ENGL 766 Topics -home

In class this week (Nov 31), let's review Technicians of the Sacred and bring to bear some of the insights and perspectives raised by the exemplary texts and criticism we've looked at thus far.

Week - 12

This week we look at two practioners, both of whom have been engaged in translation but whose poetry also exemplifies and engagement with Ethnpoetic concerns. We'll want to think about their use of the forms, the imagination, and the figures of primitive and "other" literatures and texts.

Armand Schwerner, The Tablets

Clayton Eshleman, Juniper Fuse

In what sense are Schwerner's Tablets an extension of Total Translation? How does he envision the poetics of loss, and crossing, and listening to other and foreign forms? How does the distance introduced by the "scholar-translator" frame this poem? How does Eshleman's project (and its many forms) insist upon particular, ethnopoetic ideas about the origins, history, nature, and functions of poetry? What kinds of possibilities does Eshleman open up by framing his as a poetic rather than an archaeological or straightforwardly critical project?

Past Weeks

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Note on Transcription

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Surveying Other Wor(l)ds aims to allow students an engagement with interdisciplinary issues of current concern within literary studies and poetics, as well as ethnography and folklore. Beginning with introductory reading in traditional oral poetry indigenous to the Americas, the course explores assumptions about modern civilization and primitive culture in order to foreground and problematize Social-Darwinist conceptions of progress. We look at the early prominence of "Indian Song" imitations and translation in such modernist venues as Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (1917) and an early literary anthology, Path on the Rainbow (1918), interrogating the purpose and effects of recontextualizing cultural performances as literary artifacts. We self-reflexively explore our own relationships to the twentieth-century desire for a return-to-the-primitive, (perhaps even in relation to popular culture) in order to see what the tendency toward mythification expresses about contemporary life and how it is reflected in scholarship. We spend some time considering creative rather than scholarly "appropriation," as we consider contemporary poets who explore indigenous and oral traditions and performance—such Cecilia Vicuña, Jerome Rothenberg, Anne Waldman, Kamau Brathwaite, Maria Sabina, and Armand Schwerner. Framed by an appreciation of the "primitive" as a complicated Western construction, we consider specific cultural forms and practices such as: song, story, oratory, and ritual. We look at central Ethnopoetics concerns—the gap between cultural performance and written text—and embark on projects re-presenting select oral performances (translating, transcribing, and analyzing), thereby constructing new and creative translations that reflect their appreciation of the form, content, and cultural context of oral literatures. Whether in the form of constructive ethnopoetic work or critique and analysis of contemporary poetry, independent research will engage students first-hand with the difficulties of coming to know Other cultures; it will help them grapple with the valuable yet problematic roles academic disciplines play in gathering, transcribing, translating, presenting, and interpreting other cultures in assimilable terms.