For my final project, I annotated and analyzed Pound’s poem “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” focusing mostly on his use of ancient languages, textual references to Greek and Roman mythology, and the focus on different aspects of language that perhaps cannot be expressed in plain English. A lot of these phrases in Greek, Latin, French, etc. can be “lost” in translation, and I emphasized how these quotes relate within the text and attempted to excavate their original meanings. T.S. Eliot, in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” believed that old ideas could still be used in modern poetry by presenting them in new ways, and that a poet should allow the words to speak for themselves to honor the ancient traditions. He states that “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” This interactive format allows one to “zoom in” on the different translated sections and gives an in-depth analysis of the section and what each passage contributes to the text as a whole. It uses the site called PoetryGenius, which allows users to create forms to analyze both poetry and song lyrics and create links to larger references. It allows pop-up links for each section instead of directing you to an entirely different page, which gives a brief analysis of each quotation or line that is easy to view, along with associated pictures and videos.
Bibliography
Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair. 3rd ed. Vol. 1. New York City: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2003. 941-47. Print.
Google Translate. Google. Web. 20 Mar. 2014.< https://translate.google.com/?hl=en&tab=wT>.
For any other translations in modern languages, such as Italian, French, or Spanish.
Perseus Digital Library. Ed. Gregory R. Crane. Tufts University, n.d. Web. 20 Mar. 2014. <http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/>.
This site is a translator for Greek and Roman texts and phrases, and each word can be defined in various contexts and meanings, connecting it with various other ancient texts where it has been used.
PoetryGenius. Genius Media Group, Inc., 2014. Web. <http://poetry.rapgenius.com/>.
Pound, Ezra. “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.” The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair. 3rd ed. Vol. 1. New York City: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2003. 354-66. Print.
Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Web. <http://www.wikipedia.org/>.
Very interesting start here. I like the idea of pressing hard on the references to ancient literature. I always wonder how such references were intended. If one digs to find the original context for a given reference, does that clarify or confound the way the poet uses the reference? That is, does the poet use it as an easy way to point to some idea that he assumes that some ideally learned audience will immediately grasp, or is the reference more complex and involved than that? And do the references that pile up behind a given poem form a coherent backdrop–a shadow story–or not? This project seems to combine a good deal of close reading, a bit of conjecture, and some research into the modernist uses of the ancient classics.
Keep thinking of the best way to present this. It seems like a classic paper at this stage, but I can be convinced of other formats.
Perhaps the best format for presenting this information would be as a hypertext version of the poem you’re discuss, similar to what this page does with a Milton poem (http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/nativity/). There are annotated version of Hugh Selwyn Mauberly out there, of course (we read one in our anthology) but you will offer a more focused annotation / reflection on classical references in particular. I think the references will, for the most part, already be translated. The key, I think, will be to situate these works more fully in their original contexts (the plays / works from which they were taken) and then reflect on how exploring that context in more detail might influence one’s reading of the poem itself.
I think we could figure out a workable platform for the hypertext / annotation project. Perhaps we can explore some options during our conference this week.