Conjuncture of Body and Garden: Cosmogony (Modern Poets in Translation Series, Vol. 4) (French and English Edition)

The poem is rupture, a holiday within the suffocating chain of background. the trendy poem is rupture and at the same time continuation and renewal of the prior. Born into the continuum of background, the poet celebrates the try and annul historical past, or at the least to neutralize it, to re-create it-by returning to the start of beginnings, the starting place of the area, go back to that point whilst the be aware was once unfettered, unfragmented, whilst dichotomies didn't exist, while Freedom & motion have been inseparable. If the infmite echo of that mutation we name heritage, its vii viii FOREWORD inertia of silence, living in our minds and wallet makes us stroll slower than we wish, dissolving the residing shadows of our breath, our flow, annuling the reveries of the touching dermis; if laughter is made cripple due to the shroud background factors to loom above and underneath our stare, our glance; and if the mind's eye sings with a tongue deformed and infected through the barbed cord of "progress," then now we have a correct to invite: How a lot is it attainable to transmute this background, to metamorphosize the mutilation of our senses right into a planetary sensibility, to develop into what we should be: to Invent Ourselves? this query and the insinuation it concurrently offers beginning to are found in the paintings of the fashionable poet. The poem, in contrast to prose, doesn't try and clarify the realm, it re-creates it. this implies stripping background naked into its actual shape: time. Time within the poem is the immediate current, right here, now. * Time as presence is the poem. the fashionable poem: language as intentionality, photo, analogy: negation, feedback: language as circulate towards itself, its shadow in perpetual pursuit of that otherness within the world-the You; language as its personal demise and endless rebirth. If, for Baudelaire, the poem is the analogy of the universe, it needs to be as the poem, via its personal power, its personal directive, constantly destroys and re-creates historical past: time. The poem does this by way of annuling on the speed of sunshine the growth and recession of historical past, of "progress," and accordingly time. Sappho and Dante aren't sleek within the experience i've got simply defined simply because their works exist in uncritical time. For the ancients time was once, as Aristotle believed, periodic, cyclical, eternal round movement. The winged hound of Zeus might eat on a daily basis the liver of Prometheus-Aeschylus tells us. starting with St. Augustine, this Greek perception of round time is displaced by way of an unrelenting, irreversible, rectilinear flow of heritage. this might proceed, Augustine be*To discover ways to see to listen to to claim The prompt Is our trade.... -Octavio Paz in "Letter to Leon Felipe" FOREWORD ix lieved, for a finite time till that Day of days-Judgmentbrings us everlasting, unchanging ecstasy or flails the human pores and skin numb in hell. God will dissolve time; movement will swallow itself. there'll now not be dying simply because start may have been abolished. it really is this idea of time Dante inherits and out of which he constructs the best structure of his Divine Comedy.