renaissance poet, lived a long time before Hank Williams, Sr., who was a country balladeer. However, it is not a stretch to think that the Renaissance had its own honky tonk style. Or – it is a stretch but what the hay. After all, a Renaissance poet like Du Bellay thought nothing of boosting his stylings and themes from Horace or Ovid. One of Du Bellay’s modern commentators, M.A. Screech (a last name like something in a Nabokovian fever dream) notices that, like Horace, Du Bellay dares to introduce a “style raboteaux” in his ars poetica: a prickly style, a hickory bark style. Run your hand over it and you are bound to get scratched.
And one could say the same thing about the cheap scotch thrills of M. Williams ballads. His bucket, as is well known, has a hole in it. And through that hole I’ll drop this translation.
I don’t want to be digging in the bosom of nature
I don’t want to be mulling the spiritus mundi
I don’t want to be measuring the abyss under me
Nor, for pretty buildings, exhale some heavenly rapture.
I don’t want to paint with the finest paint my canveses
Nor from high arguments draw out my verse
But from some poky instance take its accidents diverse,
Good or bad, to be writing of my advances.
I’ll put a tear in my lines if I’ve got reason to cry
I’ll laugh with em too, and whisper my why
As if they were taking dictation from my heart.
So: I don’t want a lota curlers and cosmetics
And be making up heroes and heroics.
This will be more a journal where I’ll spill my part.
Okay. Honky-tonk up to a point. And here’s Du Bellay’s poem, for purists.
Je ne veux point fouiller au sein de la nature,
Je ne veux point cercher l’esprit de l’univers,
Je ne veux point sonder les abysmes couvers,
N’y dessigner du ciel la belle architecture.
Je ne peins mes tableaux de si riche peinture,
Et si hauts argumens ne recerche à mes vers :
Mais suivant de ce lieu les accidens divers,
Soit de bien, soit de mal, j’escris à l’adventure.
Je me plains à mes vers, si j’ay quelque regret,
Je me ris avec eux, je leur di mon secret,
Comme estans de mon cœur les plus seurs secretaires.
Aussi ne veux-je tant les peigner et friser,
Et de plus braves noms ne les veux desguiser,
Que de papiers journaux, ou bien de commentaires.
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