Monday, July 3, 2017

June 2013 - From There to Here: Conversations with John E. Carley






From the Archives: A Hundred Gourds 2.3 June, 2013

From There to Here: Conversations with John E. Carley


"If a verse stands alone then its structure is largely self-referencing. In the case of haikai this means that, other than for a perfunctory bow in the direction of two or three lines, we can do what the hell we like. Because we already know what our mission is (should we choose to accept it): to be absolutely unequivocal about getting the content across. And if that means working in a bit of extra context ... all well and good. After all the text we're translating was written as free verse in the first place, right?"

"Well, no it wasn't actually. But those funny men in skirts probably only spent so much time on things like metrics, inflection, assonance, consonance and blah de blah because they were too damn stupid to know better. Not like us intellectuals, eh?"



Carley's renditions bounce unerringly off the wall and hit their mark spot-on. A *must* read for haikai poets everywhere.





1 comment:

bandit said...




not like us, johnnie, not like us