“Ridiculing Rumsfeld on this account was a stupid, partisan reaction”

And who is better at stupid partisanship than manju?

http://americandigest.org/wp/on-the-return-of-history/
“With the end of the Soviet Union in a whimper and not a bang brighter than the sun on earth, history was officially over. The moment even got its own book, “The End of History,” which stimulated an argument that even more than the book emphasized that history was over.

Most sensible people liked it that way. In fact, a lot of people really liked it that way. Because if history for the world was over, these people could get on making the history that really mattered to them: The History of Me.

More and more throughout the 90s “History” was “out,” and “Me” was in.”

I do wonder about Chinese translations. As I understand it, Chinese poems are just words without grammar or tenses, partly because they are intended to be understood in other dialects. So translators to English end up adding a certain amount of filler for flow.

Turns out a lot of English translations are “versions” or “co-translations.” A version is when a poet reads a literal translations then writes a version based on what she has read, then filtered through her own sensibility. A co-translation is when a poet works with a native speaker to recreate the poem in English.

There are obvious reasons not to trust such translations. But then all translations are suspect anyway. Thus the motto, “To translate is to betray.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Su_Shi

Re: Granta — Writing publishable poems like neo’s examples takes a surprising amount of skill, though why anyone would like the poems or care about them, as she points out, are good questions.

I once had a friend getting her MFA in creative writing who said that none of the writers/poets she knew would read the little magazines in which they were published. They would just check to see their works were printed as they wrote them.

I used to challenge poets to ask themselves about their latest and greatest, is this a poem you would want to read if you hadn’t written it? I rarely got an answer, which I suppose was the answer.

Happy New Year, gang.

My final reaction to the source material that Neo posted from Granta: I attempted her challenge to read that stuff, trying out that first poem about tennis or whatever it was – from the very first phrase in it, “Tryptamine skies,” I knew it was going to be a slog (I work in chemistry and have a degree in it, and why the H am I reading about tryptamine in a poem?!). Had to stop after about 40 seconds of reading – otherwise my brain might have liquefied and run out my ears onto the floor by the time I got to the end of that piece of trash.

But Jono, your snippet of Pound’s couplet there is intriguing.

Here are a few suggestions to get you started:

Yale University, Far Eastern Publications, “Fifty-Five T’ang Poems: A Text in the Reading and Understanding of T’ang Poetry,” look for copies of this 1976 textbook on Amazon and Ebey.

Poems of the Masters: China’s Classic Anthology of T’ang and Sung Dynasty Verse

How to Read Chinese Poetry A Guided Anthology by Zong-Qi Cai 2007 Paperback?

The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (Mandarin Chinese and English Edition)
Cold Mountain (Han Shan)