Reading Mina Loy Through Creative Translation Love Songs

Reading Mina Loy Through Creative Translation
Love Songs/Songs for Joannes
In-class Reading/Writing Exercise

As an intuitive, experiential way of engaging with Mina Loy’s poetry, let’s try a writing activity. Amy Lowell, a famous poet and contemporary of Loy’s, reputedly cancelled her subscription to a magazine which early published part of Loy’s “Love Songs.” Let’s think about the differences between Lowell’s aesethetic (still modern, imagist) and Loy’s. Read the first of Loy’s “Love Songs” along with the following poem by Amy Lowell. What marks the difference between these two poets? What would Lowell never do in her poetry?

What might Lowell's poetry have looked like if Mina Loy had written it? Venture a creative “translation” of Lowell’s “Bright Sunlight” into a language and form that is more recongizably that of Mina Loy.

Bright Sunlight

The wind has blown a corner of your shawl
Into the fountain,
Where it floats and drifts
Among the lily-pads
Like a tissue of sapphires.
But you do not heed it,
Your fingers pick at the lichens
On the stone edge of the basin,
And your eyes follow the tall clouds
As they sail over the ilex-trees.
- Amy Lowell

from Love Songs

Spawn of   Fantasies
Silting the appraisable
Pig Cupid      his rosy snout
Rooting erotic garbage
"Once upon a time"
Pulls a weed    white star-topped
Among wild oats    sown in mucous-membrane

I would an eye in a Bengal light
Eternity in a sky-rocket
Constellations in an ocean
Whose rivers run no fresher
Than a trickle of saliva

These are suspect places

I must live in my lantern
Trimming subliminal flicker
Virginal to the bellows
Of Experience
Coloured glass
- Mina Loy